Well, I might actually get an entry written at the end of the day instead of the next day or a week later. 🙃
I slept in a little bit. I’ve been doing that a lot lately. I’ve been turning my phones to silent and just sleeping until I wake up, regardless of what I might miss.
It’s been nice.
I was woken up Early this morning, however, when thunderstorms came rolling in, and thunder clapping so loudly that it woke me up despite having a fan blowing on me from my right, and my white noise from my cell phone on my left.
I was hopeful that because it was raining, I might be able to take the day off. But my first customer volunteered to take his car to a friend’s house where there was a garage, and by the time I got there, the storm had passed anyway.
That first job was on a 1999 Honda Civic. He had purchased inner and outer tie rods and wanted me to install them. It was a bit of a pain in the butt. Taking a good bit longer than I had hoped. I’d never seen The engineering for inner tie rods the way that Honda did them for that Civic.
First of all, they had this really weird lock washing retainer clip thingy. I was lucky that I noticed it because it came out with the first inner tie rod that I was doing still attached to the tie rod.
But as I looked through the service instructions, I noticed it talking about that little retaining clip, and I went looking for it and found it still attached to the inner tie rod. You’re supposed to replace the retainer clip, but the customer didn’t purchase one, and he elected to go ahead and just use the old one.
I’m sure it’s not going to make any difference, so not a big deal, but certainly different than anything I’ve ever seen before.
Another thing I’d never seen before was there was some kind of weird vent tube connected to the boot that keeps the dust and dirt out of the steering rack and inner ball joint socket.
It was a bit of a pain in the butt to deal with on the driver side, but fortunately it was super easy on the passenger side.
The passenger side was a bit more of a challenge because the retainer clip was actually significantly damaged. The customer went out to try and find a retainer clip, but it wasn’t something that could be found locally. I waited for him for a little over a half an hour, but he couldn’t find the parts, so I just put in the damaged old one, letting him know exactly what the situation was, and he was fine with it. Again, odds are is that it won’t have any impact, but still, I don’t like it when things aren’t exactly the way they’re supposed to be.
Since the rain had passed, I went ahead and went over to the 2006 Jeep Wrangler that needed the fuel pump. Gratefully, that job went really easily. I did a little bit of looking online because I was a little concerned as I was taking the tank shield off that the tank was coming with it.
Apparently, that’s how Chrysler designed it, which turned out to be just fine, but certainly gave me pause to start. In the little bit of research that I did, I also found a much easier way of doing the job, and that was nice. So I was able to get the tank dropped in relatively short order, cleaned out easily because it was such a small tank. The vast majority of the time I do feel pump jobs it’s on SUVs and trucks, and the tanks are huge and much more challenging to clean out, but this one was super easy. So I got it cleaned out, the new pump put in, and everything was good to go.
The last job was a 2011 Ford f150 that wasn’t starting. A few days prior, it was a no crank no start, and he put a battery in it, and it was fine for a day, but when he went out to start at the next day, it was again no crank no start.
I had ordered a starter for it, because I figured that’s most likely what it was going to be, given that it was a Ford, and given that it already had a new battery, but when I got there, I saw that the positive battery cable was super nasty corroded.
Voltage was getting to the starter like it was supposed to, but nothing was getting to the ignition wire, so I stopped looking at the positive cable for the time being and started doing a little bit of troubleshooting.
I plugged in a scan tool and looked at the codes, and I found three codes related to the transmission range sensor. That would definitely cause a no crank no start. Issues with the transmission range sensor are also common on that Ford F-150. Unfortunately, instead of putting the range sensor on the outside of the transmission like everyone seemed to do in the past, Ford decided to put the range sensor on the inside of the transmission where you actually have to remove the transmission pan, and not just the transmission pan, but the valve body as well.
Stupid, greedy engineering. Instead of a quick switch to remove, now you have probably something close to a four-digit fix.
😠
Before digging into that as the likely problem, knowing that bad electrical connections can cause all sorts of weird things, I went ahead and disconnected all of the connections on the positive battery cable, grabbed my wire brushes, and started going to town cleaning off all the nasty corrosion and making sure all the connections were good.
Fired right up. 🙂
That was actually a surprise to me. Certainly bad connections can cause some pretty crazy things, but I’ve never seen anything that crazy before. Apparently, the power wasn’t getting to and from the range sensor like it was supposed to, so it was not allowing the car to start. The range sensor has to tell the computer that the vehicle is either in park or neutral, and if The computer doesn’t get that signal, then it won’t let the vehicle start.
But he’s good to go now, and he’s happy that it apparently didn’t turn out to be the transmission range sensor.
🤞
I headed home, and I ate some dinner. I’ve been better at getting more vegetables in the diet lately, so that’s good.
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 