It was only a six car work day, but it netted 12.3 billible hours, so that was good. Reached the goal for the day, and almost enough to make up for what I was short the Friday before.
The first car was a 2001 Chevrolet 3500 passenger minibus kind of thing. It was a diesel engine, and I told the guy that I wasn’t any good with diesel, but since it was no crank no start, it wasn’t likely to be related to the fuel system, but I still couldn’t guarantee anything.
He decided to have me come out anyway, so I went out.
I regretted it.
Immediately upon arriving.
And even more so after getting started.
😅
Gratefully, it turned out well in the end. 🥳
When I first got there, I realized that it was a storage unit complex, and that he was parked on the dirt and grass. Wet grass from the morning dew, combined with dirt, combined with the inability to jack the vehicle up safely, which meant that my stomach was scraping against the oily bottom of the vehicle, meant that I was nice and dirty after just my first job of the day.
I also realized that the van was built more like a motorhome than it was a regular van. So the wiring was all sorts of funky, not to mention it had been Jimmy wired over time.
Lovely.
So it was a no crank no start, but I managed to jump it at the starter itself with a screwdriver, so I knew the starter was good. So then I went to the fuse box and found that it wouldn’t start jumping the terminals inside the fuse box, so I could rule out the ignition system as being the problem.
As I was jumping the terminals inside the fuse box, I heard a clicking from somewhere, and I found a relay that had been wired in. Someone had cut the wiring harness and wired in a relay. Apparently, and this is just my best guess because I don’t know, the starter relay portion of the fuse box must have gone bad, so they wired in a separate relay to act as the starter relay instead of having to replace the fuse box.
That’s at least my guess.
Anyway, I checked all the voltages at the relay, and there wasn’t really anything to speak of. So I unscrewed the relay from where it was mounted, and all of a sudden the engine started just fine.
😶
So I screwed the relay back down, and then it wouldn’t start.
So I removed the relay again, and I tested a wire that had been screwed into same place at the relay was screwed into. It was wired up as a ground, but when I tested it while he was cranking the engine, it had power. 😬
So instead of acting like the ground it was wired in to be, it was shorting out against the frame of the vehicle.
So I screwed the relay back into its mounted position, but leaving that ground wire detached, and it fired up just fine.
🥳
I told him we could try and figure out what on earth was wrong with that wire, where it went, and what was causing it to short out, but that it might take a while. He opted to just cap off the wire so that it wouldn’t short out against anything else, and to just leave it as it was.
So that was it. Job number one. I was lucky to have figured it out so quickly because it could have been a black whole nightmare, being more like a motorhome than a car, and having Jimmy rigged wiring to deal with.
Car number two was a 2016 Chevy traverse that Firestone told them had a seized up tie rod, and that was causing it to pull badly to the right. At least that’s what they understood.
The reality was that the reason it was pulling to the right was because the right front tire was insanely bad. I think the metal bands on the inside of the tire had split in one place, causing the tire to bulge out. This made the tire out of round and caused it both to wobble while going down the road as well as pull to the right.
So I let her know she needed new tires, and that was it. The seized tie rod didn’t seem to really even be relevant if it even was seized because the tire seem to be wearing properly other than the one tire that was totally screwed up, but that wasn’t an alignment issue.
Vehicle number three was a 1997 Toyota T100. I had put a radiator in for the gentleman the previous time that I had helped him with his vehicle, and this time he wanted me to put his front end together. It had been in an accident, so the front end was bent a good bit, so it was quite the challenge, at times, to get everything to fit together. Additionally, the parts that came had the incorrect clips, making it impossible to install the large grill assembly properly.
Fortunately, the customer was the kind of person who was just like, ” I don’t care if this looks perfect. I just needed to look okay. I don’t care if you have to hold it together with zip ties. I’m happy with it as long as it looks even close to halfway decent.”
So I did everything the best I could, and in the end, despite zip ties holding the front grill on, it actually looked pretty darn good. 🤩
🥳
And the customer was happy, and he gave me another big tip like he did last time, and so… great! 😁 It’s not what I generally like to do, but if he’s happy, I’m happy that he’s happy, and that’s good enough. 🙃
Car number four was a 2005 Ford focus that was having trouble starting. I went and did the diagnosis, and I found that it had a bad alternator. They didn’t have the money to do the repair right there, so they just paid me for the service call, and I recommended some potential repair places for them.
I don’t remember if I mentioned it already, but I decided, after my thumb and arm has only gotten worse and not better, that This is going to be my last work day for probably at least a month, so I did the diagnosis, but I wouldn’t be doing the repair. I had offered to do the repair, but since they didn’t have the funds, it wasn’t a possibility.
Card number five was a 2008 Pontiac G6 GT. By the looks of things, when the guy went to get tires, the people the tire shop jacked up his car the other radiator, crunching the radiator, the AC condenser, and the fan.
Yikes. 😬
The shop didn’t admit to it, and he didn’t want to deal with the confrontation, so he decided just to pay me to fix it. At first, we didn’t realize that the fan was broken, so I only quoted the radiator, because that’s all he requested when we spoke on the phone. Unfortunately, though, once I got to the car, I realized that he had that smashed up fan as well.
Replacing the fan was going to be another $220+ dollars on top of a bill that was going to beer nearly $800. The gentleman was in a halfway house, so I figured he probably didn’t have a lot of money, and he said that he couldn’t afford to change the radiator fan as well.
I didn’t like the idea of replacing the radiator but not the radiator fan. In order to do the fan, he’d have to do nearly the entire job all over again, which would cost him quite a bit again.
As I was disassembling the car, I realized that I was going to be able to finish the job much quicker than what the book called for, so I drove to the parts store, bought the fan, and installed it for him at no additional charge from my initial quote–reducing my labor charge to cover the difference for him.
I didn’t tell him that I had done that until I had the car basically back together, and he was really grateful, having realized that he was likely staring down the barrel of another very expensive fix to have to go back later and change that fan out. But it was nice to be able to get him all fixed up with both a new radiator and a new fan, and all for the same price that I had originally quoted for just the radiator. 😊
And he gave me a tip. 😊
Car number six, the last one of the day, was a 2014 Infiniti QX80 that they said had a flashing check engine light. I got there, and it had several check engine codes, including misfires on cylinders 2 and 4, and a code for multiple random misfires. Leave it to a Nissan product to have two different sizes of coils in the same motor. Can’t say I’ve ever run into that before but I can recall.
Gratefully, I had called the parts supplier the night previous and ordered one of each type of coil from the Tulsa mega hub, as none of the local stores carried the coils in stock. I moved the coil from cylinder 4 to cylinder eight and the coil from cylinder to cylinder one (the coils on cylinders one and two were the ones that were different from the rest of them).
After swapping the coils, the misfires changed from cylinders two and four to cylinder 7 and 8, with cylinder eight being a dead misfire. The cylinder 7 misfire was sort of a head scratcher, but I wondered if maybe the misfire on cylinder 8 was causing an issue with the rest of the system. I’ve seen that before, so I only swapped out the coil and cylinder eight, knowing that that was for sure an issue. After swapping it out, no more misfires showed up on the skin tool, and the engine sounded great, so I called it a night.
The customer was super happy and super grateful, even though it was late, after dark, before I even showed up, and of course, even later by the time I got done. But he was really happy, and later thanked me and sent me a message something to the effect of ” You’ve earned my business.”
I love being able to provide a service in a way that makes people want to have me be their automotive service provider of the future.
You might have noticed… After car number 6, I didn’t get back to the job with the upper control arm fiasco. 😬
It ended up being too late at night, and I didn’t hear back from the lady who needed the warranty replacement on the alternator either, which meant that even though Monday was supposed to be my last work day, I had leftover jobs that got bumped to Wednesday. So Wednesday… That’s the new day to be the last day before my month off.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 