Another rough one today…
My morning routines have been a struggle because I haven’t been getting up.
As extreme as it might sound, it really is true for me, but if I make a single exception to my routine, I’m about 100 times more likely to lose the routine.
I made an exception, and now my routine is hit and miss. 😕
And cars have been an absolute nightmare for me lately. I spent the morning, most of it, working on getting Thomas’s car fixed. That was a bit of a bear. I don’t even remember what all caused me issues, just that it was miserable. 😕
It was cold. It was damp. There is dead grass everywhere, sticking to my clothes, which is going to be a nightmare to get out because, foolishly, I was wearing my hoodie that has that fuzzy inside part, and the grass just sticks to it and won’t come out of it without massive effort.
So I took that off, and worked in just my shirt in the freezing cold.
Oh yeah, I remember, after finally getting everything back together, the new thermostat housing on, the new transmission cooler line on, thermostat housing dealing with designs that I personally think are terrible that make everything much more complicated than it needs to be, and fighting with the cooler line in tight spaces with really cold hands.
Gratefully, I was able to replace just the one cooler line that I was concerned about and didn’t have to disassemble the rest of the front end like I thought I might have to.
I figured out how to disassemble the cooler line assemblies from each other in the bracket that holds them together, so I was able to do that on the old one from the junkyard, so I knew what to do, and then I went and did it on the one was on the car still.
So that was at least one bright spot.
But then when I went to get the truck going, it started overheating, and I ended up spraying coolant all over the engine bay because there was so much pressure in the cap because there was an air pocket in the system. So the truck started overheating, getting about 2/3 of the way up, though I’m not 100% sure how hot it might have gotten in the very beginning because it was just reading constantly cold.
Eventually, it took more coolant and then more, and then more. Not sure what about the design of that engine causes it to be so easy to get an air pocket in the system, but good gravy, it was crappy. Concerns about doing damage to the engine. Concerns about whether or not there are still air pockets in the system, taking forever and ever, coolant everywhere. Just… It’s been rough.
And I don’t know what the deal is, but since coming back from… Maybe it was New Zealand? Yeah I think since coming back from New Zealand, I feel like I’ve lost a huge step in my ability as a mechanic. I feel like I’m making mistakes all the time. Lapses and judgment all the time. It’s pretty brutal.
I guess it’s a good time to be getting out of the business, but then I worry about issues that I might have caused that other people are going to have to deal with. I used to think of myself as a pretty good mechanic, but now I just… I question a lot. And I worry a lot more now than I used to.
Gratefully, the second car was a lot easier than the first, it was just coming in after a lady who had done a spark plug job on her own car, but after she was done, the car ran worse than before. Turns out that the only thing that she did wrong was forgot to plug in an electrical connector to the throttle body.
So at least that was an easy one. I had a little bit of a scare when I was taking it for a test drive when she told me that I accidentally revved it up to 7000 RPMs… It’s such a quiet engine, and I was just taking it for a bit of a hard test drive to see if I could recreate or cause any of the issues that she was concerned about. Total RPMs on the gauge or 8000, so I’m guessing that was pretty close to red line.
Anyway, just seems like every single job that I work on, things aren’t going well or I’m making mistakes or something.
Same thing happened with the next job. It was just a simple brake pad job on the BMW that ended up taking me 3 hours.
3 hours. For brake pads. Not pads and rotors and caliper. Just brake pads. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
I was struggling because the information that I had wasn’t clear about the torque spec for the guide pin bolts. It said if it was a seven then this torque spec and if a 9 then this torque spec, but nowhere would have explained to me what seven and nine represented. In the end, I had to assume that it must have meant millimeters, so I measured the thickness of the millimeter of the bolt, it was 9 mm, so I went with that as the torque spec.
Also, it looks like those BMWs don’t take guide pin grease, but when I cleaned off the guide pins and and the guide pin channels, the guide pin was even less smooth to flow through its slot than it was when it was dirty.
I mess around with that for probably 45 minutes before finally giving up and just being like, well, if that’s what BMW says to do, then I guess we go with it.
In the middle of all the struggles, the caliper, which I had balanced on the knuckle for probably an hour and a half or two of the job, slipped off and smacked down the other side putting a good wrench in the hose. I’m guessing the odds of that causing an issue were probably pretty small, but still, it’s one more thing that I think about that I worry about and I’m concerned about because it’s possible that it could cause an issue.
It’s just so discouraging. It seems like every single car I work on, there’s an* next to the job I did now. 😕
Did I do it right? Did I cause a problem?
To add insult to injury, two of the plastic clips that held the brake wear sensor to the brake hose and the wheel well shattered, being cold and brittle.
I also forgot, it being a BMW, that I needed to wear sensor for it.
It was just a mess. Three freaking hours. 😕
I told the lady about each of the issues that I ran into. She was super sweet about it, but I’m always concerned and worried.
The last car was a 2010 Toyota Camry, one that I went to last Friday, that I needed to put front pads and rotors on. At first, it seemed like the job was going amazingly well, but then I ran into issues with the wear sensors. On that car, they’re not electronic, there mechanical, like most cars, but they wouldn’t fit on properly. The brake pads that I took off didn’t have the wear sensors on them, and I think I now know why, they just don’t work very well. They don’t fit in well enough to feel confident that they’re not going to disrupt the ability of the brake pad to move where it needs to go. Don’t know if it’s just cheap aftermarket parts or what, but I fought with it and fought with it and fought with it, and finally gave up and just left them off just like the mechanic who did the brakes before me did.
And then I ran into issues again with putting caliper guide pin grease in the guide pin slots and on the guide pins. I think I put too much grease on them. I think I probably been putting too much grease on them the entire time I’ve been a mechanic, maybe. And now I’m stressed out that maybe that’s been causing issues.
Stressed out day. Struggling when I got home, relapsed yet again. I don’t do very well with my addiction when I’ve had a day like I’ve been having so much of recently.
Anyway, that was that. Today (I’m writing this Tuesday the 19th) is another day. Hopefully I’ll do better.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 