Move over, 12.9, we have a new record holder!
Even with some things going sideways, I blasted my old record and was able to book 13.9 billable hours. 🥳
It was quite the day!
The day started off with morning exercise at 6:00 with Thomas. Right now we’re just doing stretching, push-ups, planks, and walking.
Our first day of exercise, I just did three sets of five slow push-ups, where I’m fairly slow going down and fairly slow coming back up instead of just cranking them out.
We started with planks of like 30 seconds, maybe?
Each day I’ve been going up by one push-up per set and a handful of seconds or so. That’ll help me reach baseline so I know what numbers I’m at that bring me to failure on the third set. So push-ups at 8 per set for the day, and planks was at 45 seconds or so.
Then we went for a walk, this time walking up the hill toward 62, and then back down and all the way around up the main road on our property here to the barn, and then back to the house. In total, I think that was our first full-hour exercise day.
We started out with like a 15 minute walk, if that, and we’ve been increasing it. Now we’re at the full hour, so it’s just going to be increases of intensity.
After morning exercise, I ate some breakfast, and headed out to the first job. I was later than I wanted to be, not getting there until a little after 8:00, I think, but It was what it was.
I actually didn’t have a super full day scheduled. It would have been fine for a normal day prior to my new work routine, but it was definitely not shaping up to be the manic Monday that I was hoping for. 🙃
So the first job was going back to that 2013 Dodge avenger that had the noisy alternator and possibly other pulleys as well. When I pulled off the serpentine belt and started the car, it indeed ran quietly, as expected. However, when I spun the bearings on the alternator, it didn’t make any noise. And then when I spun the bearing on the AC compressor, it did make noise.
Did I get the diagnosis wrong?
No, I couldn’t have, could I?
Not wanting to replace an expensive part and be wrong, I put the belt back on and redid my diagnosis. Once again, I confirmed that the alternator was definitely making a super loud noise, and the AC compressor… wasn’t.
🤷
So I set about replacing the alternator, with a bit of anxiety in the back of my mind wondering if there was a chance that I might be wrong. It seemed so straightforward, but with bearing noise on the AC compressor and none on the alternator… 😬
But I went with what it seemed to clearly to be with my stethoscope on, and gratefully, it was indeed the alternator, and even better for the customer, all the noises went away with just the alternator, so I didn’t need to replace the tensioner or either of the idler pulleys.
🥳
One car down.
Car number two was a 2004 Pontiac Sunfire that wouldn’t start. Turned out to have a bad fuel pump, and gratefully, the local AutoZone down the road had one in stock, so I went ahead and installed it for them. With just those two cars, it was already something like 3:30 in the afternoon. I still had six more cars to go.
Gratefully, car number three, a 2015 Chevy Trax that was having weird shaking issues turned out to be a super easy diagnosis. His quad ignition coil was shorting out against the head, and every time it shorted out, the RPMs went down momentarily before popping back up to normal.
The customer had already done his own spark plugs on that car, and you have to remove the coil to change the spark plugs, so he went ahead and decided to do the repair himself. That was nice, as it made it quick and easy for me to get him diagnosed and get him on his way.
Car number four was a 2014 Toyota Camry that was supposed to be a 3-hour alternator job. But when I got there, I realized my quoting service was incorrect. The alternator was sitting right at the top of the engine and super easy to access. But as I often do, even though a customer has asked me to do a very specific job, I tested his alternator, and it was fine. I noticed that his negative battery cable was super loose, and that was likely the entire issue. So I tightened his battery cable stayed long enough to make sure that the alternator didn’t have any random issues after getting to temperature, just charged him the service call instead of the 700 plus dollar quote that he was given earlier, and headed off to the next car.
Car number five… I guess I missed a step. After finishing the fuel pump job, the next car I went to was actually a 1996 Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck with a floppy shift cable. I found that the bushing with busted on the shift cable, but there was no place locally that I could get the shift cable bushing, and he didn’t want to wait a week before the aftermarket bushing to be shipped, so I made arrangements to come back later after having ordered a new shift cable.
So car number five was actually the third car I went to but I didn’t mention that in the summary so far. Anyway, that was the job that went most sideways. An old 1996 Chevrolet Silverado is… Well… old. 🙃
And not only is it old, lots of age also generally means many repairs, and those many repairs mean that it’s more likely that you’re going to come across fixes that were Jimmy rigged and not done properly, and sure enough…
In order to replace the shift cable, you have to remove the driver’s seat, and I found that the bolts holding the seat to the frame, out of the four bolts, there were three different styles of bolts, and one of them was a freaking carriage bolt. 😒
Just that bolt probably cost me 30 minutes of time because a carriage bolt is around dome on one end that you can’t grab a hold of. So if the inside ever strips out, you’re pretty much screwed. So after maybe 30 minutes, and after a bit of damage to the sheet metal of the truck, I finally got it out.
Big pain in the butt.
I also noticed a gazillion other issues with the vehicle. I’m guessing this might be one of those customers who blames me for the issues their vehicle has because ” It didn’t have that problem before.”
I guess we will see. I texted him a long list of all the things that I found later because he said that the truck was suddenly having issues with The blower motor and something else.
96 is the oldest year of vehicle I’m willing to work on. Even then, I’d rather not work on anything in the ’90s. The vehicles are just too old. The metal is just too degraded. Too many mechanics have worked on those cars, and there are too many problems with them. Change the battery? Sure. But I really don’t like working on Boulder vehicles. They just suck the life out of you, and by that, I mean suck your time and require lots of creativity to get things figured out sometimes.
The next car on the list was a Chevy Tahoe that was having some sort of overheating issue at higher speeds. He had a whole bunch of check engine codes, but most of them were history codes, and it seemed to be running fine. I cleared all the codes, and we took it for a long test drive, but we were never able to recreate the issue.
He asked me if clearing the codes might have solved the issue, and I told him that clearing the codes, unfortunately, doesn’t solve whatever caused the codes to be thrown in the first place. Still, he was optimistic that maybe the issue wouldn’t happen again, and since we couldn’t recreate it, there was nothing really that we could do to test for it, so I wish them a good evening, and he was happy with me, so at least that was nice.
Car number 7 was a Honda CRV that was making a clunking noise, supposedly, from there passenger front wheel. Unfortunately, by the time I got to the vehicle, it was 9:30 at night. My customers were still awake, but they didn’t answer their text messages nor the front door, so I spent 20 minutes looking at the car to see what I could see without the key, and then headed off to my last car. I didn’t think they’d mind me looking at their car, as they’d already had me work on their vehicle multiple times in the past. I found that it had a bad front passenger tire, torn lower ball joint boots, and maybe some older struts. I still need to go back to check more, which I will do on Friday.
The last car was a Honda Element that was overheating. I had actually done work for the gentleman probably a year or two ago. And just as with that time, it was super late at night. I think I got to his vehicle somewhere around 10:00 or 10 :20, maybe. I don’t remember for sure.
Anyway, I found that he, unfortunately, had pumped his car full of radiator sealant without knowing the cause of his leak. Then he found that his overflow bottle was cracked, so he replaced the overflow bottle, but what he didn’t realize was that the radiator sealant had solidified into big chunks inside his radiator.
As best I could tell, he had unnecessarily put in the sealant, which I only ever recommend if the next stop for the vehicle is the junkyard, and didn’t have anything sealable, but then he clogged up his system, and that was the cause of it overheating because it couldn’t circulate properly.
So I walked him through what he was going to need to do to fix it, and he decided he wanted to try doing it himself, so I bid him good evening and headed home, getting home somewhere around midnight.
And there you have it. 13.9 billable hours. 14.5 if you count the one that I did that they weren’t home for, but I don’t know if I’m going to count that on this day. I probably could, and maybe I still will because I did put in the time, but since the customer didn’t really know that I was even there, and I was only there for 20ish minutes, probably better not count that as part of my record-setting day.
Anyway, that was my Monday!
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 