(written on August 8th and 11th from notes taken previously)
Once a mechanic, always a mechanic, I guess. 😅
Today was definitely another car day. I was up and over to Haven Hill early to swap the original computer, cluster, and lock cylinder out of my van and put the donor parts back in. I did that, because without doing that, I wouldn’t have been able to drive down to the dealer without causing damage to the van, so… yeah.
Gratefully, it’s super easy to do. 🙏
Once ready, I headed on down to Lewis Ford in Fayetteville, taking it relatively easy along the way, and she did great. 🙏
What wasn’t so great was when I got there, they had no record of having talked to me, telling me they were a week and a half out and never would have promised to get me in the same day.
😶
Frustrated, I started looking through my phone calls to prove that I talked to somebody, only to find really odd phone call records that just didn’t make sense given the calls I knew I had made.
But after looking at everything for a little while, I finally realized that there was a good reason they had no record of me talking to them. I hadn’t. Apparently, I had thought I was talking to Lewis Ford when I had actually been talking to Springdale Ford.
😅
So now I was late getting the car in, and I’d added a whole bunch of extra miles that I was going to need to have the vehicle off the ground in order to get the mileage accurate.
🤦
Ugh.
So I swapped the computer, cluster, and lock cylinder yet again, and drove over to Springdale Ford. Gratefully, though the person at the counter wasn’t the same person as yesterday who had told me to just go ahead and come on in, they did squeeze me in. 🙏
At first, the service person said that he didn’t think they were going to be able to program what I needed programmed, but later when the tech showed up who actually did all the programming, he said he didn’t think it was going to be a problem, and gratefully, it wasn’t. 🙏
Super nice guy, and with the computer programmed for a gasoline engine now, I was all set. As I drove away, she felt great. The transmission shifted a little harder than I would like (but Ford transmissions are notoriously crappy anyway if you’re looking for soft, smooth shifting anyway), but she was running and driving quite well. 🎉
I had told my friend Miguel that I was going to swing by his shop today and help him out, as he had lost one of his three techs and then had to fire another one, so he was super short-handed with a full slate of cars enough to keep everyone busy.
So I headed over there to help him out and also to see if we could get the AC working in my van in preparation for my fall road trip with my mom (which… might not happen now 😕, but I’ll get to that later).
The first job Miguel asked me to do was put an alternator in a little Mercedes, so I started taking that apart, and it went relatively well, gratefully (not a whole lot to take off and not much going sideways. 🙏)
From there, it was a Jetta that needed some diagnostics done. I think it was having both HVAC issues and maybe suspension issues?
I took it out for a test drive and gave Miguel my thoughts and piddled around from car to car and need to need as stuff came up.
Sadly, the alternator I put in turned out to be a come back, as the lady came back a little later in the day with the same noise that had led the other tech to diagnose it as a bad alternator.
😕
I don’t remember what I was working on at that point, but after messing with it for a good little while, Miguel and another shop owner who happened to be visiting managed to figure out the actual issue, so that was good at least.
By the time the work day was finished, I want to say maybe it was 7:00 ish? and I started working on Rover to get the AC fixed.
It was a beast. 😶
It didn’t help that I was out of practice as a mechanic and kept forgetting things out simply not thinking about things as I went along.
The AC compressor was brutal to take out, but it was even more so to try to put back in because I had to hold the compressor up inside this tight little space with one hand while trying to get it at exactly the right angle in order to put the AC line on almost as if it were by Braille. 😶
And to hope to be able to do all that without knocking a whole bunch of crap inside the open holes where the AC lines are supposed to go in.
Oh, and whoever designed it designed it so the bolt doesn’t go through a hole, it goes through a slot, so I can’t just feel for the hole with the bolt and then start to thread it in and have everything line up. No, that would be reasonable. Engineers don’t make things reasonably. Especially when you’re dealing with engineers from countless different companies all designing parts for a single vehicle. No, they decided to make the AC line slotted. So you have to line up the lines themselves first, which are attached together at a single point.
You know what, I’ll spare you the details. It was a pain in the butt. And after I finally got it all together after fighting with it for who knows how long, I realized that I hadn’t lubricated the o-rings before I bolted the lines to the compressor.
😶
So guess who had to take the lines back off, the very lines that I’d spent who knows how long fighting to get on?
😠
I wasn’t happy. At all. And if that weren’t enough, after I got it back together the second time, and had everything bolted up, I realized that the new compressor hadn’t come with the spacers pre-installed. How did I find that out? Well, after having bolted everything on, I crawled out from underneath the van to do whatever it was that I needed to do and found the bag of spacers.
😫
🤬
Did I mention I wasn’t happy? 😅
So I unbolted the compressor, thought to get the spacers put in without having to also redisconnect the AC lines yet again, and gratefully was able to do that. 🙏
It was probably 10:30 at night by the time I got everything back together and ready to start working on the actual vacuum and fill of the system.
Miguel had been eating dinner and then talking with somebody, forgetting that we were still working on AC stuff, which actually worked out relatively fine, because it took me so blasted long having made all the mistakes that I made in the replacement process.
Gratefully, Miguel has a machine to do the vacuum and fill, so he just set the machine up, and we spent the next probably 30 minutes or so cleaning up the shop.
Looks a lot better now than it did, so that’s something.
And thank you to Miguel for staying up late to help me with the AC stuff. 🙏
Gratefully, the AC system held vacuum… well… Until the hoses were disconnected, and Miguel noticed a leak in one of the pressure ports.
[sigh]
Oh well. Glad he caught it. Better to catch it now and before recharging the system only to have it all leak out.
Unfortunately, Miguel didn’t have the right size part to fix the issue, so that was it for the night. We know it will at least hold vacuum once the leak at the pressure port is fixed.
And I guess I’ll be back tomorrow to work on it after buying more parts to get it fixed.
It was super late by then. I want to say 11:10ish? by the time we closed up, and we both headed our separate ways.
Loooooong day.
And it was frustrating in multiple respects, but at the end of the day, I’ve got a freshly programmed computer for my ex CNG van that has the engine running well, and I’ve at least got a new AC compressor in Rover that will hopefully be ready to receive refrigerant tomorrow and start making cold cabin air possible. 🤞
Still thinking a lot about my friend who’s struggling. Still not sure what to do, if anything. There are questions I’d like to ask both to better understand her thoughts and feelings and to encourage the pondering of what I think could be enormously helpful avenues of thinking/remembering.
But… maybe this is for her to do without me?
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 