Hey! Even with some pretty good discounts, I managed to get more than 12 billable hours.
🥳
Another Freaky Friday in the books!
Just car stuff to talk about today, like usual for manic Mondays and freaky Fridays. 🙃
First car was a 1997 Toyota T100 that needed a radiator and radiator fan replaced. Customer was providing the parts, so it was just a labor job.
He didn’t have any coolant, I ended up going to get Some distilled water because I was out of distilled water and couldn’t use the coolant I had without it.
The job went relatively well, gratefully. I was happy that I didn’t have to remove the fan clutch in order to remove the fan. That was kind of a big deal. I hate taking off and clutches. I’ve had experiences in the past where they’ve been on so ridiculously tightly that It takes ages to finally break them free.
So that was nice. 🙂
When I was all done, the customer gave me like a $60 tip, so that was pretty cool too. 😁
The first car was in west Bentonville. Car number two was down in Springdale. It was a 2000 Dodge caravan that just died while driving. This is one of those jobs that I had felt like maybe I shouldn’t take when it first came up, but my schedule was feeling a little thread bear, and I didn’t want to find myself short of jobs, so I threw it on the schedule.
It did indeed turn out to be a bit of a pain. And it wouldn’t be the first job that was a bit of a pain. I had taken multiple jobs that I was a little concerned about based on the descriptions and the types of vehicles that they were.
Anyway, the fuel pump was kicking on just fine. It had injector pulse. It wouldn’t let me check the engine codes because I couldn’t get either of my scan tools to connect to the van because there wasn’t any power going to the test port.
Normally, when there’s no power to the test port, the fuse that runs both the test port and the cigarette lighter/ auxiliary port is blown. (Little tip for the future if you weren’t already aware.) But in this case, the fuse was okay.
That was leading me to think that maybe there was an issue with the computer until I found that it had injector pulse. With a fuel pump kicking on, and it having injector pulse, that made me think that, no, the computer is working fine, but I’m not able to interface with it to read any of the data.
One of the challenges about working on older cars is not having all the modern data anyway.
Gratefully, at some point, I was able to manage to get the scan tools to connect. I forgot exactly what I did. I was fiddling with the ignition a certain way and finally managed to get it to connect. I think I was wondering whether or not the ignition switch was making proper contact to send power where it needed to go in order to have power to the test port.
Anyway, I managed to get the scanner hooked up, and I found that there was a trouble code for the crankshaft position sensor. I also found another connector that was broken off with part of a sensor still inside, but I had no idea what that sensor was, nor could I find where it went.
Before I was able to finish the diagnosis, they mentioned that they couldn’t have me there past the hour, because that’s all the money they had for me to look at it. By that point, of course, it had already been well past the hour. 🙄
But my customers were drunk, so they weren’t quite all there.
So I finished buttoning everything back up that I had a part while testing, and ended up giving them a fairly substantial discount to bring the price in line with the hour that they, too late, told me was their maximum.
I had the guy crawl under the van with me and showed him where the crankshaft position sensor was. I pulled the old one out for him so that he could compare the parts, and I showed him where to put it back in.
Car number 3 was a 2013 Dodge Dart that… Turned into quite the saga. I was there to work on what I was told was the AC system, that it wouldn’t blow cold.
It was a crazy hot day, and one of the guys at the house suggested I move the car over to the shade, so I did. It fired right up, and I pulled from the street into the driveway and into the shade.
🥳
I think it was like 97° outside with a real feel of 107°, which in Arkansas feels more like 180,000° because unless the wind is blowing, there’s no evaporative cooling, and you just boil in your own sweat.
Anyway, I popped up in the hood and was getting ready to set up my AC gauges to check the AC pressures to see where the car was at, but I noticed that there was no coolant in the pressure tank. So I put some coolant that the customer had in the car, fired it up, came out of the car, and saw the coolant spilling all over the ground.
Turn the car off, found the two different hoses were broken, the plastic having deteriorated to the point that it couldn’t withstand the pressures and just broke, and said about fixing those leaks.
Gratefully, I had some parts with me that worked, so I didn’t have to go to the parts supplier to make everything work 🥳
It took a little while, and it was a bit annoying, but I managed to get it taken care of, the leak, that is.
In the process of fixing the leak, I found out from the young man who was actually the driver of the vehicle that the AC wasn’t the problem: It was that the fan on the inside of the car didn’t even try to blow.
So I open the door, pulled the trim That was covering the blower motor, disconnected the connector, and started testing. I found that there was power going to the blower motor, So I gave power directly to the blower motor, and nothing.
Bad blower motor.
So that was solved! Currently fixed, blower motor issue diagnosed, and with a blower motor being a special order part, that meant I was done with the Dart!
Or so I thought.
😬
During my testing of the cooling system and whatnot, every time I started the car, it fired up. But the last couple times that I had started it up, it sputtered a bit before it started. But it finally caught each time.
I didn’t think much of it. A tributing it to maybe because I had the air intake sensor disconnected and the air intake hose removed.
But when I finished diagnosing the issue with the blur motor, I went to fire up the car, and all it would do was crank. Crank crank crank crank crank.
But it would never start.
😶
A disconnected air sensor wouldn’t cause that.
This is one of a mechanic’s worst nightmares. You got to a car that was working when you first got there, and isn’t when you’re ready to leave.
I spent the next probably hour or hour and a half trying to figure out what on earth was going wrong. I hadn’t done anything that could even remotely cause a car not to start. The only electrical systems that I even touched were disconnecting the air sensor because it had to be disconnected to remove the air intake hose in order to get to the broken cooling hoses, but that wouldn’t cause any problems at all.
The only other electrical connector I messed with was the one that went to the fan, and that won’t have anything to do with a car not starting either.
I tested fuel. Plenty. I tested injector pulls. Fine. I tested pretty much everything except compression, and I couldn’t do that because the engine was still hot.
What the crap!?!?!?
What the heck am I supposed to tell my customers?
There’s not a thing that I did that could cause the car to not start, but here we are. It was starting perfectly fine when I got there. It started sputtering but would still start, and then finally just cranking.
Eventually, I had to throw up my hands. They had one other car that needed to be worked on, so I started working on that one. It was an AC issue, and I found that both their AC pressure was low, and that it was blowing warm out of the driver side vents while cool out of the passenger side vents.
Interestingly, for the first time in my automotive career, recharging the system fixed both problems.
I’ve never seen that before. But I guess it simply didn’t have enough cool air to make it across the dashboard and out the other vents. Usually, pretty much universally, if you’ve got one temperature blowing out of one set of events and another temperature blowing out of another set of events, you’ve got an issue with a blend door actuator. Super common problem. Pretty much super easy, universal diagnosis. Gratefully, when I was looking up some data on that vehicle, I found that for some people, just recharging the system, solved that issue with that car.
I wonder how often that’s true with other cars?
🤷
Oh! I Just remembered. When I first got there, there was actually no AC at all! There was blowing, but it was all warm. After doing a little digging, I found that the electrical connector that was supposed to be connected to the AC compressor was disconnected. I guess they had replaced the alternator, and they had disconnected that connector, but they couldn’t find where it was supposed to be reconnected when they put everything back together, and they had just left it sitting there.
Might have helped had they told me that to start. 🙃
“Hey, so there’s this connector that we can’t figure out where goes. Maybe that’s why our AC suddenly stopped working?”
Yeah, something like that. 😆
So I plugged that back in, and that’s when I found the other two issues of low charge and cold air not coming out of both sides of the HVAC system.
But after topping off the system with a couple of cans of refrigerant, the AC was blowing nice and cold, and it was blowing nice and cold out of all the vents.
🥳
At least that car went well. 🙃
(sigh)
Car number five was a 2002 Honda CRV. Actually, it’s the car that I went to look at on Monday when they didn’t answer the door and it was late at night. So I went back to it, was finally able to reproduce the issues that they were concerned about. Definitely had blown boots on the lower ball joints like I already knew, but being able to open the hood and take it for a test drive, I was able to confirm what I suspected, that the struts were bad.
At first, it was super hard to diagnose the struts. I took it on a test drive, and couldn’t really make it reproduce the sound reliably at all. That let me know that it wasn’t ball joints making the sound. If the ball joints were bad, every time I went over the speed bump that was in the neighborhood, I should have heard the clunk clunk.
After having the customer take me out on a test drive, and having him be annoyed because for the first 95% of the test drive, we couldn’t recreate the issue. We finally got it to recreate right at the end enough to have it be a little meaningful. Once I heard the sound right there at the end, I jacked up the car again, checked a few things, and found that the strut upper mount appeared broken. When we lowered the car we took it out for another drive, expecting that if that were the issue, we would immediately noticed the sounds that he had been hearing all along, and indeed we did. With the upper mount busted, and then having had no pressure on it at all, it had shifted, so driving it down the road, even out of the driveway, started shifting it back to where it was under load, and that caused the sounds.
At least, that’s the best I can figure out at this point. I’m always a little nervous when I’m not absolutely 100% positive, and suspension sounds can be tricky sometimes, but with what appears to be a broken upper strut mount, that would explain it, I think.
So I just did the diagnosis on that one, as the repair is going to be a long job.
Car number six was a 2007 Hyundai Elantra that wasn’t starting. When I got there, The lady who came out acted like I was a long lost friend, and at first, I couldn’t place her at all. But then after we talked for a little while, I remembered that she was one of my customers way back in the beginning, way back when I had the first David as my helper. This would have been probably 2017? 2018?
Anyway, I had worked on her car multiple times– different car, but I remembered after talking to them a little bit. I had also worked on there next door neighbor’s car.
Anyway it was kind of fun for her to be excited to see me. Unfortunately, I had to give her the bad news that her engine was blown.
😞
Crappy news to hear, and all the crappier because it was her birthday.
But I gave her a crappy news/birthday discount, knocking quite a bit off the service call price.
Car number seven was another Honda CRV, this time of 2001. It was cranking, but not starting. I could hear the fuel pump kicking on, and it had injector pulse, but it had no spark.
Given that it was an old CRV with a distributor and not a coil on plug system, or even a coil and plug wire system, it was pretty much guaranteed to be either a cap and rotor or a distributor problem.
I pulled off the cap and rotor, and I found super corroded contact points on the cap and a corroded rotor. I scraped off the corrosion, put it back together, and tested it again.
It still wouldn’t start, but this time I could see really faint spark flashes from my tester. That confirmed to me that the issue was either cap and rotor or the entire distributor with the cap and rotor masking the issue because it was also having issues.
Those are the most likely possible causes, at least.
The customer decided he wanted to do the repairs himself, so I ended with just the service call and headed out to my 8th and final car.
My last car was a 1997 Toyota RAV4 that wouldn’t start. I had done a radiator replacement for the young couple probably a month or two prior, but this time it was a no start.
Gratefully, this customer did what my earlier customer didn’t. The first thing he did was show me a blown main fuse just off the battery. At some point in time, the fuse had blown, and because they didn’t have one, the previous owner, not the young couple, they broke apart the fuse housing, and used pliers to connect the two sides of the filament back together so that the car would run.
😅
Effective at getting the car to start, yes, but risky. Fuses are there for a reason. You want them to blow instead of frying a major component during overload.
Those kinds of fuses are bolted into the little fuse housing, so I removed the fuse for them, and the guy said he would take care of it himself. There wasn’t much more I could do to help with that car because unless I was willing, which I wasn’t, to reconnect the two sides of the blown fuse together, nothing more could be done without the fuse.
Since the customer wanted to do it himself, I just made sure that he knew what he was doing, and he did. He also had an older Toyota 4Runner that was having issues, so I helped him a bit with that one, charged just for my service call, and headed on my way.
Even with the discounts, I finished the day with almost 12 and 1/2 billable hours, so that was nice. So far, I’ve mostly managed to reach my goal of 10 billable hours per work day.
🥳
Overall, I think working less is helping. I do find that I’m still absolutely dreading the days that I do work. But we’re making progress, folks. Definitely making progress. And how lucky am I to be able to make a decent living working just too insane days a week!
I mean, I’ve worked more than that because I’ve had to overflow I’ve had to take care of the next day and what not, but I think my stress load has reduced significantly because I’m not dealing with the daily pressures and stresses all the time? It’s more of a two day a week pressure issue.
I’m not going to have months like I did in March where I absolutely killed it and made almost double my normal monthly income, but that’s fine. I’ll make less than my average, but maybe not a whole lot less?
We’ll see.
Anyway, that was freaky Friday. In the books. Done.
Hello weekend! 🥳
Because I actually have weekends now. 🙃
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 