Well, my hopes for escaping without getting poison ivy didn’t come to fruition. In fact, Not only did I manage to get poison ivy, I managed to get a pretty darn crappy case of it too. I’ve got poison ivy on my hands, arms, waist, legs, face, and even… in my nether regions (thanks to checking myself for ticks down there with Poison ivy on my hands.
I’m only 24 ish hours in, so it’s gonna get a good bit worse before it gets better.
Not so fun. 😅
The poison ivy didn’t help me overcome what was already a sense of dread for the coming day. I’m just struggling a lot. It was a super busy day today. 8 cars. 10+ billable hours.
Gratefully, it went relatively well.
The first car of the day had me experiencing deja vu back to what might well be my first real mechanic repair job when I first started this business, advertising on Craigslist. Someone had called me with their Nissan Xterra broken down at the Wendy’s parking lot in Rogers. I think it was that parking lot. I went out there, had no idea what was wrong with it, found the JustAnswer website, had an online mechanic help me figure out what was wrong, and that started me off and running.
It wasn’t just that it was a Nissan Xterra. It was that it was the exact same symptoms as that first car so many years ago. This time, remembering that first job from back in 2017, I was able to let him know, even though we couldn’t fully recreate the problem, what the fix was.
He needed a new distributor assembly.
One car down.
Well, I guess two cars, technically, as I looked at one of their other cars for about 10 or 15 minutes before leaving. But I’m not going to count that because I didn’t bill for it.
That first job was supposedly in Bella Vista, except for it was way in the heck and gone all the way up by the Missouri border just off of i-49. I guess maybe technically it’s still Bella Vista.
The second job was going back to that 2013 Hyundai sonata from last week that needed to start her. They had ordered the starter online, and I went back today and installed it for them. For some reason, gave me a little bit of grief, even though I had already done the job two more times since. But, it’s done, and didn’t give me massive headaches, just a bit of one.
Car number three was doing a a quasi pre-purchase inspection on a 2021 Ford mustang 2.3 EcoBoost. Technically, he had bought the vehicle already, but because he was buying it from Hertz car rental, he had 7 days to return it if he decided he didn’t want it, and they would just charge him $250 in rent, basically.
It was a beautiful looking car, but it did have some red flags. The coolant level was below the minimum line, and it looks like it had what perhaps was molded coolant residue on the underside of the hood.
The struts were also wearing out, which was causing the tires in front to wear prematurely. Some of the body panels were misaligned, although I couldn’t find any evidence of accident, so it looks like it was just a bad QC job from the factory.
The total solar eclipse was taking place while I was working on that car, so I would periodically Take a gander through the solar eclipse glasses to see. I think where we were, it turned out to be about a 97% eclipse? We didn’t get the full thing. I would have had to have driven a couple of hours from here to see the full 100% eclipse, but these days, it’s not important enough to me.
Car number four was a 2013 Ford escape that was broken down in a fast food parking lot. She said she heard a clunk well driving. I went over there and saw something I had never seen before.
As I was looking down in the engine on the passenger side, it looked to me like the engine was way way too close to the side frame of the vehicle. Then when I went to the driver side and started looking down into the engine bay over on that side, I was dumbfounded at what I saw.
Apparently, someone had worked on the vehicle in the past, removing the transmission mount that holds the transmission and the engine to the frame of the vehicle. When they put it back in, it looks like they didn’t tighten one of the bolts down at all, left another one really loose, and possibly had two of them tightened or maybe only one fully tightened. The result was that the torque of the engine and the weight and everything had put so much strain on the transmission mount bracket that it had broken off.
One bolt was missing all together. One bolt was just sitting there in its slot as though it had never been tightened down at all. One bolt was sitting in the engine bay on top of the transmission, and one bolt was still in the transmission.
One of the ears had broken off the transmission mount, and threaded nub on the transmission itself was broken in half.
Poor lady. 😞
She might be able to get away with having only three out of the four bolts, is it appears she’s only had two out of the four for quite a long time and did fine until now. But I would probably suggest that she pay a welder to weld a new nub on the transmission, drill it out, rethread it, and have four bolts holding it in like it’s supposed to have.
The only real option besides that would be to pull the transmission out and replace the case or try and do the same weld repair with a transmission off the vehicle. It would be safe for to do it off the vehicle, as transmission fluid is flammable, but… The food should be inside the case, so it should get hot enough to combust.
Anyway, crappy one for her.
After that I went to a Toyota Tacoma in Springdale that wouldn’t start. I had fixed a Jeep for him years ago Back when I was still working on old cars as well. Anyway, after working on it for quite a while, the best I could tell was that maybe there would have been a bad connection at the starter, as after working on everything and testing and everything, after adjusting the connection at the starter, I never had an issue with it again. I let the customer know, explain that if the issue happens again, then go ahead and replace the starter, and I suggested they could do that themselves, as it’s super easy on that one.
Car number six was a 2013 Chevy Impala. This was actually when I worked on not too long ago, last week or something like that that I put a battery in. She called again with the same issue, a no-start. I always check an alternator when I do a battery job, so it wasn’t going to be the alternator.
So I headed by, and I found that she had a parasitic draw That was draining the battery down. It took a good long time to figure out the cause, and eventually, I was able to figure out that the courtesy lights in the front passenger and driver foot wells were lighting up. You couldn’t see them looking in through the windows, so when I went to check to see if there were any lights on inside, they weren’t visible. But I could see them if I looked through the rear windshield at just the right angle.
For whatever reason, they weren’t turning off, a short somewhere, but it was cheaper to just remove the bulbs than to try and figure out where the short was, so she just had me remove the bulbs and leave them out.
Easy peasy. 🙃
Car number 7 was a 2010 Kia forte that They were trying to put a belt on but couldn’t get on.
They weren’t alone. 😅
Holy freaking crap–that was a pain in the butt belt to get on. None of my specialty tools would fit in the teeny tiny space they left for doing the job. There must be a super duper special tool for that car.
Holy freaking crap.
In the end, I had to invent a way to get The tools that I had to work. It probably took me an hour or two just to get a belt on. 😅 I don’t even have a clue what kind of specialty tool is that thin, but I guess they exist somewhere.
Maybe if I look up in the Kia factory service manual it’ll have a part number for the tool that you’re supposed to use to do the job. Oftentimes they do when there’s a special tools required.
Anyway, that job was at the Walmart supercenter in Fayetteville on Mall avenue, And it was already well past dark.
The last job of the day was a 2012 Dodge ram 1500 that He was trying to do a spark plug job on but the spark plug coil boots were breaking off inside the spark plug wells and were making themselves super duper awful to try and Remove.
It was quite the ordeal for me to try and get them out. In the end, I think I was there A little over an hour and that’s what it took to figure out how to get busted spark plug coil boots out of the spark plug wells with some of them at Ingles where you couldn’t even see into the spark plug well having to do everything by feel. What ended up working for me was using my smallest pick tool and just patiently pulling out chunk after chunk of coil boot after I broke it piece by piece. Then I would use my vacuum to vacuum stuff out, and I would try and blow it out with a hose, and then I would use my camera to make sure I got everything out.
Good gravy.
He still had more spark plugs he needed to replace, but they were even further back and in a space that if the boots broke, we would have to remove the brake booster to get access to even try and get the broken boots out, so he decided to not even try and change the spark plugs in those cylinders. 😅
I was actually grateful for that because it was already way late, I think like 10:00 or something, maybe later.
Long day. First busy day in a while.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 