After having a wonderful nearly 3-hour conversation with my brother last night, mostly about gospel stuff, I was able to get to bed relatively on time (I think?) in preparation for today’s long work day.
And long it was.
I got up and did my normal routine for the morning, and then it was on to the day–6 cars, 1 in Lowell and 5 in Fayetteville.
I left the house somewhere around 8:00 or 8:15, I think, but then I spent a good little while at the AutoZone in Pea Ridge ordering and picking up parts. While I was there, I received a call from a truck driver who was at the truck stop in Lowell just off the freeway. He was there with a woman who needed an alternator, or at least that was his best diagnosis without tools.
My first appointment of the day hadn’t responded to me, so I went ahead and went to the truck stop to help out the lady.
When I got there, I found a pretty badly mangled Toyota Camry, with accident damage both in the front and the rear, if I’m remembering correctly. The battery was indeed drained down, and when I started the car with my jump box, which took me having to press down the gas pedal because it wanted to die right away, it made an absolutely awful racket from the alternator.
I also found metal shavings around the alternator, so I set about removing and replacing the alternator. Since I had been at the parts store when I received the call, I went ahead and purchased an alternator in a battery just to be safe.
So I replaced the alternator, and started the car, and the alternator was indeed charging as it should have. I was grateful that I had remembered to hook my battery cables up to her battery while I was doing the job, so the car was able to start with a battery that had been at least partially charged back up, so it wouldn’t be an extra strain on the new alternator.
When I started the car again, it again had trouble getting started, troubles with the idle being too low for whatever reason, but the awful noise was gone, and the alternator was charging properly.
But the lady wasn’t happy.
She was mad because the car was still dying on her because of the idle issue.
Two issues, and since having plugged her into the schedule, my first job of the day called and said she still wanted help, so I needed to go because I was now going to be behind on the day. So I taught her how to drive her car with a low idle issue until it could be fixed at a later date, but she was still mad. I think she thought that I didn’t fix anything because she still had the issue with her car dying, or maybe that she still had the same issue or something.
I tried to explain to her probably half a dozen to a dozen times, but she just wouldn’t have it. She was like, I called you out to fix my car, and It’s still dying.
Well, I’ve been called out to replace an alternator, and she did indeed need an alternator.
Anyway, she asked me to follow her to Fayetteville to make sure she was okay after I taught her how to drive her car without it dying on her, and I went ahead and did that since my next jobs were down that way anyway.
Not the greatest start to the day, but it was what it was.
The second car was a 2007 Hyundai Santa Fe that the lady had tried to do her own brakes on, replacing the rotor and some wheel studs, but She hadn’t been able to break the bolts free on her own, so she called me out there to take care of it.
So I got there and started pulling everything apart. It seemed relatively straightforward, but in order to replace the wheel studs, I needed to unbolt the hub from the knuckle, or so I thought. 😅
So I started loosening the hub bolts, only to realize that for the first time in my experience as a mechanic, I realized that the backing plate that made it impossible to remove the wheel studs without taking the hub out was actually bolted on. I could just unbolt it, and take the wheel studs out.
😶
That made the job a lot easier, but I had already dug myself a bit of a problem. Hyundai had made it so the tolerances were so tight that I couldn’t get a regular socket on the bolts without taking the CV axle out, nor could I get a hex crow’s foot wrench on them either.
Ugh.
So either I disconnect suspension parts and make it so that she needs an alignment and a new axle nut, or I just tighten the bolts to what feels about right.
I opted for the latter. Generally I want everything to be torqued down exactly to spec, but that’s not for sure necessary, it’s just a safety set.
Anyway, since I had done a bunch of extra steps that didn’t need to be done, I didn’t charge her for the extra time that I had wasted because of my own ignorance about how that particular setup was built.
Car number 3 was a 2015 Audi Q5 that needed a battery, but when I opened up his battery compartment, the whole thing was completely full of water. The battery was basically submerged.
😬
So I drained the water out of the battery tray, gave the vehicle jump start, and had him follow me over to the AutoZone, as I didn’t want to change the battery out without leaving it attached to power to keep the memory alive in the vehicle.
So I swapped out the battery, and after I was putting everything back together, I couldn’t seem to find the screw cap that held the spare tire in. It was just… Missing. That didn’t make sense because I hadn’t gone anywhere. I taken all the parts out of the car and set them right down next to the car and then as I was putting them all back in I was picking them up one at a time, but the screw cap… Wasn’t there. 🤷
Gratefully, they were cool about it, and they had been there with me while I was doing the job, and we were all stumped. The only thing I can think of is it somehow rolled away, but we even walked around looking for it if it had somehow gotten tipped up on its side and managed to roll away.
Weird.
Car number 4 was a 2009 Toyota Corolla that she said was making bad noises with her brakes and had a code for a coil pack issue. Well, I couldn’t reproduce any of her issues. The car ran beautifully the entire time I was there, and there was nothing wrong with the pads of rotors on all four wheels. Tons of pad left, everything was good.
She had me go ahead and change the coil pack just in case, so that if the coil was an issue, which it is common that it is, then she wouldn’t have to call me back out (though I did offer to show her how to replace the coil herself since it’s easy to do).
Car number five was a 2004 Chevy suburban that was making an absolutely awful rear end noise. Without being able to put the vehicle on a rack, it was quite challenging to figure out what was going on with it at first, I couldn’t feel any movement in the drive shaft, and the noise was such that it was hard to tell whether it was coming from the rear differential or the transfer case.
I would crawl along the ground with the suburban going forward and then going back and then going forward and then going back. Finally I was able to determine that the sound was coming from the rear differential. As bad as the sound was, it seemed to me that it was most likely that the rear differential was completely blown out. But I wanted to be absolutely sure, because I don’t want to give a catastrophic diagnosis without being a certain as I can be, and for him, the next stop was selling the car to the junkyard. In fact, they had a scheduled pick up for the car just a couple days from then.
So I pulled off the pumpkin cover in the back (the plate that covers the rear differential gears), and the diff fluid that came out was chock completely full of lots and lots of metal shavings.
That in and of itself does not necessarily mean that the rear end needs to be completely rebuilt. There’s a lot of wear and tear that happens inside those huge gears, and there weren’t any big chunks of metal, so that got me wondering a little more what might be going on.
So I jacked up the rear end of the suburban and started messing around with the wheels and the drive shaft and whatnot, and I noticed that the rear pinion bearing was completely blown out. I could see the damaged portion of the bearing seal through the space between the pinion and the rear differential, and after consulting with Miguel to make sure I was on track, I was able to let the gentleman know that, though I wasn’t positive because there would be no way to know until I got it apart, that there was a possibility that the issue could be fixed for somewhere around $500.
I also told him how he could save money by cleaning out the whole pumpkin himself, which would reduce the amount of time it would take to do the job properly and the reduces his cost. The challenge for him, though, is that he has super super bad rheumatoid arthritis, and even a little work can Take him out.
But I was happy that I stayed longer to get the accurate diagnosis, as I was able to figure out that his vehicle had the possibility of being salvaged without having to just be sold to the junkyard.
Car number 6 was a 2014 Jeep Patriot that They had asked me to come out and just install an alternator on. He was starting to get cold by that time, as it was getting dark, but gratefully, it wasn’t too bad.
The job itself wasn’t too bad either, so that was nice. But at the end of it, I had something happen that I’m still a little concerned about. When I started the vehicle after getting it all back together except for some of the splash guards and whatnot, I left it running to charge the battery a bit better, and I periodically went over to check the coolant temperature to make sure that it wasn’t overheating or anything while I was working on other things. I could tell that the engine was struggling, not running smoothly at all, but what I didn’t see was that the check engine light was flashing. It makes me wonder if it actually was the whole time? I looked in the window at least a few times to check the temperature, but I never went all the way into the driver’s seat.
Where I was standing and looking in the window, I should have noticed a flashing check engine light, but at the same time, the way they built the instrument cluster, instead of having everything visible all at once, it had little horse blinders on each little section, so instead of clearly seeing the check engine light, it was visible but not conspicuous, if that makes sense.
So did I run the car for a long time with a flashing check engine light? That’s not good for the car. What that means is unburned fuel is going to be filling up the chamber, and that can be pushed out into the exhaust system and burn in the catalytic converter and possibly ruin the catalytic converter, or it can seep down between the piston rings and into the oil, reducing the ability of the oil to properly lubricate the engine. 😬
Not so great.
I don’t know how long I had it running like that. It was probably somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes, and I don’t know if the check engine light was on the whole time, and I just didn’t notice it, or that it was only on a bit there at the end and that’s why I noticed it.
🤷
But I’ve been concerned about it ever since. Worried that maybe I caused some damage to the vehicle.
I chatted with the gentleman about the misfire issue, and he said yeah, that it was supposed to have been fixed by his girlfriend’s uncle, or somebody like that, but that it was still having issues. So I guess it’s been that way for at least a little while? Maybe she’s been driving it like that, I don’t know.
Who knows… But I really struggle with car experiences like this one and like that Dodge Dart from a few months back. What do you do in those situations? I’m going to go back tomorrow and look at the car again, on my own dime, this time. I’m going to check for the smell of gasoline in the oil because I didn’t check while I was there. If the oil smells like gasoline, then there’s a pretty good chance that there is damage to the engine, though that still doesn’t mean that I caused it, given that the issue has been there for a while, it sounds like.
Anyway, The way my brain works, I just worry about it, and the easiest way to solve it is to take complete responsibility for everything, but if you do that, then you’re taking responsibility for things that aren’t your fault and aren’t your problem and that you actually are not responsible for, only to soothe your fears.
I don’t know. So tough.
While I was working on that car, the girl from earlier with the 2009 Corolla called and said that the issues were even worse as she was driving home from work, So after finishing up at the Patriot alternator job, I went over to her house in West Fayetteville, and I went over her car again, this time with her driving around to show me what the issue was, but once again, there wasn’t any issue. 🙃
I didn’t charge her for my second visit, and headed home, getting home I think somewhere around 8:15 or 8:30 or something like that? Basically, I got home just in time to go to bed, but then I remembered that it was Cyber Monday, and there were things that I wanted to buy, or at least look for. So I looked for things, but I couldn’t remember what all I needed, and I couldn’t find anything worth buying that I could remember I needed, so I just ended up wasting time looking, which got me to bed later than I wanted to, but I guess at least I tried. 🙃 Mainly, I was looking for clothes because I don’t really have many nice clothes.
On a different note, guess what! Since I allowed Facebook to show me ads based on my search history and not just the default crap they send to everyone, I have had zero, count them zero, issues with ads that feature super revealing lingerie and scantily clad women. 🥳🥳🥳
Wahoo!
Love to all. 😊
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 