Four cars today as well. 🙂
First one was a 2011 Ford Escape that had an issue with the rear hatch actuator. I figured that out after pulling everything apart carefully. The rear hatch was closed, so I had to be really careful in popping out what I could of the rear trim, and then squeezing my arm down between the trim and the door because you couldn’t get the whole trim piece off with the hatch closed. So I squeeze my arm down in, got my fingers around the latch, and managed to pop the rear hatch open.
From there, I put a zip tie around the actuator lever, so until we get the part ordered and replaced, she can at least pull the zip tie to unlatch the rear hatch and open it up.
She’s a single mom with two tweens, I think, and I’m toying with the ideas maybe asking her out on a date.
We’ll see.
Car number two was a 2011 Nissan Xterra that wouldn’t start, and all it needed was a battery and a new battery cable end. He already had a new battery, so I slapped on a new battery cable end, installed the battery, and he was good to go.
Car number three was a pre-purchase inspection on a 2015 BMW 535i. I went out to look at it, and the first thing I noticed was that it had been in an accident, and it had been extremely poorly repaired. Looks like basically they had taken a sludge hammer to pound stuff back out, and the hood was terribly misaligned, the internal metal was bent, and on and on.
Clean title, but damaged badly enough that the insurance company went ahead and cut the owner a check. Then somebody had done the repair, and yuck, absolutely terrible work. Shoddy, money-grubbing.
So tired of dishonest people.
This was returning customer I had done an inspection for last year sometime, and he still had that car and it was doing great for him, but he wanted to upgrade to a luxury vehicle.
But definitely not this one. I told him within the first 30 seconds I’ve looking at the car that he definitely shouldn’t buy it. Then I tried to walk him through a little bit more on how to visually inspect cars for accident damage.
I only charged him half of my normal service fee because it was such a quick visit. We walked around the lot, and I showed him on several different cars how to inspect. That particulars used car lot was full of apparently previously wrecked cars, because so many of the body panels were poorly aligned.
Clearly, they weren’t “repaired” by people who actually cared.
The last car was a 1998 Dodge caravan that had a parasitic draw. As I did my testing, I found draws in three different systems, but there were still more draws that I wasn’t able to even identify. Given their financial situation, The condition of the vehicle, and everything, instead of spending hours chasing down the source of all the different issues, which could take many many hours, I just installed a quick disconnect battery terminal on the negative post. That should, though a little annoying, get them taken care of without having the battery drained down in a matter of hours.
After that, I headed home, grateful to be home at like 6:00 or something like that. I pretty much just veged the rest of the day.
Did some laundry.
Definitely still working less. So I’m staying on top of that. Now I’ve just got to make some concrete plans for the transitions into the new arenas of life.
I’ll be doing that a little bit each day this week.
The hot and muggy is coming. Well, I guess it’s already here, but this coming week is going to be in the ’90s, so… here we go!
Wish me luck! 🙃
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 