Today was definitely a full work day, but it wasn’t the insane day that Monday was. Monday was 11 billable hours, and today I cranked out nine, so that was good. A couple of good money days, and one more work day this week, with my weekly billable hours goal already met. 🥳
First car of the day was working on that 2008 Cadillac Escalade that I had done the heater hose on a few days days or so ago. This time the car was at his daughter’s house, and he just wanted me to put a battery in it. He had already bought the battery, but physically, he’s not really able to do that kind of work anymore.
I’m starting to feel like I understand that a bit, as my body wears down more and more.
It’s hard sometimes to watch my body unable to do everything that my mind thinks it should be able to do. My brain is built to be a hard worker, especially hard manual labor. I like that kind of work. I like lifting heavy things and moving stuff around and that kind of stuff. But my body… Doesn’t want me to do that kind of stuff anymore. 😅
Anyway, I was grateful to have an easy peasy job as the first one of the day.
Second job also turned out to be an easy peasy job. The customer had a set locking lug nuts that require the special key to get off. Fortunately, I’ve learned a method that works pretty well. I’ve probably written about it before, but you can just take a 12-point socket, hammer it on with a sledgehammer, and then use an impact wrench to zip the lug nut right off. You may end up sacrificing the socket, but a $6 socket is easily worth the sacrifice.
He actually asked me to take off all of the locking lug nuts on each of the three wheels that still had them. Gratefully, I was able to get the stuck lug nut out of the socket the first two times. I couldn’t get it out the third time, but that’s fine, as it did its job three times over. 🥳
Car number 3 was an interesting one. Repeat customer with a 2011 Jeep Liberty. He had a misfire and had replaced the coils, spark plugs, and spark plug wires. Those particular vehicles have issues with rocker arms, and I had mentioned that as a potential issue to him over the phone, so they had removed the valve cover.
In the process of removing the valve cover, they had knocked a whole bunch of crap inside the head, so I spent a good while cleaning up the inside of the head with my vacuum and pick tool. Then, not having been the person to take the valve cover off, it took me a good little while to figure out how to get the darn thing back on in the tight quarters that it was in.
After getting it on and starting the engine to look at the misfire data, what had previously been a cylinder 6 misfire was now a misfire for cylinders two and four.
🤔
I thought to myself that maybe they had mixed up the spark plug wires, so I arranged them how I thought they should go, and it was even worse. 😅
That was misfiring on cylinders one, three, and five. And not at all on four and six. 🤔
That pointed to an issue with the orientation of the wires, so I found a diagram, did everything up according to the diagram, and boom, no misfires at all.
Wires. That’s the only thing that was wrong. They had just crossed a couple of the wires. Easy mistake to make, as I did the same thing, even crossing them up worse. 😆
Car number four was heading back to that 2008 Honda Civic that had the bad fuel in it from the other day. It was another weird one. He had put new fuel in it, and it still wouldn’t start. 🤔
Same issue as the first time. Cranked and cranked, but it wouldn’t start.
So I went back over there, did some testing, and I found out that the fuel pump wasn’t working. The old pump that we put back in because the new pump wouldn’t install properly. Didn’t think the old pump would be a problem after finding out that the fuel was bad.
But it was. Bad gas, and a bad fuel pump. I suppose the bad gas could have killed the pump perhaps.
Anyway, I spent some time modifying the pump that they had bought so that it would work, and I had to reuse the old pump seal because the new one was just too big to seal properly.
Anyway, car weirdness today.
The last car was inspecting a 2015 Toyota Corolla that a younger gentleman had bought recently. He was a Cuban who had just moved up from Uruguay.
He asked me how it was that I spoke with an accent as though I were from South America.
That made me feel good. 🙃
So my vocabulary and grammar have taken a massive dive, my accent still seems to be relatively decent, gratefully.
I do love speaking Spanish. I just get embarrassed because my vocabulary is so terrible.
Anyway, I did a little inspection for him. Car was pretty good, other than the fact that it had been in a wreck in the back that looked fairly decent from the outside, but had obvious issues with quality if you look underneath the surface perspective. Gaps in the metal that hadn’t been properly welded, rust where things hadn’t been properly painted, etc. Probably going to run fine for a long time, but it’ll rust out over time where the repair wasn’t done very well.
Anyway, that was my day. 😊
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 