2023-07-24 — Ever So Close!

So close!!!

I was soooo close to breaking a record today. Sooooo close!

I did nine cars, having one get postponed, otherwise I would have broken the record. I also had multiple jobs go quicker than I expected, which reduced the billable hours I was expecting as well.

But hey, in the 13-hour work day, I was able to put in 12.3 billable hours. 🥳

I started the first job at 8:00 a.m., and I finished the last one at 9:00 p.m.

So far, I’m really liking this load myself up to the gills two days a week gig. Tons of work to do, massively long day, but hey, 5 days off after working two massive days? I’ll take it! That should make it realistically possible to transition to the non-profit stuff without losing a decent income. I won’t make as much money as I usually do, but I’ll make plenty to take care of my needs.

The first car was going back to that 2013 GMC Yukon that I had worked late into the night doing the brakes on before. This time I went ahead and did the fronts. I still couldn’t reproduce the issues that he was explaining, but I did find that The brake hardware was deformed and pushing up against the brake rotor, which I think was causing the sound that he said he was hearing.

So I replaced the front pads and rotors, and he was good to go. That job went a lot smoother than the rear brakes did the Friday before.

In the process of doing that job, I also found a way of cleaning out the caliper guide pin bolt holes in the caliper bracket. General motors designed the guide pin boots to be pressed in boots, so you can’t just pop them off like you can for every other vehicle out there. And since they are made of rubber, I can’t just spray brake cleaner all over them because I worry about the brake cleaner swelling the rubber up and screwing up the seal that keeps the dirt and grime and road debris out of the guide pin area.

So you’re trying to find a way to clean out this hole that’s like 3 in deep but only a little bit wider than a pencil. One of the things that took so much time the day before was that I had accidentally compressed shop towels in the end of the holes, and I spent a heck of a long time trying to figure out how to get the shop towels back out because they were wedged all the way at the end. Finally, I found that one of my broken tools had a little barbed hook on the end where it broke, so I use that to grab a hold of the shop towel that was wedged in there.

But today I have the idea to take a drill bit, and just how the drill a few years ago had sucked my thumb in and giving me a nasty cut that I still deal with several years later because it screwed up my nail bed, I use the drill bit to grab a hold of a shop towel, and then I put the whole deal inside the guide pin hole, and then just gently turned on the drill, and it wiped the hole clean.

🥳

Woohoo!!

That saved so. much. time!

Car number two was a 2018 Chevrolet Tahoe that wouldn’t start that turned out to just need a battery. Another repeat customer who had done the battery for on their Mercedes some months back.

Car number three was a 2014 Mitsubishi lancer that also was a no start and also just needed a battery replaced. Gratefully, I had one with me, and greatfully I was able to get it swapped out quickly. It was nice to have two quicky jobs in a row.

Car number 4 was a 2017 GMC Sierra that was having significant issues with the throttle and misfires and all sorts of stuff. It just seems so pathetic to me that these companies that have been in business for 100 years can still make junk. I mean really!?!?!?

General motors has just totally gone to crap.

The poor people had spent gobs of money already on their piece of junk truck.

I found I think six check engine codes. Multiple misfire codes, issues with air intake stuff, just a whole host of things. I found that one of the electrical connectors looked like it had been chewed off or torn off or something. So that was probably causing some of the codes. Also, the vehicle was running terribly, which I eventually diagnosed as bad catalytic converters. I pulled out the O2 sensors and plugged in my back pressure tester, and found that the back pressure on the system was like six times more than the allowable. That points to clogged catalytic converters.

It ran a heck of a lot better with the O2 sensors removed from the equation, which lent further creedence to the likelihood that the cats are clogged.

It’s also misfiring, and there are lots of different possible causes for that misfire. It’s likely misfires that caused the clogs in the catalytic converter, but a cloud catalytic converter can also cause misfires. So that’s a fun puzzle to try and figure out. Most likely, there are still misfires and still will be misfires once the catalytic converters are replaced, but that should make it easier to diagnose specifically what the misfires are caused by.

Fun fun fun.

Cars numbers 5 and 6 were both with the same customer. He wanted both of his vehicles brakes inspected just to stay on top of things. I found that neither one of them needed breaks done immediately. One of them it would be years before he would need brakes, and the other one probably sometime in the next year, as one side was definitely wearing faster than the other in the front of his 2019 Chevrolet Silverado. Yet another newer Chevy with issues it shouldn’t have that soon.

Good gravy, general motors. Good freaking gravy.

Car number 7 was a no start in a parking lot in centerton that turned out to just need a battery. Been nice to have a bunch of battery jobs in one day. Easy, simple jobs.

Car number eight was anything but simple. It was a 2007 Ford crown Victoria that had more problems than you can shake a stick at.

That’s probably the wrong phrase and has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m talking about, but I think you understand what I’m at least trying to say. 🙃

The key lock cylinder would just come out, and the internals are broken, so you can’t just slide it back in. You’ve got to line it back up.

He’s got a coolant leak that requires putting in a half gallon of coolant a couple times a week.

The cooling fan doesn’t turn on.

He’s got a misfire on cylinder 6, and the spark plug wells on the driver side of the engine are full of coolant.

It’s… a mess. 😕

He looks like either a later teenager or a younger 20 something, and he’s got a baby on the way, and he doesn’t have a job, so I spent some time walking him through everything and explaining what I would suggest that he do on his own to fix it. Explaining the order of potential repairs in order to most effectively figure out if the vehicle was even worth fixing.

The last car of the day was replacing a starter that the customer supplied on a 2015 Honda CRV. If you own a four-cylinder Honda, you can pretty much just expect that the starter will not be the same quality as the rest of the car. The six cylinder Honda’s use a different manufacturer for their starters, and they don’t have anywhere near the number of issues at the four cylinder starter manufacturer does.

Having done that job, or similar jobs, many many times, it was easy enough, and I found some better ways of doing it on the newer versions. I was actually able to knock the job out in less than an hour! 🥳 I had one more job that I was hoping the customer would say yes to, even though it was 9:00 at night, because I was so so close to breaking my record. I had 12.3 billible hours finished by that point, and needed only 0.6 more hours to tie my record.

But it was too late for that customer, and I didn’t have anyone else on the list that was a reasonable candidate. The other jobs that I had were all way down south.

(sigh)

So it was a no-go on breaking the record, but I was so so close! And I’m pretty sure I broke My record for the amount of time it took to get that many billable hours. I was almost a 1 for 1, which is phenomenal as a mobile mechanic, considering that I probably spent 2 hours of that time just driving.

After that last job, I drove down to home Depot to exchange my lifetime warranty torque wrench for another one, but they didn’t have one in stock.

😕

Should have called first.

Oh well.

I came home to pancakes that my absolutely wonderful mother had fixed, and that was the day! After eating, I chatted with one of my sisters for about an hour, which was lovely, and then vegged out for a little while, and finally crashed for the night. I hadn’t slept well the night before, having trouble falling asleep, and then waking up throughout the night as normal. So it was nice to finally sleep, and it’s nice to have a day off right away.

This new schedule is so so so so so freaking nice!

Cross my fingers, I hope it works out that I can keep it this way!

Love and hugs. 😊

Lift the World

~ stephen