Good golly, Miss Molly!
I believe I broke a record today.
I did 10 service calls, logging 12.9 billable hours in a 13-hour-ish work day.
🥳
Yay!!!
I killed it. I totally killed it. 😎
I’ve had some really successful days lately, which is pretty nice. Several days over the last few weeks I’ve been doing seven and eight cars in a given day.
Today it was 10 service calls. 10! I don’t think I’ve ever done 10. And I don’t think I’ve ever done 12.9 billable hours in one day. If it weren’t for a discount I gave, I would have had even more. 🙂
The day started out with the normal efforts I’ve been making to try and help my Arkansas family members get my late sister’s belongings distributed to her kids and siblings. If I haven’t mentioned it, I’ve been taking pictures of a handful of items each day and texting them to the family for people to claim if they want them.
So I did that, and then I spent probably an hour communicating with an attorney about the issues with my lead generator.
And then I finally got out to go working, getting to my first car I think sometime around 10:00 or 10:30 or 11:00?
Car number one was a 2008 Chevrolet suburban that had a coolant leak. I got there and very quickly figured out that it was one of the heater hoses that was leaking, down by the water pump where it connects. There’s a little plastic tee connector That had deteriorated over time from constant hot and cold temperature changes and the breakdown of the coolant chemically.
So I went to the parts store, picked up the new hose, came back to the vehicle, slapped it in, filled at full of coolant, chatted a little bit with his little girl who was curiously watching what I was doing, buttoned it up, and headed on to the next one.
Car number two was a 2008 Ford f150 that wouldn’t start. Hey went over to it, and the battery was drained down, so I hooked up my jump box. When I heard it try to start, it was a pretty gnarly sound, and The sound to me seemed to be something that I would hear from a partially seized engine. The engine itself was turning over a lot slower than it should, and it just sounded like it was metal on metal as it cranked.
I did some checking, trying to crank the motor over by hand, and I was able to do it, but it was super challenging. It took all a lot of energy to get it to move just a little bit. That seems to lend credence to my initial tentative assessment that it was a partially seized motor.
Finally, I loosened the drain plug from the oil pan and drained out a little bit of oil. In doing so, I saw that there was a bunch of milky oil coming out in addition to regular oil, meaning that it had blown a head gasket or cracked ahead, and I also found metal in the oil.
Basically what I think happened is that it blew a head gasket, leaked a bunch of coolant into the engine, and the coolant mixed with the oil messed up the lubrication such that it ended up poorly lubricated, which is what caused the metal to be in the oil.
So there you go. That was car number two. Needs engine.
Car number three was a 2016 Ford f150 that the customer had purchased a charcoal canister for because the bottom of the charcoal canister had been smashed and broken out. I drove over to the Tyson chicken place in Springdale, acres and acres and acres of Tyson stuff.
The smell was awful–awful.
Gratefully, the repair itself was straightforward and didn’t really give me any issues to speak of it all.
Card number four was a 2014 Subaru WRX that someone had over tightened the lug nuts on, ruining lug nuts on all four wheels, one on each of three, and two on the other.
So I had to disassemble the brake assemblies on all four wheels, and replace five wheel studs. $310 later, everything was done.
Got $310 is the cost that this poor customer had to pay because someone massively overtightened a lug nuts, likely with an impact wrench.
Don’t tighten lug nuts with an impact. Full stop.
Car number five was a 2005 Honda Odyssey that turned out to be broken because of another careless mechanic. I went out there, and he had misfires on four out of his six cylinders, and I found that one of the spark plugs had blown out of the head, damaging the threads in the head, ruining the spark plug, and destroying the coil pack.
Whoever tightened the spark plugs last time did exactly the opposite of the lug nuts on the previous car. They way way way under tightened them. They probably screwed them in hand tight and then forgot to torque them. The result? At the very least it’s going to cost him several $100 to fix, and at most, possibly thousands.
I might be a slow mechanic, but I’m absolutely a perfectionist, so I put a torque wrench on pretty much everything.
I pointed him to some shops that might be able to do the repair, as rethreading heads is a heck of a lot bigger and more dangerous of a job than I want to be doing as a mobile service.
Car number six was going back to the 2015 Dodge Journey that had the busted coolant hose from a few days ago. I slapped on the new coolant hoses, filled with coolant, made sure that it was properly filled up and not leaking, and headed off to the next one.
Car number 7 was a 2005 Nissan Xterra that had a floppy shift cable. I went over there, the car stuck in the parking lot of a Mercy medical clinic, pulled apart the center console, and found that the shifts cable bushing had disintegrated.
Auto manufacturers don’t allow you to just buy the bushing, so you’re supposed to buy the entire cable. Fortunately, I had a bushing that would work at least temporarily, and possibly permanently, and there’s an aftermarket company called bushingfix.com that creates bushings specifically so that people don’t have to go out and buy the entire cable.
So I got them going with a temporary/ possibly permanent fix, gave them the link to The part that they need on the website that sells the part, and taught them how to replace it themselves once the part comes in– If my fix for some reason doesn’t last.
Car number 8 on the docket was a 2021 Hyundai Genesis g70 that she had run over something and torn the water shield underneath the car partially off. There wasn’t any repairing it, so I simply shaved off the portion that was damaged to beyond repair, and she was super happy that I was able to do that.
Car number 9 was actually the same car as car number 7, but on their way home from my fixing their shift cable issues, they’re alternator went out. They were just a couple miles from the Missouri border. I didn’t want to leave them in the lurch, so even though they were on the side of the freeway, and my policy is to not do service calls on the side of the freeway, I wanted to help them out. So I diagnosed it as a bad alternator, and told them that they be able to limp it home if they charged up the battery and then drove it again. I told them they might have to charge it a couple times, but they would be able to make it home. It was well after 9:00 at night, so no parts stores were open to get an alternator for them. So I told them what they would need to do to replace it, giving them A step by step summary of everything I found, and then watched them drive away.
Please send me a follow-up message later that night thanking me for my help, both times, and making sure that they were able to get home. I can’t do the repair for them because they live in Missouri, but I did everything I could to make sure that they had and knew what they needed.
Car number 10 was a 2014 Nissan versa that I got to somewhere around 10:00 at night, I think. It was owned by a long time customer of mine who passed away a couple weeks ago, and her sister was calling me because she knew that I had been her sister’s mechanic.
She wanted me to check out the car because she was going to come from Kansas to pick it up. I found that it hadn’t been driven in probably a year and a half, the battery was toast, and three out of the four tires were bad. Because the car’s been sitting so long, I think it needs to be oil pressureized, and that’s not something that I am able to do. So I explained everything to her, and I’m going to try and help her find someone who can take care of everything.
10 service calls. 12.9 billable hours. Records broken.
What a day! 😊
I went home and ate dinner, because I don’t think I had eaten all day, and then I veged out the rest of the night, not tired, and not falling asleep until almost 5:00 a.m. 😅
Oops. 🙃
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 