Knowing that I wasn’t going to be working again for a good little while, and no worky means no money, I loaded up the day pretty good.
I ended up doing six cars and reaching my goal of getting 10-plus billable hours in. 🥳 So that was nice.
The first two cars were at the same house. The first being a 2006 Ford F-150 that had two different issues they wanted looked at. The first was that the driver’s window glass had been shattered, and they had purchased new glass and wanted me to install it. The second issue was that the heater wasn’t working.
So I spent some time working on the window, taking off the gobs and gobs of super powerful duct tape that was holding on a piece of plexiglass as a window.
Once that was out, I had to spend a good while scraping out the broken glass that was still wedged in the frame. That took a good little while, and then it took a good little while longer to vacuum out the broken glass that was in the bottom of the door.
The customer had been gone while I was working on it, But they got back, and and I had the customer start working on doing the vacuuming out of the door to save him a little money while I started working on the other stuff. I had already diagnosed the issue with the heater as having a bad heater core or clogged heater core, as coolant was flowing into the heater core a bit, but nothing was coming out of it.
Once he was done vacuuming out all the broken glass, we hooked up my flush tubes to his heater hose lines and flushed out his heater core, back and forth and back and forth until no more crap was coming out. It took a good while, but eventually, the water was coming out clean.
After flushing everything out, I started working again on his other car that had issues with the windows rolling down properly. I changed out the regulator and motor assembly on the front passenger window, but he had written down the wrong information for the other window. He had said it was the rear passenger, but it was actually the rear driver that was the issue for the second one that had a problem.
So I didn’t end up getting that one fixed. Instead, I taught him how to do the job himself, so he should be good to go, hopefully.
So after 4 and 1/2 hours at his house, I got the window glass replaced on his Ford truck, got the regulator and motor assembly replaced on his Mazda CX-9, and flushed his heater core, but there was so much junk in the system, that even after flushing it, it looks like it just clogged right back up. He’s going to need a full cooling system flush… And possibly the replacement of radiator and heater core.
Car number 3 was a 2009 Honda Civic That was a no crank, no start. Gratefully, I was prepared with both a battery and starter, cuz that’s pretty much what it always is, usually a starter, and this time it was indeed a starter.
Gratefully, this starter job went like it should have. 🙃 It seems so many times like when I do the job, even though I’ve done it a thousand times, it just keeps being a pain in the butt every single time. But this one it went really smoothly.
🥳🏋️🥳
Car number four was a 2004 Chevrolet Tahoe that was making a bad noise. When I got there, there was no oil reading on the dipstick, and the dipstick tube was damaged and so is the dipstick. I ended up putting in four quarts of oil just to get it to be in the safe zone.
I taught him how to replace his dipstick tube, which will solve the oil leak that nearly ran him completely out of oil.
The noise that he was hearing was a lifter tick, but after running for a while, the tick went away. It could be the normal tick that those engines have, or could have been mostly because it was so low on oil.
Or both.
Car number five was a 2007 Chevrolet Cobalt in Bentonville that was throwing power steering messages, had misfire codes, and the transmission wasn’t shifting. Oh, and the speedometer wasn’t working either.
🙃
So I did some looking around, and I did a little bit of research, and I found that one of the common issues with those with the codes that it had was damage to the speed sensor wiring, so I went over and looked at the speed sensor wiring, and sure enough, it was cut in half. So I spend some time finding replacement wire and splicing in new sections of wire, and once I had done that, the transmission shifted properly, the speedometer worked as it should, and the power steering message went away.
🥳
The last car of the day was a 2011 Kia soul that supposedly was a crank no start, but when I went out there, it started just fine. The battery looks like it was on its last legs. It tested good, but it looked pretty bad. I poked around and looked at some things and taught him some things and we called it good.
I think I was just shy of 10 and 1/2 billable hours, so we’ll call that a success for My last day of work before this cold-induced vacation.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 