Happy Wednesday! Hope you’ve enjoyed the day!
Another super busy one over here. Eight more cars, though three of them were at the same location for my last job.
Still not sleeping well. Still waking up early no matter how late I go to bed. And my stomach issue was a bit worse today. Not sure why. Not really anything different to point to.
Anyway, car number one was a 2015 Jeep Wrangler that the customer had called me about a couple days ago because even taking the key out of the ignition, the truck wouldn’t shut down. So I told him to take off the negative battery cable, which he did, and he left it off until I came.
I got there and found that in an effort to take the doors off of the Jeep, they had disconnected spliced and wires from an aftermarket alarm system that someone had wired in.
I had no idea which wires went to which ones, and they hadn’t taken any pictures before they started disconnecting things, so they had no memory of what wires went where.
Basically, that left two options: either spend however long it was going to take to find the wiring instructions for that particular make and model of alarm system, so I knew which wires to connect to which ones on the car wiring harness, or, I could just remove the entire aftermarket alarm system.
The gentleman had purchased the Jeep with that aftermarket system already installed, and he opted for me to just remove the whole system. So I very carefully detached all the wires and harness stuff from the alarm system, and I spliced back together A wire that had been cut, reconnected another that had been split, and found a ground that had been cut that I also spliced back together.
The moment of truth revealed success!
I think the customer made the right choice. I wouldn’t want And aftermarket alarm in my own vehicle, and it probably saved him a lot of money because it didn’t take me much longer than an hour to disassemble everything and reconnect everything back up like it was from the factory.
Car number two was going to that 2010 Honda Odyssey from the other night, the one where I went to the wrong house and diagnosed the wrong odyssey. 😅
It rains for a bit, but gratefully not long enough to cause any issues for me. I diagnosed the van is having a bad starter, replace the starter, and they were good to go.
Car number three was a 2008 Lexus SUV that wouldn’t start. He had replaced the battery, but it still wouldn’t start, so I figured it was probably the alternator. But when I got there, I saw that the negative battery cable still had a whole lot of corrosion on it, so I surmised that it might well be that there was so much corrosion that the current couldn’t get through to properly ground the vehicle.
I was right.
I spent a little while cleaning off the nasty corrosion that had taked itself to the inside of the battery cable connector. It took a screwdriver to chip it all away, but I got it tipped away, then wire brushed the inside of it to make it shiny, connected it back together, and the SUV fired right up!
It didn’t take very long to get that all taken care of, so I spent another 15 minutes or so cleaning out his engine base from all the nasty corrosion that had been splattered and whatever everywhere from when he changed his battery.
He asked me, while I was there, if I knew anybody who was interested in buying pressure washers, as he had two brand new ones that he had decided not to use. He used to do pressure washing as a business, and he had moved here from Virginia Beach, and he was going to do the same thing again, but he couldn’t get any takers, and he didn’t want to put too much effort into it, being nearly 70 years old. So he was just selling the pressure washers that he had just barely bought.
He paid like $350 or $400 for the pressure washer that he sold to me, and he did it has a straight trade for the work I did for him today, My total for him coming out to $138.
So, I jumped on that, and now I have a brand new working pressure washer that is is supposedly capable of doing 3600 PSI. I guess we’ll see if that’s actually true. It’s a knockoff brand, but still $400 worth of a knockout.
I’m not going to hold my breath, but he did show me that it worked, so I know it works. If it lasts a little while, It will be worth it.
Anyway, I got that taken care of for him, and he was happy.
Car number four was a 2012 Chevy Cruze that was working when they left on vacation and not when they came back. Wouldn’t start. Wouldn’t do anything.
I spent nearly 2 hours troubleshooting trying to figure out what was going on before finally throwing in the white flag. I gave them a record of all the tests that I had done in the results, and I only charged them for an hour of my time, sending them to another shop to finish the diagnostic. It’s going to be better for another shop to finish the diagnostic because I want the other shop to be the ones who actually find out the problem, so they are responsible for the fix. I say that because there is also a decent chance that the issue is the computer itself, and I can’t program computers, so there’s no sense in me doing the diagnostic, sending them somewhere else to have it replaced, and not be able to have that shop be responsible for the diagnostic. It’s important, in my opinion, for the shop that does the diagnostic to be responsible for the repair.
Car number five was a 2022 Toyota Camry that would start but had every warning you could possibly imagine flashing like the car was going to explode if you try to do anything with it.
Weird.
When I realized the vehicle was likely still under warranty, I told him that I could just go ahead and stop right there and only charge him half my service call. So he elected to do that, and I called the local Toyota dealership, checking to see if they would cover the tow cost for a vehicle under warranty. She said she thought they would, but the service department was closed, so I gave the phone number of the dealership to my customer, and we had a little chat about life And the world today, and then I headed out to cars numbers 6, 7, and 8– All owned by the same person, and all having broken down recently.
The lady who had three cars I needed to look at had had a pretty huge run of bad luck. She’s had three cars go down in quick succession, one of them being a car she purchased because the two others had gone down.
Poor lady!
She’s a kindergarten teacher, and she left one job at the beginning of the summer to take another one, and the one she left isn’t going to pay her the rest of the summer because she resigned. Crappy thing to do to somebody. They should keep paying her the full summer that she earned, especially with her giving them an entire summer’s notice to find another teacher.
Anyway, the 2014 Dodge avenger had been worked on by somebody who had it for like a month trying to fix the overheat, and it overheated a gazillion times on the drive back after it was supposedly fixed. The person who supposedly had fixed it said she needed a water pump, but I told her that was almost certainly not the case.
I opened up the cooling system and realized that it was empty. Of course it’s going to overheat if it’s empty.
Good gravy.
So I started pouring coolant into the system, and it right away poured out of the radiator onto the ground.
She needs a radiator. Not a hard diagnosis, people. If you’re not a mechanic, don’t claim to be, and don’t charge people when you have no clue what you’re doing.
End rant.
Anyway, so I gave her the diagnosis on that one and quoted her a repair price. It’s a Chrysler product, And Chrysler radiators, as you know from the other night, are some of the worst radiators on the planet to have to replace. This one was no exception. It’s an 800 plus dollar bill just to replace the stinking radiator.
I told her that instead of having me fix that one right then and there, I would suggest that she have me go diagnose the other two of her three vehicles, and after diagnosing all three, she could decide which one she wanted to fix first.
The next one was a 2008 Acura TSX. She had just barely bought it because the other two cars had gone down on her. And this one died while it was driving. I quickly found that it had a blown mega fuse, removing all power from the inside of the vehicle, and causing it to not even try to start. Unfortunately, it’s quite likely that whatever caused it to die while driving is not the cause of what blew the fuse. I’m guessing the fuse blue because someone accidentally jumped the battery backwards trying to get it started.
I taught her how to replace the fuse herself. She ordered a couple of them on Amazon because they’re not just regular fuses you can buy at the parts supplier. You either have to get them from the dealer or from online.
So I taught her how to replace it herself, and then I gave her step-by-step instructions for how to treat the car from replacing it to trying to start it. There are step by step instructions that need to be followed so that we know that if the fuse blows again, we know exactly at what point it blew again so we know exactly where to start looking for the dead short that’s causing the fuse to blow.
If it doesn’t blow, and the car starts, then great. If it doesn’t blow, and the car still won’t start, then we need to go back to diagnosing and figuring out what was the cause of why it died while driving, as the blown fuse at that point, would pretty much have been proven to be user error when trying to jump the vehicle.
Vehicle number three was a 2013 Dodge dart that she thought needed either a battery or alternator, but when I popped the hood, I found that her son had already removed the alternator.
Can’t do any diagnostics without an alternator to test. 🙃
Since it was already out of the vehicle, I sent her to the parts store to have the alternator tested. It tested bad, but she couldn’t afford the price of the new one, as it was a pretty hefty price.
It’s her son’s car anyway, so he’s going to buy the alternator, and he’s going to put it in since he was the one who took it out.
And that was the day! I just pulled in to the house, and I’m going to eat some dinner and rehydrate myself, because I’m pretty dehydrated. Then I’m probably going to veg out a bit and head to bed.
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 