Eight car work day today. Started super early, getting to my first job way down in Springdale just after 7:00 a.m.
First car was a 2016 Chevy Cruze, returning customer, with all sorts of lights popping up on the dash, as well as a badly shaking engine.
The code scan revealed misfire on cylinder 2, as well as some misfires on cylinder one, but basically a dead misfire on cylinder 2. Usually, on those Chevy cruzes, misfires are caused by a bad coil pack. The way they designed the coil pack on the cruise is… Not very intelligent, in my opinion. They built one whole assembly to do all four cylinders. Seems to me like it would be much more effective to have a single coil per cylinder like nearly every other modern car, but what do I know?
True to form, the misfire on this one was an issue with the coil, but surprisingly, it was more than just a cracked coil pack. When I pulled the assembly out of the cylinder head, it left parts of it in both cylinders one and two. 😶
Pretty nutty.
I had to get my needle nose pliers and pull the remains out of the spark plug wells piece by piece. It didn’t take very long, but it certainly was interesting. I then pulled out the spark plug from cylinder 2 because it was covered in corrosion. The electrode on the end that actually does the exploding was fine, just corrosion on the top where the coil meets the spark plug. So I took a little bit of sandpaper and sanded the corrosion off, put the spark plug back in, and installed the new coil pack.
Oh, I was grateful that even though the app said that they didn’t have the part I needed in stock, the store manager was like I know I just put one of those on the shelves yesterday, I’m positive we have one. We just haven’t added it to inventory yet. So he went back, pulled it off the shelf, and woohoo! If they happen to have had one, I would have had to have driven to Fayetteville to get the part in order to get them taken care of.
The second car on the docket was a 2013 Ford edge that had been sitting for about 9 months. She said it was having odd shifting issues, and so she parked it and it was just borrowing your sister’s bar for the last 9 months.
When I got there, I found the battery completely dead, and her key fob wasn’t working either. So she jogged over to the nearby Walmart, bought a new key fob battery, but still nothing. In the meantime, I was charging up the actual car battery, and I started trying to do a whole bunch of diagnostics because there was no communication with the modules on the car, at least not the regular engine computer and transmission computer and what not. I could access other modules with my scan tool, but none of the most important ones.
I spent a long time trying to figure out what was going on. I was squeezing that job in, or was supposed to be squeezing it in as a quickie between the first job and going to the upper control arm job that I needed to redo.
Unfortunately, it didn’t go quickly. At all. I ended up there for something like 2 hours on what was feeling like a black hole until I found a mechanic who had posted that a bad key fob battery made it so he couldn’t access all the important modules on the car.
I popped open the key fob again, and I flipped the battery around, and boom. Car started.
I put the key fob in battery in backwards.
😳🤦
I didn’t think it was supposed to be installed upside down, but that’s the way they designed it. 🙃
I drove around the parking lot to grind all the rest off the rotors, and they also found that the reason it was not running very well was most likely because whoever had worked on it previously had unplugged the mass airflow sensor. So I plugged that back in, and it seemed to run just fine. I don’t know if the battery will survive, but I charged it for probably 30 or 45 minutes, and then I gave her instruction to leave the car running for probably another 30 or 45 minutes and the hopes that it might resurrect the battery. Cross your fingers for her.
Card number three was going back to that upper control arm job that turned out to be a nightmare last week. Since I knew exactly what I needed to do to get it done, I figured I could knock it out and maybe an hour.
Nope.
It fought me just as much or more as the first time around. I ended up taking probably a little over 2 hours to do the job, and was pretty darn frustrated by the end of it.
I never wanted to see that vehicle again. 😅
I did decide that I was going to take full responsibility for the broken part, so I’ll just eat that $75 or whatever it is. I suppose it could have been bad out of the box, but the odds of that I think are probably fairly small given the damage that I saw. It seem to be clearly that it had been just way over torqued. Funny how you can over torque something with a torque wrench, but sometimes it just doesn’t work like it’s supposed to or like you think it would.
Because the first three jobs each took a lot longer than I expected, I ended up being way late for my fourth job. They had a time deadline, so I ended up making her late for work because she was waiting on me. Finally, I just had her go to her job, and I told her that I would take care of it at her work.
Interestingly enough, her work was actually closer to me than the house where I was originally going to do the repair.
And gratefully, the repair took probably all of 25 minutes or so. They didn’t want any diagnostics. They just wanted me to install new VVT solenoids, which is a pretty easy job on that one.
🥳
Four cars down, four to go. Well, there were actually 10 cars total, but I only was able to finish eight of them.
Car number four was a 2015 Chevrolet equinox, and that one was back up in Bentonville. One car in Springdale, one in Lowell, and two in Bentonville to that point.
Car number five was a 2011 Ford Taurus that was a no start that had died while driving, and then after that was completely dead and wouldn’t even power up the dashboard. Based on the description, it sounded like it could have been either of that battery, a bad alternator, or with some of those Fords like we saw last week, a bad starter that blows the main battery fuse.
So what did I do to be prepared for that one? I guess I didn’t mention it, but after diagnosing my first car of the day, I drove to the parts store to get the parts, and I also picked up all the rest of the parts that I was expecting to need for the day. For the Ford Taurus, I bought two alternators, because I didn’t know which one it might take. I bought a battery, and I bought a starter. I also ordered a battery fuse assembly, but they didn’t have one in stock, even though the inventory said they did.
Anyway, so I showed up supremely prepared to the Ford Taurus only to find out that the only issue was that both battery cables were loose. 😆
Which meant that I had over $600 worth of parts to return–just for that one car. 😆
Car number six was a 2008 Honda CRV that the gentlemen’s daughter was going to be driving to Arizona on Friday, and he wanted me to do a thorough inspection to make sure that she was good for her trip. So I drove up to Bella Vista where that car was, after going to the previous one, which was in centerton. Being that it was a Honda CRV, I didn’t expect to find much, and I didn’t. The AC system needs repair. Probably a blockage in the system because the AC pressures were lower than they should have been for a fully charged system on the low side, but higher than they should be on the high side. That symptom is generally caused by a clog in the condenser, or something like that. The AC worked somewhat, but didn’t work great as a result.
The other thing I found was that she needed rear brake pads, and ASAP. So I called Miguel’s shop, and they were able to squeeze in a rear brake pad job for them. The guy was super grateful that I went out of my way to help him find someone who could get him in so that his daughter could have the car ready to go for her trip.
Car number 7 was one that I added that day that I said I might not be able to get to, but turned out to be fairly close to where I already was. It was a 2007 Acura RDX that needed an alternator, and the quote that he has been given was like seven or $800 or something like that. I quoted him I think just over $400, So he had me swing by, and after picking up the alternator for that one, I installed it and was on my way to car number 8.
Fortunately, after the first three cars took way longer than expected, the next four cars went quite smoothly. After car number 7, I still had three more cars on my schedule, but by that time it was about 6:30, I think 6:30 or 7ish.
Car number 8 was a 2005 Ford focus then needed an alternator. It was the one that I had done the diagnostic on the other day that they couldn’t afford to do the repair on, but when they called around, they got higher prices from other people, and they decided to just have me go ahead and do it because they knew that I was going to be taking a month off for injury.
I thought with that one for a good little while. It didn’t go badly, but I wish I would have thought about it a little more and looked at it a little more before I did the job. I ended up taking apart a bunch of stuff that I don’t think I needed to take apart. It looked like I would need to, but then when I realized that the best way to take it out was from the bottom, I realized that I don’t think I needed to take the heat shield and all the upper stuff off that I did.
Liz and learn. I haven’t done that job in multiple years, but if I have it again, cross your fingers and hope that I’ll remember that the easiest way to do it is to remove the bolt from the torque strut on the underside of the engine with the car jacked up, move the breather tube out of its slot in the steering rack, and just push the engine forward. Then you can drop the alternator through the gap between the engine and the steering rack. Super cool way to do it. Will take a lot less time next time, assuming I ever do one of those jobs again. 🙃
I finished that job a bit after 9:00, so it was too late to take the leftover parts and the core back to AutoZone, which I was hoping I could do, but whatever. It was also too late to do either of the other two jobs. Well, I could have done one of them, but she said it would be better for her if I came the next day.
Sooo… Once again my last day wasn’t really my last day. 🙃
But notwithstanding I didn’t get to have this be my last day, because I was overbooked again, it was still nice to be done for the day. I was pretty worn out.
I chatted with one of my sisters on the way home. She was excited about it being the super blue moon. I guess the brightest moon that will have for the next 14 years. Fun stuff. 😊
And that… was my 28th. 😊
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 