T’was another Monday where I didn’t pay proper attention to what I had scheduled, forgetting that I had a pretty significant job that by itself I thought might take four to six hours. 😅
The first car was a 2011 Toyota Camry that the gentleman was just doing routine spark plugs on. I had had that job scheduled for weeks, so it was nice to finally get That one done.
His daughter had also run over a curb or something and badly damaged the splash shield under the engine. I let him know that lots of cars don’t even have splash shields, so it wasn’t that big of a deal as long as she wasn’t driving through puddles quickly.
Car number two was the biggie. It was a 2015 Infiniti QX60 that they had asked me to do a radiator on. But my memory was doubly bad. Not only had I forgotten to look at my schedule and pay attention to what all I was scheduling as people called, but I forgot that I almost certainly wasn’t going to be putting a radiator on their car because it had been in a collision where he had driven into someone’s toe hitch.
He hit hard enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if the car is basically totaled. But he wasn’t insured when he was driving, I don’t think, so they’re not doing anything with insurance. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a 10 digit fix.
But obviously, that’s not something that I’m going to be doing. I spend about 3 and 1/2 hours, or so disassembling all the busted pieces. He’s going to need thousands of dollars just in parts.
Big deal. And it was his girlfriend’s car. 😬
Anyway, so I didn’t spend as long as a normal radiator job, which was good because it helped me get to more customers. I would have made more money had it been a radiator job, but that’s okay.
Car number 3 was a 2013 BMW 528i with the 2.0 motor in it. They said they were concerned about an oil leak and also that the battery was low on charged, and they thought that the alternator was bad.
Well, when I got there, I started it up, and it made an absolutely awful sound. So I turned it off, ran a scan, and found 20 check engine codes.
😶
Good gravy.
There were so many different codes for different things. Misfires on every single cylinder. Exhaust issues. Lean codes. Catalytic converter stuff. It was a mess.
For the first 45 minutes, or so, I was thinking I might need to throw up the white flag and eat my lost labor cost. But then as I kept digging in, I found a technical service bulletin from BMW that stated that if any of the check engine codes were one or more of a list in that technical service bulletin, then the technician shouldn’t do any repairs at all until the main computer had been reprogrammed.
Woohoo!
Not only was I able to point them in the next direction they needed to go, but I could actually get paid for it. 🥳
Car number four ended up being car’s numbers for five and six, but all on just a single service call.
They called me out there to get a second opinion on a 2015 Buick enclave that they had been told by someone they described as a shade tree mechanic that it needed a motor.
Based on their description of how he came to the conclusion that it needed a motor, it was certainly suspect, but after doing the inspection myself, it did indeed need a new motor. They had kept driving on it even though the oil pressure light was on, thinking that all they needed was more oil.
😬
Nope. They actually didn’t have good oil pressure, and apparently they drove it that way until the engine seized, as when I went and did the inspection, it was completely seized up. I pulled the belt just to be absolutely sure, but it was locked up tight. 😕
So crappy anyway, and even more so when I have to tell customers who still owe quite a bit on their vehicles that their vehicle is basically a very large paperweight. 😕
If there’s a bright spot to the story, it’s that it took me 33 minutes to diagnose the car, explain their options, and offer my condolences to their situation. That left 27 minutes, and they had another car they had questions about, so I went over and looked at that one. I believe that one was a 2001 Buick century with the 3.1 engine in it. It had a super bad coolant leak, and as best I can tell, I think it’s coming from the intake manifold gasket. That’s a fairly common place for those to leak coolant, I believe, and it wasn’t coming from the normal places, So that looks like it.
So they got two diagnostics done on two different cars for the price of one. 🙂
But wait, there’s more!
I still had 13 minutes left in the first hour, and their son was having issues with his Cadillac Escalade, a coolant leak of some kind as well. So I topped off the coolant with some that they had there, got my cooling system pressure tester, pressure tested the system, and found a crack in the radiator.
Boom. Three cars diagnosed for the price of one!
Doesn’t make up for the fact that their Buick enclave needs an engine and that they are just going to let the bank repo it because they don’t have the money to keep paying for it. But at least they now have answers on three different cars and it was all done for just the normal service call price.
So that’s something.
Car number 7 was a 2014 Chevrolet Silverado. It had a misfire on cylinder 5, and I don’t know what happened, but my brain didn’t quite work so well on this one.
Not to mention the customer was breathing down my neck the entire time I was there, except for the little while that he left to go get money.
Nice kid, but he asked question after question after question while I was trying to work on the vehicle.
Anyway, it had a bunch of misfire issues. When I first got there, it had a dead misfire on cylinder 5, so I went to swap the coil out, but I confused myself, and ended up swapping coil packs one and three.
Which shouldn’t have made any difference, except that now cylinder 5 was no longer misfiring…
Wait… hmmm… Was the wire to cylinder 5 off?!?!
Anyway, I miss took cylinder 3 for cylinder 5, so I swapped the wrong coils, and I noticed another wire unplugged, so I plugged it in, and then the fires mostly went away. There were still random ones sporadically showing up here and there, but the main misfire was now gone.
Looking back, I realize that I think just that wire was undone because it had corroded itself apart. It needed a new coil and a new wire.
The customer hadn’t done a tune-up since they had owned the truck, something like 4 years ago, so seeing that there were still some misfires here and there, even though the main misfire had gone away, we decided to change the spark plugs and wires in the hopes that it would get rid of the rest of the misfires.
I also changed out the bad coil That was full of corrosion.
When all was done, there were still just these little random misfires here and there, not even on the sams, just popping around all over the place.
🤔
🤷
Not sure what to do with that. They are totally random. At first, I thought they were only showing up when I would rev the engine really quickly to a high RPM.
But then it wouldn’t misfire at all at the higher RPM or Reverend quickly, and then it would misfire at idle. But it would only miss fire once or twice at a time, and the cylinders were totally random.
🤷
I’ll do some research into this one. I gave him a discount, something like $70ish off.
Even though what I did was what would have happened anyway even if I hadn’t screwed up the initial diagnosis, I still felt like I should give them a little bit of a discount. He was surprised.
The last car of the day was way out by the lake in Lowell. It was going to that 2007 Honda Accord that I had been to probably a few weeks ago where he had accidentally blown the main fuse by putting the cables on backwards. He was concerned that there was some kind of an issue with the ignition switch, and didn’t want me to diagnose it but to just replace it, so I went out there, replaced the ignition switch and then the found out that the only issue that he was experiencing was just a buzzing sound when turning the key. He said it would still start just fine, but it would buzz a bit before starting. Well, for any who might not know, it is an odd but normal quirk of Honda’s, one that they even provide a bulletin to their mechanics for (a bulletin I didn’t know about until today, that if you turn the ignition slowly, the starter relay will buzz
Now we both know. 🙃
I had two more jobs, one of them that was supposed to be before the Accord that didn’t answer before I needed to head north and only answered once I was already another city away. I’ve got them rescheduled for Wednesday. And then another that said it was too late for me to come out today, so I’ll get them Wednesday as well.
It’s 10:00. I just pulled in, and I’m exhausted. But it was a good, productive day. Managed to complete just shy of 11 billable hours.
🥳
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 