(recapping on the 25th)
Today was disjointed. 🙃
I hadn’t properly planned my schedule and route for cars, so I was completely out of sorts as the day started. And it was a super busy day, as well. 😅
My days are a lot smoother when I am on top of things.
Shocker, right? 🙃
It was a seven-car day today. The first one was doing an oil change for my mama for the new BMW Z3. That went fine, gratefully.
I do oil changes so rarely that they make me nervous. 😆 Don’t forget to tighten the drain plug. Don’t forget to screw on the oil filter tightly. Don’t forget to put oil in it. It’s all super simple, but it feels like it’s so easy to forget because it’s so simple.
Car number two was a 2016 Chevy Suburban that wouldn’t start. When I got to it, I remembered that it was the same kind of starter connector that’s in the Silverado, which, last time I did a starter on a Silverado, the connector broke trying to take it off.
I probably spent 20 minutes, maybe 30, just working on the connector, doing my absolute best to take the connector off without breaking it.
No dice.
Can you believe it?!?!
It’s so frustrating how these cars are designed. They’ve been making clips for decades and decades and decades and decades. Why is it that they invent ever more complicated clips? They’ve worked fine for 100 years. Why are we reinventing the wheel and making it that much more of a pain in the butt?
Anyway, that added probably 45 minutes to the job because it’s a pain in the butt to try and secure that connector to be absolutely sure that it’s not going to come off.
After a heck of a lot of frustration, I finally did get it back on in a way that I felt would leave the customer well taken care of.
That was car number two. Car number 3 was a 2007 Lexus ES 350 that wouldn’t start. That one was in Bella Vista. That was part of my bouncing around. The first car was in Bentonville, and then the next one up in Bella Vista. Granted, I accepted that job the same morning, so I guess I can’t really qualify it as part of the disjointed day.
Gratefully, the Lexus turned out to be just bad connection with the cables, I believe. I don’t remember for sure, but I think that’s what it turned out to be. Cleaned off the cables, made all the connections nice and happy, and it was good to go.
The fourth car was a 2009 Mercedes c350 That wouldn’t start. Everything that I was finding seemed to point toward an issue with the key, I believe. I don’t remember super clearly. I only charged him half my normal service call. No, actually less than half my normal service call because I wasn’t sure what the issue was.
Card number five was a 2015 GMC Sierra with a misfire on cylinder 5. The last car was in Fayetteville, and so was the next one. The next one was a 2011 Infinity G37 that wouldn’t start. Customer was pretty sure it was a bad battery, and they were correct. I picked up a battery before I went there, got there, verified the battery issue, slapped in a new one, and was on my way.
I’m grateful for easy battery jobs. 😁
The last car of the day was a 2011 Ford escape that they said was losing power while driving. If I’m remembering correctly, when I got there there was a history of misfire, but I wasn’t able to reproduce the misfire. I had swapped one coil to one cylinder and one spark plug to the other cylinder, but I couldn’t reproduce the problem. So I gave them the information about what I had done, so that they would be prepared to take care of it once the misfire came back, if it did.
And that was the day. Onward and upward.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 