So… I actually went out and fixed cars yesterday!!! 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳
Can you believe it?!?!?!
🙃
It took 4 days of barely existing, and I’m not 100% sure why I woke up yesterday and was able to work. In the past, one day I’ll just wake up and feel a bit more energetic and positive. I also reached out to god… Don’t know if it’s coincidence or not. Either way, I’m grateful.
I went out and did four cars. One of them for one of my hill brothers-in-law. He’s been waiting for me for the entire week but said I was going to fix his busted window on Monday, but I just couldn’t get out of the house.
So I finally got it done for him, and only charged him for parts.
Then I went out and did three regular customer cars. The first was an alternator on a 2014 Honda Odyssey. That went relatively well, gratefully. It’s amazing how tight some of the fits are to get some parts out.
The second car was a Chevrolet Uplander minivan that also needed an alternator. That one was supposed to be a good bit more complicated than the Odyssey. But gratefully, I found a way to do the job differently than anybody else I had heard of doing it. Usually, you have to take off the windshield wiper motor assembly and then take off two motor mounts and rock the engine forward, but I found a way of doing it where instead of removing the motor mounts and wiper motor, I just removed the idler pulley closest to the alternator, and then tried a handful of different positions with the alternator before finding one that allowed me to squeeze the alternator out just barely. 🥳🥳🥳
So everything was going fabulously without one, until after putting the alternator in, hooking everything back up, and going to plug in the connector to the alternator, I realized that the alternator receiver connection for the electronic plug was broken and couldn’t be plugged in.
At first, I was worried that maybe I had broken it somehow. But I hadn’t heard anything break while I was putting it in, and I had put it in pretty carefully. Then I have the idea to look inside the box, and there I found some pieces of broken plastic, releasing me from any responsibility, gratefully.
Gratefully, I found a way to rig the connector on in such a way that it could be trusted. 🥳
The customer, who had been pretty frustrated with the busted part, was super grateful that I found a way to get it to stay connected.
I also fixed his absolutely nasty battery cable, and did all that free of charge, having to remove both cable ends and cut them back aways because of all the corrosion.
The last car was going back to that 2006 Hyundai sonata that I did struts on a month or so ago. He had me go ahead and put on the upper control arms. The driver side was a pain, but once I figured out a good way of doing it without having to take everything back out, the passenger side was pretty easy.
Funny, after not having worked for like 5 days, I tweaked like five different muscles on just three jobs. Crazy. Hoping none of them are long-term things. 🤞
My body is just giving out. 🙃
I finally finished the job somewhere around 10:00 last night, came home, are dinner, spent some time catching up on my YouTube channels (I pay a lot of attention to what’s going on in the electric car market and the advances in energy production, and those are my go-to channels/topics).
Definitely a better day than I’ve had the rest of the week.
Of course, as I used to say, every day is a good day: It’s just good in different ways. I’ve had lots of very very hard, good days lately.
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 