Rough day on the car front. 😅
First car was simple enough, a newer Tahoe or Suburban or whatever it was with an issue with the cooling system. The gentleman tried to fix it himself and accidentally broke the connector for the engine engine coolant temperature sensor.
😬
I tried to teach him what to do to fix it, but his wife made him promise that he’d never work on the truck again.
Poor guy. Looks to me like he actually had done a really good job, and a plastic connector breaking is something that happens to all of us. It’s just the nature of working with brittle plastic.
The second car was going to a 2016 Chrysler Town and country. He had a misfire on cylinder 2, and he also said that there was some kind of weird sound in the engine.
I couldn’t reproduce the weird sound, and at first, I couldn’t reproduce the misfire. I saw a single misfire on cylinder one and a single misfire on cylinder 4, but then after my customer came out, and we try it again, I saw cylinder number two start to misfire constantly.
The way Chrysler designed their engine, cylinder number two is underneath the intake manifold, so it got to be a pretty expensive job. After all was said and done, to replace the six spark plugs, and then he opted replace all six coils as well, it was going to come out to be just under $800.
So I got to work, and I did the whole job, and it went relatively well, except for at the very end the intake manifolds cracked before the torque wrench should even reached the torque spec. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that the torque wrench was off, but it was still pretty crappy to have happen. But realistically, it didn’t cause any major issues to the vehicle itself.
But after getting everything back together, what would I find but that all the same misfires were there. 😶
That’s just about the worst thing that you can have happen when you’ve spent hours and hours working on a car, and the customers got a massive bill on their hands because of how much the parts cost and how much time it takes to do that kind of a job.
When I had taken it apart, the spark plug for cylinder 2 looks absolutely awful, so it seemed to make sense. It was worn down super badly, so I didn’t give it much thought.
But… After digging in and doing a little bit of research to see what else might be out there for misfires on these vehicles that aren’t solved with spark plugs and wires, I found that Chrysler had issues with the actual heads themselves on this particular motor for certain models.
😶
In fact, they had extended the warranty for some of them to 150,000. Unfortunately, my customer had more than 150,000 mi on his van, and his van had a different motor than the one from the factory anyway, having the motor replaced it like 80,000 mi, or something like that.
These kinds of jobs are crappy because I start to feel like crap because I got the diagnosis wrong, and the customer has this huge $800 bill and still has the same problem.
The customer was pretty discouraged, not blaming me at all, but pretty discouraged that he was going to have this huge bill and also a very likely significant end much more expensive repair bill if he even decided to fix the van.
I told him there was at least some good news: I wasn’t going to charge him anything at all.
That shocked him pretty significantly, given that it was supposed to be an $800 bill, and given that half of that was parts.
He didn’t feel right about not paying anything for all the work I did, and asked me if I’d be willing to take at least something, if I did at least be willing to let him pay for the parts, so I let him go ahead and pay me for the parts, but only my commercial price for them.
Part of me still feels bad because I feel like I should have figured it out first instead of just assuming that it was going to be solved with plugs and coils, and also because of the cracked little part of the intake manifold where the bolt goes on.
I still feel unsettled about it, thinking maybe I’ll just refund him what he paid, but I don’t know if that would be a slap in the face after he sort of negotiated me down from $0 up to paying for parts– which ended up being some around 260 something, I think.
I don’t know. I much prefer to have a settled heart than to have money.
I taught him how to take it from where we were at that point, doing some tests himself to save some money to see what might be going on, and he also told me that he wanted me to get in touch with him about my non-profit stuff because he wanted to be involved in that kind of thing, so that was a good connection.
Car number 3 was a 2002 Mercedes E320 that had died while driving. He thought it might be the alternator, and the battery certainly was drained down, but when I charge the battery up a little bit and then started the car, the alternator was working fine.
At first…
But then it choked out and stopped charging it all, so I managed to get the alternator out in a light rain, and then I scheduled to come back on Monday to replace it, the alternator that we needed being in a different city.
Car number 4 was going to an older Dodge Dakota that had a super bad coolant leak. I got there and was able to diagnose it as having a bad water pump, but it was starting to get late, and I didn’t want to get going on a job that could be a big pain in the (The gaskets on those old Dodge trucks can be an absolute nightmare to scrape off). I was going to do part of the job, at least enough to know how big of a job it was going to be so I knew what to be prepared for, but he didn’t want me to leave it in pieces for the weekend because he thought he might need to run to the grocery store or something. I told him it wasn’t a good idea to drive it, but the grocery store was only like a half a mile away, so I guess as long as he keeps it full of coolant and as long as the bearing doesn’t blow out so badly that it ruins everything, he’ll be okay.
😅
Car number five was finally getting that fan put in that 2009 Mercury Grand Marquis. My customer is out of the country, but he went ahead and paid me a couple days ago, I needed to make sure that I got back out there to get it actually repaired.
Though it was a relatively simple job, there was one particular engineering design that proved to be a thorn in my side, with me losing my temper… and control of my vocabulary. 😅
I think that’s the first time in months that I’ve done that, and I was a bit disappointed in myself for losing control and going there.
At least my customer was out of the country and couldn’t see my little tantrum. 😆
The last car was going to a hotel in Fayetteville for the woman who had driven in from Texas to run a half marathon. She had been telling her friends how grateful she was that I was coming to rescue her, which was nice to hear, and I found that the coil pack on her car was super corroded, and two of the plug wires were also corroded. The plug wires were available in a different city, but I did have the coil pack, so I swapped that out, and scrape the corrosion off the other plug wires, and it seemed to run really well. I taught her how to change her own plug wires, which is super easy on her car, so she should be good to go. She might not even need to because I scraped off all the corrosion back down to bare metal, but she’s going to go ahead and replace them anyway to be safe, I think.
And that was the day.
I got home sometime around 8:30, I think, and bed was… after 11. 😅
Did I mention I’m starting to feel like maybe my time in Arkansas is coming to a close?
And my time is a mechanic, even the transitional portion of it, I think is… almost over.
Well, that was my Saturday.
Love and hugs.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 