I’m really grateful for people who face monumental fears and overcome them.
This morning, I woke up and learned that a friend of mine who’s been struggling to do something that she’s felt like she should do but that was excruciatingly difficult…did it.
I know that fear, though in different circumstances. I’ve never had to deal with what she had to face and has faced and will now continue to face.
I was talking to my mom about it, and my mom broke down in tears because she knows what my friend has been going through, and she was just so overwhelmed with, I don’t even know what you would say, respect and honor and gratitude and whatnot.
My friend’s example has already been a blessing for me just today, as I think about the things that I’m trying to overcome that I’m struggling with, and then I remember the choice that my friend made, an absolutely monumentally huge and terrifying choice, but she did what she felt was right.
That’s been inspiring me today as I try and choose what I feel like is right in important but much less consequential areas of my own life.
So to my dear friend out there, thank you for an amazing example to follow. It’s not the first time you’ve been an example of incredible courage to me.
On a different note, it’s been a really interesting this last week or so. Maybe it’s been longer. But somehow, some way, God has given me the gift of living in a place where I’m no longer concerned about the outcome of that really huge struggle that has been the most challenging thing that I’ve dealt with that has lasted 14 years now.
I’ve given the example in the past of life being like living in a room with no doors or windows, and you really get to know the room really well. And once you’ve gotten to know the room really well, then a window appears briefly and you get to look out the window and see that there’s more outside of your room. But that window disappears sometimes, and you’re only left with a memory of what you saw, and having seen the glimpse of the greater world beyond, if you want that world, you have to remember what you saw. And as you do your best to take advantage of everything you have available to you and your own room, eventually that window reappears and you can see out of it, and as you continue forward, eventually, the window turns into a door that you can walk through, and you walk through the door into that realm beyond the room where you were. And you find in that realm or in that new room, that you’re in a new place again with no doors or windows, and the cycle repeats itself again and again.
I feel like I’ve been given a window right now, where I can see what it’s like to live without anxiety in this particular area of my life, not worrying about what things are going to look like and what’s going to happen and when it’s going to happen, but to just relax and let it be.
I don’t know if what I’m experiencing right now is going to be a brief, disappearing window that then I no longer have and must remember, remember the sites that I saw, remember what that new experience tasted like, so to speak.
It might also be that I get to keep this feeling. That would be beautiful, because right now in areas where I had previously been concerned for myself and how whatever happened was going to affect me, right now I’m not. Right now my heart is looking outward, my heart is wondering how I can bless others, especially my friend and her family, if there’s anything that I can do to be a blessing.
Of course, I still wonder what’s going to happen, and I wonder exactly what all has happened and what it all means for me, but I’m not worried about it.
I’ve actually been really happy the last few days. I’ve had fantastic conversations with heavenly father. And at 6:15 in the morning with Josh groban’s Impossible Dream blasting through my headphones while I work on stuff down at the deck, singing that song that I love so much, with a huge smile on my face, just happy and enjoying life.
I’ve missed this.
I’ve really missed being happy.
I hope I can hold on to it. 🤞😊
So I’ve had my friend and her family on my mind today, and I’ve been grateful for what’s been going on in my own life recently, and today was a relatively productive day at work, so it’s been a pretty good day all around. 🙂
My first car was going to a 2016 Dodge charger that had a p0128 code. Normally, that’s a code that indicates that a thermostat is stuck open, not allowing the temperature in the engine to get up to the normal operating range.
And that’s what I expected to happen here, except that when I got to the car, I noticed the coolant was low, and Dodge lets you know right away that if the coolant is low, then you’re supposed to find and repair the leak, refill the system, and then see if the code goes away. So the coolant was definitely low, not dangerously low, but definitely low. So I spend a good long time searching high and low trying to find any evidence of a leak that I was positive was a leak, but I couldn’t find anything anywhere but I could say, yes, there is your leak. So I topped off the coolant, and I fired up the engine, and I let it run to see if it would get up to temperature properly or not.
Once it got to 163° or 165°, I can’t remember which, the fan inexplicably kicked on, cooling the engine back down 159° before starting to heat up again. After doing that once, it heated up exactly like it was supposed to and never put a foot wrong after that .
Crazy. I’ve never seen anything like that. I’ve seen fans that don’t kick on at all. I’ve seen fans that won’t shut off even after you turn the car off. But I’ve never seen a fan kick on at the wrong time. I did my best to come up with a logical reason how that could even be possible based on how cooling systems are designed, and I couldn’t come up with any reason that was legitimate except somehow just a straight up glitch in the system. The coolant temperature sensor is designed to send the signal to the computer as to what the temperature in the system is. And the coolant temperature sensor was clearly reading the temperature because I was using that temperature reading to watch what was going on. And it’s not supposed to signal the engine to turn the fan on until it gets to like 219° on that particular vehicle. Every car is different, so it’s not going to be 219° on all vehicles, but it is for this one. And so it kicked the fan on nearly 60° sooner than it should have.
But then it never did it again. And so it’s not going to be the thermostat, because the thermostat isn’t what kicks the fan on. The thermostat just constricts or opens up the flow of coolant through the system. So it could be the computer, I suppose, if somehow the computer glitched out and saw 163° as the signal to turn the fan on, but that would be super wacky and weird. And I suppose that maybe somehow the temperature sensor could have wacked out, but it’s not going to send the signal to turn the fan on if it only thinks it’s 160 3 or 165°, so that didn’t make any sense.
I couldn’t find any reason to explain it, and not being able to reproduce the problem again, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. The car was functioning perfectly after that one little hiccup, and that may well be the hiccup that’s causing the temperature to not get up to temperature sometimes. They mentioned that the fan they mentioned that the light comes on sometimes, but other times it’s turned off. So, you’ve got me.
Anyway, I didn’t want to guess and just replace parts because they were likely. If I had to guess, I would say the issue is with the coolant temperature sensor, But I don’t like guessing, and they agreed, so we’re leaving it as it is for now until we can recreate the issue if it even comes back. After all come I did have to top off the coolant, so potentially there are two different issues, the low coolant issue and the fan kicking on earlier than it should, but it’s all a big mystery. I did some searching around to try and find any possible reason, and I wasn’t able to find anything that I could rely on. I even reached out to a mechanic friend of mine who’s been a mechanic for 35 years, and he’s never running to that issue in his 35 years as a mechanic, and this is the first time I have, so… I guess we just see from here.
The second visit was two cars, a 2014 Ford escape and I think a 2014 Chrysler Town and country. Supposedly the Ford escape had a bad starter that he’d been smacking with a hammer to get it to work. And supposedly the Chrysler Town and country had a bad alternator. He had replaced the battery, but the charging light was still on. So I started with the starter job, and the battery was so drained down that I didn’t want to risk damaging the alternator, so I hooked up my jump box started the car just long enough to see if it would start, and it did, and then I shut it off and put my jump box on it to act as a host for his battery to parasitically suck the juice from.
While that was hooked up, I went over to start looking at the town and country. So we already had the one that was supposed to have a bad starter starting. And the Chrysler Town and country fired up okay, but the alternator was working just fine… at first. Eventually, the alternator started acting goofily, and I was able to test it and come to the conclusion that it was a 75% chance that it was a bad alternator. There are probably maybe 15 to 25% of the time issues with the fuse box or with the computer itself, but the factory service instructions tell you to replace the alternator after the testing that I did, because they say not to back probe the computer connections as he risk damaging the connections and causing more problems.
So… I looked up the alternator, and I could have gotten the super crappy brand alternator, but I had read other mechanics who would mentioned having significant issues with aftermarket alternators so I certainly didn’t want to use the lowest quality market alternators. The problem was that the alternators that were available were not in stock, so I explained all that to him, and then I went back over to the escape with the starter issue, and the battery was charged enough for me to feel comfortable letting his alternator do the rest of the charging, so I fired it up, and it fired up once again without any issues whatsoever, and I let it charge and started it probably five more times without any problems at all, so he decided he didn’t want to fix anything at the moment. So I’m going to get him a quote for replacing the alternator with a factory alternator and with the good aftermarket alternator, or the better quality aftermarket alternator.
Car number 3 was going to a 2007 Nissan Sentra that had the wheel pop sideways while she was driving down the road. I went out there and found that her lower ball joint had popped completely off when she went over a bump at 20 mph down a hill. The wheel had popped sideways and so forcefully that it popped the CV axle out of it socket.
She needed a new CV axle on a new lower control arm, so I ordered the parts, had them delivered, and started working on the car. I got the CV axle out without much difficulty but the lower control arm bolts were so tight that I couldn’t get them to budge. I fought and fought with him and fought some more and couldn’t get them to budge. Eventually, after some PB blaster, I was able to get One of them to budge a bit, so I thought I was home free.
But no… Not home free at all. After the bolt loosened up several turns, all of a sudden it got really tight again.
😬
I tried to break it free, but it was no use. The threads on the subframe were destroyed and the bolt threads too, I’m assuming. The bolt is stuck in the subframe and is going to have to be cut and then drilled out. I’m wondering if maybe what happened was that when the wheel got popped sideways that maybe it happened with such force that it’s slightly bent the bolts. That’s the only thing I can think of, as there’s no other reason for those bolts to strip out the innards like that. It wasn’t like it was a rusty car or anything like that, but who knows. So I had to throw up the white flag on that one, as she’s either going to need to have the old stuff cut and drilled out, or she’s going to need an entire new subframe. If it were me, I would probably go with a new subframe. That’s probably easier and I would trust that more than having threads that had to be drilled and retapped on something as important as a control arm.
I think she’s probably just going to scrap the car, in which case I told her to try Facebook marketplace first, is that’s where she likely get the most money for it, and then to price selling it to the local junkyards, and then I would talk to my brother here because he has Accenture of the same vintage, and he might want a parts car for it.
Car number 4 was a 2007 Ford F-150 that they wanted me to go down and take a tow hitch ball off the rear tow hitch support. The job was way out of my way, but I figured it would be easy to do because the guy didn’t have a huge impact wrench like I do. So I headed down there, but what he didn’t tell me was that the ball itself was spinning it wasn’t just that it was tight and he couldn’t get it off: it was that it was spinning and couldn’t be held on to.
My impact certainly would have been strong enough I think, but even with a large pipe wrench, there was no holding that ball in place.
I tried and tried, and I got out my torch and heated up the nut for a good little while, but it was just no use. So I got out my grinder to cut the ball off, but my battery was dead, and I think I’m down to one battery? I thought I still had two… Anyway, it actually turns out great that my battery was bad because when I realized what they were trying to install after I was supposed to have gotten the ball out, they had the wrong hitch, which means they would have been stuck there without anything to hook their trailer up to, and they’d have to try and figure that out.
So I gave up completely trying to get that ball off because that would have left them with no ability to tell their trailer at all, and all they were trying to do was put on a hitch that was closer to the ground in order to make the trailer more level. So instead of continuing on with that task that was an impossibility anyway given the current circumstances, without going out and getting more equipment, I found the actual trailer hitch that they would need for their truck to make it work to lower the ball and be able to do what they wanted.
I went to give them a discount because I hadn’t done what I came there to do, even though I had done everything I should have done, and instead of wanting the discount, he tried to give me $180. I didn’t feel right about that, so I took $140. Or maybe I took $120. I don’t remember I think I took $140. Which was a little tiny tip over my normal fee. I was thinking I would charge like $80 or something, but he was super cool, and he was super grateful that I showed him why the hitch he purchased wasn’t going to work, and super grateful that I found the Hitch he needed, so I guess it was a net positive for them, and they were happy about that.
Car number five was a 2008 Volvo S80 that had a coolant leak. He said the coolant just completely dumped out on the ground, and when he went to try and refill it, everything he put in poured out immediately. I got there and found that the upper radiator hose had broken in half at the plastic portion.
I wish they wouldn’t use plastics in the cooling system. The plastic degrades, and then it crumbles, and stuff breaks, and you have not just inconvenience and expense, but possible massive expense by blowing your engine.
Anyway, gratefully for him, doesn’t look like he did any major damage to the engine. He was also super lucky that the upper radiator hose was in stock. Volvos are not common, and I was actually a little surprised that the part was in stock. But it was nice that I could just drive over, grab it, swap it out, fill the system, and be done. The gentleman was grateful that I took the time to stay with the car until I was sure that it was properly filled and circulating completely with everything working like it should. He mentioned that one of the reasons why his previous car blew up was because the cooling system wasn’t properly filled.
The last car of the day was a 2013 Honda Civic that needed a starter. He didn’t want me to do any diagnostics, just replace the starter, and on a car like that, I’ve done starters so many times that I’m not going to try and persuade someone to not just change the starter. So I swapped the starter out for him, teaching him and showing him every step of the way how to do the job, as this was the second time His car has needed a starter since he bought it. But now he’s going to know exactly what to do. I also showed him how the people who did the starter job the previous time left multiple wiring harness portions disconnected from their brackets, and they didn’t put back in the bracket that connects the intake manifold to the block. 😶
Just a quick and sloppy job. Functional, yes, but not right.
I got done with that job around 8:15 to 8:30ish, I think, the guy was super grateful that I took time to walk him through everything, and he tried to give me a $20 tip which I just realized just now as I’m writing this that I didn’t put the tip on there when I swiped the card through. I was having so much trouble swapping the card through, that I completely forgot that he was going to give me a tip. I had ended up having to manually type in the card number.
Whoops. So, no tip for me. 🙃
Anyway, so that was the day. I got home somewhere Just before 9:00, and I haven’t really eaten anything at all since breakfast, except for a couple of pieces of bread and butter that my mom had sent me off with this morning, so I’m starving, and food is in the microwave, and I’m about to chow down and then fall into bed.
It’s been a good day.
I’m thinking about my friend and the huge decision she made. Thinking about her and her family, the challenges they have gone through and that they will continue to go through.
I haven’t yet talked to her about her huge leap of faith that she took last night. I hope she’s doing okay. I know how Satan can come in and just mangle you after you’ve taken the big leaps of faith. He’s so good at that. Reminds me of a talk from Elder Holland and what sometimes happens after beautiful experiences like what she faced and experienced last night.
Well, folks. Life is a trip… and I’m off to stuff my face, chat with Mr. Big Cheese, and crash.
Love and hugs. 🥰 💚
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 