Long day today. Not a rush day. Just a long day.
Though it actually snowed a bit last night, I was grateful that it wasn’t a super cold day today. There were times where it was a tad bit chilly, but nothing too crazy.
In the blink of an eye, it will be the hot summer again.
And then fall. And then winter.
Time goes by so quickly.
Anyway, with today being the first day that Jim was out of work, I had thought that maybe he would be coming with me while I fixed cars, or possibly hanging out on the hill working on to-do list stuff, but he already had stuff to do, so I didn’t worry about it much further.
The first car I went to today was actually my own. I went to my pickup truck in the upper pasture to see if I could identify specifically the location of the oil leak. It looks like a sieve, and I figured maybe paying Jim to fix it would help both of us out.
Usually, you see a drip drip drip from the bottom down by the bell housing, but you can tell that it’s coming from much higher up. But it’s not a valve cover issue.
Anyway, so I fired up the truck after putting some oil in it, and I watched to see where the leak was coming from.
And I watched.
And watched…
🙄
So it looks like crazy, but the last two times that I’ve actually said to myself, okay, I’m going to figure out where this is coming from, then it stops leaking.
😶
I ran the truck for probably 15 minutes, warming it up to see if maybe it would leak once it was warm, but still nothing.
So I gave up for the day, having a very full day of cars to go to, and headed out to actual customer cars.
First car of the day was going to a 2008 Lexus IS250 that was having starting issues. They had bought a battery, but it a drain down. It was kind of funny, I drove dirt roads through what felt like the middle of nowhere, and then when I drove up there long, super steep driveway, what I found was that their property butted up against a really nice neighborhood.😆
Anyway, the issue turned out to be an alternator, and gratefully, I had brought one with me guessing that that might be the case. While I was doing the job, I put my pry bar for the alternator in a place that put pressure on one of the AC lines, and I heard some air or something escaping.
😬
Oops!
The sound stopped almost immediately, and then I tried to figure out where it was coming from so that if they had issues in the future, I could take proper responsibility and know where the issue actually was.
Gratefully, when I did a leak test to see if that connection was actually leaking, it wasn’t, even after I turned the AC on, so, cross your fingers, hopefully it’s fine and will be fine, but I let them know anyway and will cover the cost if that line needs to be replaced.
I hate it when I do stuff like that.
Car number two is going back to that 2013 Dodge avenger that needed the fuel pump that I was excited about having figured out the other day. I went and installed the fuel pump, getting the whole job done in like 30 minutes, including sucking out the crap in the bottom of the tank (granted, there wasn’t much crap to suck out). So I gave him a discount on the price because I had expected it to take a lot longer and had quoted accordingly.
Car number 3 was a 2018 Kia soul. It was another no start issue, and they had tried jump starting the car to no avail. I got there and found the battery drained down significantly, so I disconnected the battery cables and hooked my jump box directly up to it, and It fired up just fine.
If I haven’t mentioned it before, a battery that’s super bad may not allow the car to be jumped even with jumper cables hooked directly up to it. Sometimes, I find that disconnecting the cables from the battery in order to bypass the battery all together allows the vehicle to jump start.
And such was the case, so he had me just go ahead and replace the battery, which gratefully again, I had brought with me.
The first three jobs were all in Bentonville, though the first Bentonville job was out in the middle of nowhere about 50 ft into the county and not actually the city of Bentonville 😆.
The fourth car on the list was a 2002 Ford escape down in Fayetteville that was the vehicle driven by the lady’s son who called me to help. He’s at the university doing mechanical engineering, and they had just had the radiator replaced, but it was leaking coolant super badly and overheating again. So I went out there and found that the water pump was leaking pretty badly.
The lady was surprised at the cost to replace the water pump, as it wasn’t going to be cheap, so I figured the given that her son was an engineering student, he probably wouldn’t have much trouble understanding what to do, so instead of making an appointment to replace the water pump, I spent about 15 or 20 minutes walking him through how to do it himself.
Car number five was in 1999 Lincoln Town Car that had a screw in the tire. I added that one to the list midday because it was just a screw in the tire, and the gentleman needed it done and even with all the normal disclaimers that come with putting a plug in a tire (that even though it may last for the life of the tire, it should be considered a temporary fix), he still wanted me to come.
He didn’t happen to mention that his apartment complex was in the middle of a construction war zone, and it took calling him to get instructions for how to even get to the apartment complex because every access that I tried to go through was blocked off for construction. 😅
He did however give me a tip for doing the job. Super cool guy.
Car number five, oh wait, that was car number 5. Car number six was a 2022 Jeep Wrangler that wouldn’t start. I got out there and found the battery was drained down a bit. So I replaced the battery, and then I remembered after I had replaced it and started the Jeep up, that a lot of those Jeeps have auxiliary batteries as well, and oftentimes they’re the cause of the main battery being drained down, because they go bad and suck power from the main battery because they are wired up in circuit.
So I did a parasitic draw test and found that there was indeed a large draw, but after charging the auxiliary battery and testing it, not only did it test good, tested really really good. So that was super confusing. I spent probably over an hour charging and testing and checking things trying to figure out exactly what was going on, and in the end, I found that the main battery was indeed bad, as it kept testing bad even after charging, and auxiliary battery kept testing good. I have no explanation, yet, for why there was a large parasitic draw, but I had already been there for quite a while, so I gave her some instructions for how to Go forward, and let her know that we could make another appointment for me to come out on Monday which wouldn’t cost her any more than me leaving and getting an auxiliary battery and coming back and whatnot.
So I’m waiting to hear from her how things go.
Car number 7 was a 2017 Hyundai sonata but they said was having ignition issues. What I wasn’t prepared for was coming out and finding out that they had dismantled a whole bunch of the system, and there were parts strewn around all over that I had no idea what were or where they went.
Ooh! Bald eagle!
🐿️
Er…
🦅
It took me a while, googling parts and what they look like to figure out what was going on.
In the end, I realized that they had bought some kind an exhaustive kit from Amazon that had an ignition lock cylinder, door lock cylinder is, trunk lock cylinder, and glove box lock cylinder.
And I found a piece of the glove box cylinder wedged inside the ignition lock cylinder housing. 😆
If You ever hear a mechanic say they don’t want to touch your car if you’ve been messing with it yourself, this is one of the reasons why. 😆
Anyway, clearly they were the kinds of people who wanted to try and do the work themselves, so I explain to him what he was going to need to do, at least to some degree, gave him the names of the parts he needed, and headed on to my last job of the day.
By this time, it was well after dark.
The last job of the day was in Rogers, and was a 2010 Suzuki Grand Vitara That wouldn’t start. So I went out there and started doing some testing, and found that I was able to reproduce the issue a couple of times in the very beginning, but then once I started doing the testing to actually figure out the specific issue, it stopped having problems.
I tried and tried to try and get it to have the issue again, but it just wouldn’t. Eventually, I gave up, told her her options, and gave my recommendations. Her options being that she could go ahead and replace the starter, since that’s what it seemed like it was going to b, but that was just going to be an educated guess because I couldn’t prove it with it fully functional at the moment, and replacing a starter was going to be close to $800 on that particular vehicle with special order parts.
So I recommended that she buy a multimeter, and just in case it might be an issue, I spent a little bit of time trying to clean off the terminals for the ignition wire to the starter, and suggested that she just keep driving it as she had been, as we would either be making an $800 Guess, or she could just keep me on speed dial, so to speak, and once the issue happens again, if it does, then hopefully we can reproduce the issue long enough to get a firm diagnosis.
Starters, unfortunately, are one of those things where, unless you have a manual transmission, you can’t just find some way to Jerry rig the car to get it to start. Without the starter, your toast.
Oh, just popped into my brain a little story from the other day. As I was driving back from Oklahoma with Jim on Thursday, we were coming back on highway 72, and someone had come to a stop in the road to turn left but didn’t have their blinker on, and I didn’t realize until it was too late that there was no possible chance I was going to be able to stop, especially not with 5000 lb of additional trailer and cargo behind me.
I was going to obliterate them with a nasty rear end smash
Amazingly, The moment I realized there was no way I was going to be able to stop, I pulled off the road into the ditch going probably 40 mph? Truck and trailer down into the ditch, along the ditch, and back onto the road.
It all went so smoothly, that it almost felt just like passing somebody on the freeway. It was pretty nutty. 😆
Amazingly, there was no adrenaline pumping at all. It was just kind of like “oh, that was interesting.”
😆
And I laughed a little as an abrupt end to the tears that had been grilling down my cheeks from the conversation that I was having with Jim about what’s going on in my life and the challenges.
Anyway, end flashback. 🙃
That was the day. Gratefully, I didn’t really have any follow-ups to do with JustAnswer, So I vegged out and went to bed.
I should probably say something like I’m grateful to be alive after what happened the other day, but it was also ordinary and nonchalant that It doesn’t really compute that We were close to having been in a major accident.
Oh! I think I might have jinxed myself the other day when I mentioned that I hadn’t had to come back in a very very long time. After doing the fuel pump job on that car that I was excited to have figured out the issue on, he texted me later in the day to tell me that the car had died yet again.
😶
Gosh, it drove absolutely fine for me after putting the fuel pump in. Erg.
Part of me still doesn’t believe that it’s even possible that it died again. When I replaced the pump, disconnecting the fuel line from the pump itself, there was no fuel pressure to speak of in the line, which was one more evidence of the fuel pump issue.
Why on earth would it continue having dying problems?
(sigh)
I guess we’ll find out. He was low on gas, so he’s going to fill up and see if he still has the issue.
I’m 🤞 that he doesn’t. Otherwise, I might just refund my labor and throw up the white flag.
Love to all.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 