It’s been an eventful day today!
Wouldn’t want anything less, right? 🙃
As with every Monday these days, the day started off early. I didn’t get to bed at the greatest hour, so I didn’t get as much sleep as I would have liked to have gotten. But I did fine.
I had a crap ton of cars on the schedule today, way more than I could have ever hoped to have gotten done, but that’s what I’m trying to do– load myself up in order to reach my billable hours goal. I think at one point, I had maybe 12 cars on the schedule for the day? And they weren’t just quickie jobs either.
I got to my first job, a 2014 Ford F-150 with supposed squishy brakes, at about 8:15, after I stopped off at AutoZone in vain to pick up parts. I say in vain because the parts hadn’t arrived yet.
Anyway, I took the history of the F-150, and then I took it out for a drive, and the brakes felt totally fine. There was no air in the lines that I could discern. The brakes were firm and responsive immediately, and everything seemed great. I think maybe the gentleman wasn’t used to modern braking systems where the anti-lock brake system keeps you from being able to lock up the wheels. He specifically mentioned that he hadn’t been able to lock up the wheels and that the pedal was going all the way to the floor.
So I gave him the good news on the brakes, and then I diagnosed his coolant leak for him, as well as an oil leak. I checked out a few more things that he wanted checked out, and then I called it good.
I was grateful that it actually wasn’t brake problems. I don’t like dealing with squishy break issues, whether it’s leaking lines or a bad master cylinder. I just don’t like it. It’s not the funnest thing in the world to bleed brakes by yourself. 😅 Takes a lot lot longer.
After that job, I went to a 2010 Nissan Sentra that was a warranty replacement of the starter. This was a job that Malachi did back in October of last year, and I realized that he made some mistakes on the job. I don’t know if his mistakes were enough to cause the starter to go bad, but he did make some pretty rookie mistakes.
Is what it is.
Card number three was a 2016 Chevrolet Cruze that the customer had all sorts of concerns with, but when I got there, everything was able to be solved by simply replacing the bad battery that he had in the car. So I drove to AutoZone, picked up a battery, drove back, installed it, and headed on to job number four.
Job number four was a 2014 Dodge Journey that the lady said she had gone over a really big dip, had the front end of the car smashed down pretty hard, and then had coolant squirting out afterward. Given her description, and given how cars are manufactured, generally, the only way to ruin a radiator after going over a dip or a big bump or something is to smash the radiator support.
I told her that I had time to diagnose it, but I didn’t necessarily have time to fix it today. She was okay with that, so I drove over there, and to my amazement, I found that the radiator support was fully intact. The radiator wasn’t smashed. Nor was the AC condenser. The bumper was fully intact. There was no visible damage at all that I could see. It was clear, however, but the radiator definitely was leaking, and given the fact that it happened immediately following her smashing down into a dip, It had to be correlated.
I started taking things apart to diagnose exactly what was going on, and I did indeed find that the radiator was. As best I can tell, what happened was that when the vehicle came crashing down after going over that dip, the power steering fluid cooler got pushed up into the radiator temporarily, but far enough to puncture one of the cooling veins in the radiator.
That’s my best guess right now as to what happened.
After taking off the whole front bumper fascia and having the look around, I realized that with that particular vehicle, there was absolutely no way that I was going to be able to remove the radiator without evacuating the refrigerant from the AC system.
I think this is the first vehicle in all of the ones that I’ve done where there was no alternative means of removing the radiator other than evacuating the AC system.
That was annoying. 😒
I told her that I was going to go to my following jobs and pick up the radiator that she needed, which was in another city, and hopefully come back to finish the job in the evening.
After that, I headed to a 2016 Infiniti QX70 that also had a radiator leak, or at least that’s what they thought was going on. So I went out there, and indeed it did have a radiator leak. It was another lovely design where it made it almost necessary to remove the AC condenser. Grately, I found a way to remove the radiator without needing to disconnect and evacuate the AC system. Boy, was it a nightmare, though.
The radiator for that one was also in another city down south, so I stopped that job in the middle as well, let them know that I would come back to get that taken care of, cleaned up my stuff, and I headed out on my way to job number 6. The first five jobs had been in Bentonville, the job number six was going to be in South Rogers.
So I popped on the freeway at exit 86, and just after the on-ramp to exit 83, as I was going down the freeway with the people who were entering the freeway from the on-ramp starting to merge, I had a car merge right in front of me going way slower than I was.
😬
I slammed on my brakes and swerved in an effort to miss smashing into the back of them, but what ended up happening was that the massive force of the vehicle trying to continue forward while the brakes were being slammed actually blew out my rear axle to the point that the rear axle was torn off the leaf springs, and pulled back probably maybe 6 inches on the frame of the van. 😶😬😶😬😶
The result was that my drive shaft got yanked out of the van and went clanking around the freeway, my wheels partially locked up, screeching like banshees, as I skidded to a stop on the shoulder– grateful to have made it off the highway.
😅
And of course, the vehicle that caused all of that just kept right on going.
That was lovely.
That was a pretty nutty driving experience. Not my nuttiest, but definitely pretty crazy.
Gratefully, another driver pulled over very quickly and retrieved my drive shaft out from the middle of the freeway.
Many thanks to that gentleman!!!
And gratefully again, my mom was only a few miles away running errands in town and was able to swing by and rescue me and take me directly home so that I could grab my back up van.
🥳 thanks, mama!
Once home, I made myself a gallon of apple juice water to help hydrate me because it’s beastly hot outside, and I still had seven cars left on the schedule.
Shout outs a second time to my mama for making me a couple of sandwiches to take with me. Those were lifesavers on such a blisteringly hot day when I was working a 16 plus hour day.
I removed the trash from my backup van, and I headed back to the freeway to swap over my stuff from the one van to the other. It took probably an hour to an hour and a half to swap everything over. It’s amazing how much stuff I have in there. Makes me want to be better prepared for swaps. 😅
But I was able get it all swapped over, and I got to job number 6 I think about 6:00, All of my tools, equipment, and supplies strewn about the back of my massive white Twinkie.
Gratefully, job number six, a 2005 GMC Yukon that wouldn’t start, was a relative piece of cake. They had a bad starter, and starters are easy to put in those. My perfection isn’t wouldn’t let me just leave it as it was, though, as I noticed that the ignition wire to the starter was missing part of its safety insulation from rubbing against metal and damaging the wire, so it took me a little while, but I put some new protective insulation on the wire.
They were super happy, and they gave me a couple big bags of kettle corn, because that’s what they do for work.
After that, I headed down south to pick up parts from the Springdale AutoZone and to do a few jobs. But the first job that I was going to cancel, when I told him I was on my way, he said he’d already gotten it taken care of.
Then the next job postponed, saying he wasn’t available when I was trying to head his way. Normally, that would be a pretty crappy situation to have two people unavailable or cancel without telling me, but because I was so overloaded, I was okay.
That left just one more job down south, going back to a customer I’ve been to multiple times already. His battery is draining down in his Lexus. Sometimes James down overnight. Sometimes it takes two or three days to drain down. So I went over there and did a parasitic draw test, and I found a really tiny one, but nothing to explain a draw that would drain a battery overnight. So I put in a quick disconnect, and gave him step by step instructions for how to do the testing from there so that he knew exactly what the issue was. If it was a parasitic draw that was just intermittent, but it was large enough to drain a battery down, most likely he wouldn’t want to pay for the cost of chasing down exactly which wire or which unit was causing the draw, so the quick disconnect that I already installed would solve that for him; and if it turned out to be a bad battery, then he could just get it taken care of himself because it’s under warranty, he would get a free replacement.
So I got him all set. That was car number 7.
Card number eight was going back to a customer that I had helped a couple times a few months ago when another shop told him he needed a new car, and all he had was some misfires in his engine. He had actually called me out there to do a pre-purchase inspection, and after finding all the cars he was looking for were junk, and seeing that he was driving a decent looking car, I asked him why he was looking for another car, and that’s when he told me the story about auto shop telling him that he should just buy another car. I convinced him not to, and he has saved a lot of money because he didn’t go by another car when he didn’t need one. Sure, he has a few repairs he needs to do, but so far, nothing major.
Anyway, I went out there and found that he had another misfire. I checked his spark plugs, and they were bad, still functional, but definitely very old with gaps that were far too large. The spark plugs weren’t the cause of the misfire, however. After doing some testing, I found that the coil on cylinder 7 was misfiring, so I went ahead and replaced that, as well as the two spark plugs that I had removed.
When I started working on his car, it was After 9:00 at night, and he was getting ready to go to bed, so I told him that I wouldn’t bill him for any more than an hour’s worth of labor. That way he wouldn’t wake up with an unpleasant surprise of a big bill.
That turned out to bite me in the butt a little bit because just doing the bare minimum that I did took an hour and a half, but I had told him I wasn’t going to bill for more than an hour. So I ate my labor on that one. But I got him going. And I think I also fixed the AC issues he was dealing with that I’m guessing were caused by a vacuum leak. I found a large vacuum hose that was disconnected. I also found another part in the engine that had a hose that was kinked– part of the evap system.
By the time I finish that car, it was like 10:30 or 10:45, I think. But I was so far behind that I went ahead and went back to the infiniti qx70. I stayed long enough to get the radiator back in, but I damaged one of the o-rings because I didn’t realize when I was checking the radiator and saw that the transmission cooler line fittings were loose, I didn’t realize they had o-rings inside and just needed to be gently snugged down. That’s the first time I’ve gone to do a radiator job with tranny cooler lines that used little o-rings like that that you didn’t just tighten down.
Of course, none of the o-rings I had in my o-ring assortment were the right size. Honestly, I don’t know why I even buy those assortments. I’ve got several different o-ring assortments, and every single time I need an o-ring, nothing, not a single o ring from any of my assortments fits what I need. Makes me wonder why people even buy those o-ring assortments, as clearly all of the manufacturers are purposefully designing their o-rings to be different sizes than what people commonly buy in those assortments.
It’s so stupid.
So I got everything back together but what will need to be still apart in order for me to get that o-ring issue fixed. I’ll try and get that figured out tomorrow– along with the mess that is my broken down van on the side of the freeway. 😅
After that, I headed home. It was after midnight, and on the way home, I realized that I left my super important OBD2 Bluetooth connector in one of my customers cars. So I had to go all the way back to that customer’s car to get it. Gratefully, that particular car was one where the customer had already gone to bed, and I had hidden the key on the car, so I was able to just grab the key, open up the car, grab my tool, lock everything back up, hide the key again, and head home.
I think I got home somewhere around 1:00, ate some food, and spent the next couple hours trying to get things figured out for the next day. I finally crashed sometime after 3:00 with a waking up time around 7:20 or so. Long long long day. And then a short sleep turn around.
😅
Oh well. It was nice to have been able to be pretty darn positive all day, even cheerful, despite the pretty significant bumps in the road that the day brought.
Granted, probably the only reason why I wasn’t totally stressed out about it was because of my new schedule. It’s probably not any growth on my part, just reducing the load which gave room for things to go sideways and not totally screw me over.
Anyway, that was the day! Tuesday is going to be… interesting. I have at least two cars that I have to finish. Neither one of them is going to be just a quick simple thing. And I’ve got that van to figure out what to do with. Kind of a challenge when the rear axle is separated from where it’s supposed to be. 😅
Wish me luck! 🍀🤞🍀
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 