Six 🚗, plus my own 😬, in this edition of Manic Monday!
Ready?
Begin!
The first car on the list today was a 2007 Honda Odyssey in Pea Ridge that needed an alternator.
I had the alternator ready, and I’ve done that job so many times that it’s almost second nature at this point. The different generations of odysseys are slightly different, so I don’t always remember exactly which one I’m going to, but they are all basically the same, in general, with just slight variations in the removal installation process.
Card number two is a 2007 Ford Escape that had power steering issues. The customer wasn’t home, but he left the key for me. It took a little while to figure out exactly what all was going on, but I figured it out that the power steering leak was actually leaking from the power steering pressure sensor, which was something I’ve never seen before. I’ve seen oil leak from oil pressure sensors plenty of times, but I’ve never seen it leak from a power steering pressure sensor. It’s all the same, really, just haven’t run into it before.
Anyway, the parts I needed were in two different cities, so It wasn’t realistic to try and get the repair done as well as the diagnostic, so I ended up just doing the diagnostic.
Car number 3 was a 2013 Honda Accord that had a serpentine belt that was starting to shred off. Gratefully, the issue was only the belt, so that went quickly and easily.
Car number 4 was a 2004 GMC Sierra truck. It was a diesel, but the poor guy had accidentally put gas in it. He owned both gas and diesel trucks, and just slipped a cog for a moment and accidentally put gasoline in his diesel. Fortunately for him, I was able to squeeze him into the schedule. It took about 3 hours, but I was able to drop his tank, clean all the fuel out of the tank, get everything back together and get him on his way.
He was lucky that he realized what he had accidentally done before he started the truck. Otherwise, he could have done major engine damage.
That job helped with my billable hours for the day, is by the time I’d finish that one I was already over 7 billables. I wasn’t quite sure If I would reach My goal of 10, but there was a decent chance.
As I was on my way to that Sierra job, I heard a weird noise in my engine, like my belt was shredding and slapping around. I forgot about it once I got to that job, so as I was leaving, instead of looking to see what was going on with my own work van, I just started driving toward the next job.
But as I drove out of the parking lot, I realized that my alternator wasn’t charging anymore. 😬
I started heading toward the nearest AutoZone which was about 11 minutes away, but as I was driving, I looked up to see whether or not they had a belt in stock for my van, but they didn’t.
Gratefully, the only AutoZone in all of Northwest Arkansas that had the belt that I needed was only about 14 or 15 minutes away. So I headed back the other direction, and miraculously, even though my van’s battery has been on its last legs for a good long time, it had enough juice to get me all the way to the AutoZone.
🥳
Once at the AutoZone, I realized that it wasn’t just that I needed a belt, my tensioner pulley had burned through its bearing, and the pulley itself was now missing, and the belt had been rubbing against the leftovers for the last 15 minutes, ruining the belt in addition to needing a belt tensioner.
As luck would have it, the AutoZone that I was able to get to was the hub for the area, so they were also the only ones who had a belt tensioner in stock, I believe.
🥳
So I bought a belt and belt tensioner, slapped them on my van, and headed to job number five, grateful to not only have made it to the autozone without breaking down, grateful to have had both parts I needed at that store, and grateful that the repair was quick and easy.
🥳🥳🥳
Job number five actually turned out to be two cars. The first was a 2011 Chevy Cruze that had the battery completely drained down on it. They had basically a brand new battery, and they had just replaced the alternator, but it still had drained down to almost nothing.
So the first thing that I did was a parasitic draw test, but there was no draw to be concerned about.
Brand new battery. Brand new alternator. No parasitic draw. So why on earth with the battery be drained way down?
🤔
Hmmm…
I use my jump box to jump the car with a disconnected from the battery so I didn’t tax the alternator too much, and I found that the alternator wasn’t charging the battery at all.
So I reached around back on the alternator where the main hot wire connects to the alternator, and guess what?
It wasn’t attached. 🙃
They had installed the alternator, but they had forgotten put the charge cable back on the alternator after they installed it.
No charge cable = no charge = drained battery = dead car.
Boom.
The lady had another car there that she had recently purchased that she said was making a bad noise and now wouldn’t start. When I check the oil, it looked a little… off. Given her description, and given that when I tried to start the vehicle, it just clicked once, I had suspicions that the engine was seized.
Without her description, I would have leaned toward it being an issue with either the starter or less likely a frozen pulley, but given her description, and given the oil that looked a little suspect, my first priority was to just jump right to testing to see if the engine was seized.
So I grabbed some tools, connected my half inch ratchet to a long extension that had a 22 mm socket on the end, and I tried to manually turn the engine. Tip for anybody ever doing this, always make sure you know which direction the engine naturally turns when it’s running. Most are clockwise, but a few here and there are counterclockwise, and you do not want to turn the engine the opposite direction to What is normal. To find out the rotation of the engine, I usually go on AutoZone’s app, look up an alternator, and look up the rotational direction listed, as usually the data for the alternator will show its rotational direction. Anyway, just a little tip if you ever need to manually crank an engine over and don’t want to risk causing damage to the engine.
It was seized. 😞
Poor lady. They don’t have much money, and their cars keep breaking, and she just bought another one that is junk now. 😞
I’ve been out to fix their cars multiple times over the last 6 months.
Anyway, I looked at both cars, and I only charged her for one service call even though I was there for more than an hour.
Poor lady.
Call number six, car number 7 I guess, was a 2003 Suzuki Grand Vitara. That was back with a customer that I’ve helped several times over the last year, and he was worried that the alternator might have gone bad. He had a charging light on, and he replaced the battery, but he was worried that it was actually the alternator that was the issue. He was also concerned because the light that lights up the PRNDL automatic shifter assembly to show you what gear you’re in wasn’t lit up.
So I diagnosed that it did indeed have a bad alternator, and I tore apart his center console and found the little teeny tiny light bulb that illuminates the shift console was burned out.
So after getting approval to do the repair, I went and picked up the alternator, but there was no bulb available. It’s this little teeny tiny thing that’s probably a specialty bulb you can only get online. Don’t think there any Suzuki dealers anywhere near here, and it’s a 21-year-old vehicle, so… I think online is going to be the best bet.
Anyway, I got the alternator put in, and I gave the customer instructions for how to replace the bulb once they were able to find one, and I called it a night.
I was toying with the idea of going and fixing the Ford Escape that needed the power steering repaired, but it was a 3-hour job according to the book, and it was already past 9:00, which meant that I couldn’t get one of the parts that I needed cuz it was way up in Pea Ridge, and that store closed at 9:00, so I was effectively done for the night.
That was probably a good thing because I had scheduled an EGD appointment for the next day to see if they could figure out what on earth is wrong with my stomach/ esophagus/ whatever the heck is hurting and causing me to regurgitate food and have acid pour into my esophagus and all that other crap.
Oh! I broke my vegan protocol and went to Taco Bell because the last few days I haven’t had the spilling out issue with my stomach issues, the issue where I bend over and what’s in my stomach pours into my esophagus. And I was terrified that, though it’s nice to not have that issue for a few days, I was afraid that nothing would show up on the test results, so I went to Taco Bell in an effort to not only fill my stomach with some food that I needed because I hadn’t eaten it all that day and had to eat before midnight because I wasn’t allowed to eat after midnight, but also to try and eat something that would give me issues so as to hopefully have a better chance at having the tests find something.
Anyway, I ate that Taco Bell after picking up the alternator for the Suzuki and before fixing it.
When I got home, I ate the last of my two popsicles, even though I have a rule I’m only allowed to have one popsicle a day, and none after 6:00 p.m. But I wanted to try and aggravate whatever these issues are as much as I could in the hopes of making it easier that they find what’s going on.
So I ate my popsicles, I tried to hydrate myself as well as I could because I wasn’t allowed to have anything to eat or drink after a certain point in order to have a successful test.
And then I was off to bed, crossing my fingers, hoping that I could cause my stomach to have issues again like usual so that the $3,000 test wouldn’t be wasted.
And that was… Manic Monday. 🙃
All told, after the day was over, and even losing time because I had to fix my own work van, I still was able to put in over 11 billable hours.
🥳
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 