(written on the 5th but in the first person is though it were the fourth}
I slept in, of course, after that super super late night last night, so the only part of my morning routine that went as planned, was prayer with my mom.
First job of the day was a 2015 Volkswagen Passat that they needed help with the front brakes. I think her brother had tried to do the job, but he couldn’t get the caliper bracket bolts off. He was trying to use just a little tiny drill with a socket attachment on it, and that’s definitely not going to do it for caliper bracket bolts. Those are usually torqued to well over 100 ft lb, and I think on this one, they’re torqued to 148 foot pounds. I forgot the spec.
The job when decently well until it got to the point where I needed to grease the guide pins… But I recognized that it was basically the same setup as the BMW that I had done right before my road trip, and the BMW specifically instructed you to not grease the guide pins.
There was some residue left over as though someone had greased them in the past, but when I looked up the Volkswagen instructions for doing the brakes, they didn’t say anything at all about greasing the guide pins.
After spending who knows how long online trying to see if there is any clarification for the Volkswagen instructions, there was a lot of disagreement that I found online. Some people said to never grease them, and some people said to go ahead and grease them, but to make sure that it was with a synthetic grease and not a petroleum product.
In the end, since the Volkswagen instructions did not include directions to grease the guide pins, and since it was the same basic design as the BMW I had done a couple weeks before that specifically said not to grease the guide pins, I decided to go ahead and leave them ungreased.
Still, I spent probably an hour just trying to figure that part out.
German cars. 🙄
I guess I shouldn’t really roll my eyes. Pretty much every make and model has their own annoying things. And not having to grease the guide pins actually makes the job easier, so… It’s just figuring out the information.
After that job, I went over to Miguel’s shop and hung out for a little while. He wrote me a check to pay me back for funding the purchase of two cars that we were trying to sell. One of them, he still has, and the other one he sold. So I got the money back for the investment on those two, plus the profit that we made on the one that sold.
Since the check was made out to a business, arvest wouldn’t cash it. I’m not sure why they would have a rule like that. I guess it makes sense to them.
Fortunately, The bank is only like a quarter of a mile away from Miguel’s shop, so he ran over, canceled the check, and just did it withdrawal for the amount of the check. He had some other checks to deposit as well, so it wasn’t a total waste of his time.
From there, I headed over to the 2007 Hyundai Santa Fe that was only a few miles away from Miguel’s shop as well. That job went relatively well, even though it is a bit of a pain in the butt in places.
The main frustration was dealing with a poorly machined alternator. They didn’t stop to check to make sure the bolt threads on the alternator were good, and they weren’t. So I went and tried to bolt the alternator on, but with a threads being bad, actually mildly damaged to the threads on the bolts themselves, and the threads inside the alternator were just not usable. Gratefully, the threads all happen to be sizes that I had in my tap and die kit, so I was able to recut the threads on the bolt, and clean out the threads on the alternator.
In the end, I was able to get it all done, and it was just a matter of wasting probably 30 or 45 minutes of time cleaning up the issues with the bolt and alternator.
After doing that job, I had others that I could do, but they were all way down south, and they weren’t promised, so I decided to go back to Miguel’s shop and hang out for a bit. I chatted a little bit with Miguel, then I chatted a little bit with Koven, and then I called it a night and headed home.
Definitely crashing earlier tonight.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 