MECHANIC: Complaints about tow trucks · 12:19am February 11th
Before I get started, there's a disambiguation and a bit of terminology. Tow trucks are also called wreckers in my part of the world, and they may have other slang in your part of the world. They're trucks that are meant to haul vehicles, usually disabled, from one location to another, such as off the road and to a shop.
The two kinds we'll be concerning ourselves with are flatbeds (also called rollbacks) and 'sling trucks.' Flatbeds have a flat deck which an entire car rides on, and sling trucks have a boom on the back and pick up a car by lifting one end or the other. These days, wheel lifts are more commonly used than slings, although a lot of those trucks still have booms, 'cause those are handy for winching things out.
Also for those of you who didn't know, I used to drive a wrecker, both flatbeds and sling trucks. Back before I got a job as a mechanic.
Also also there aren't gonna be that many related pony-themed pics, 'cause there aren't many pony-themed pics of tow trucks. If you're an artist, that's a niche to fill 
As a mechanic, one of the things that can bring dread is when a wrecker rolls up with a car. Given how tight-fisted most people are, if it's coming in on a truck, that means it won't drive itself to the shop, possibly won't even lot-drive. That means that there's a good chance it's gonna be pushed into the shop.
If it's a no start, there's a good chance that the battery's dead, 'cause the customer kept trying to start it until the battery gave out. That means any codes it might have are probably gone forever—some cars will keep them if the battery voltage goes too low, but many will lose them. It'll also have a number of new codes set due to low voltage.
Sometimes it got towed in and then it starts, and that's a whole different ballgame. One that I just finished working on recently got towed in 'cause it quit while driving, and when I went to start it, it fired right up and there weren't any codes that made it obvious what went wrong. It has, in fact, fired right up every time I tried. Based on what I found, it only malfunctions in the rain, but I honestly don't know.
Maybe we'll get into that one later on.
Or maybe we won't, 'cause I wrote this blog post a while ago and have completely forgotten which vehicle I was working on that would only fail in the rain
Of course, cars being towed in is part and parcel of the job I've got. Sometimes it's one where I get to laugh (to myself) at the customer, 'cause I already told them that they needed to fix the widget on their car or else it was gonna break and leave them stranded. Other times, it's an unforeseeable failure that even good preventative maintenance wouldn't catch, not unless you're doing airplane levels of PM where you disassemble it every now and then and check everything. Or some other unanticipatable failure, like running over something in the road that you couldn't avoid which takes out the bottom of the radiator or blows a tire or two and then you find out that the spare tire winch on your car doesn't work because honestly who ever lowers that down, lubes the cable, and rolls it back up? Or maybe you've got an 80s S-10 and the cable rusted through and dropped your spare tire while you were driving. I've owned at least a half-dozen of those trucks, and every one of them had a broken spare tire cable and no spare tire . . . there must have been some years when you were taking a big risk driving behind a S-10 in a snow belt state. That truck hits a bump, and you might get hit with fifty pounds of bouncy loose tire.
These days, most wrecker companies prefer flatbeds for most jobs. There are lots of all-wheel-drive vehicles that can't be towed with two wheels on the ground, not unless you use dollies and that takes extra time to set up. With a flatbed, you just winch it on up there and when it's all strapped down, as far as the car knows it's just sitting in a driveway. One that's cruising along at 60 miles an hour.
The problem with flatbeds is that they're long. Basically the front end of a truck, with a driveway in the back that's long enough and wide enough to fit someone's lifted F350 crew cab dually, which means that the wrecker can't really do tight bends. A sling truck, well, that's a whole truck plus whatever it's towing long, but it bends in the middle and can go around much tighter corners than a rollback can.
And on the flatbed, you've got to lower the bed to get the vehicle off, which means extending the bed out like ten feet (3 meters) and angling it down to the ground, making the whole thing even more unwieldy. Also getting cars on and off them with certain kinds of failure is far more difficult, but that's a matter for a different blog post.
Here in America, the trucks and cars people drive have gotten bigger and the parking lots have not. Ours tends to get crowded, 'cause we've got lots of cars we're working on or have worked on or will be working on or would have been working on except that the part we need is on galactic backorder and nobody can tell us if, or when, we'll ever get the part.
Flatbeds have also gotten bigger; the one I most often drove back when I was driving wrecker was a Chevy 3500HD, basically a pickup truck cab on a longer frame with a slightly beefed-up suspension. The frame wasn't beefed up; that truck had broken in half several times and been welded back together. [Although one source claims that the 3500HDs had 4500 frames and suspension, but I don't know if that's true or not.]
Even the one-ton trucks (3500s/F350s) are bigger now, but a lot of the rollbacks are built on medium-duty truck frames, F450s and up, 4500s, International or Freightliner, etc. Wider and longer than what we had back in my day, usually.
But not always, sometimes I got to drive our Kodiak flatbed that was a manual transmission and the only vehicle I've ever driven with a stiffer clutch than my old Chevy C10 where pushing the clutch also lifted the cab 'cause the mounts had rusted off. And another company I worked for had an International 4700 flatbed with a seven-speed manual that I frequently drove.
Never mind all that terminology, the point is that part of the job was picking up the car, wherever it was. Sometimes that was a sort of field-engineering problem; a van's off the road and wrapped around a tree and also caught fire so I got to pull it off the tree, turn it around, and then pick it up.
Before I get into the complaining part, one thing I can say for all the wrecker drivers that have delivered cars to us is that they have managed to pick up the car.
The second part of the job is to deliver the car where the customer wants it. And that's something that the drivers around where I live seem to be bad at.
Our parking lot is 'too small' and so they can't unload the car into a parking space, so they'll just drop it in the aisleway instead and leave it to us to push it back into a spot. Never mind that the guys who pick up our used tires can get a semi-truck with a 53' (16m) trailer in our lot and don't seem to struggle with it.
One of my other co-workers also used to drive wrecker, so we spend a fair amount of time complaining about how bad these wrecker drivers are. Lots of "I could have done better" (and we'll get to that as soon as I quit rambling 
), or "Kids these days," 'cause we've both got grey in our beards and can say that now.
Our parking lot has little islands to subdivide it, and a couple weeks ago one of the wrecker drivers got the brilliant idea to back his flatbed against one one side of the island, extend his bed out over it, and drop a truck in the space from the other side. We made fun of him and wondered how much of the landscaping he'd destroyed in the process. Turns out the answer was none, and the tF150 he dropped off was perfectly centered in the parking space and we both had to eat crow. If I ever go back to driving wrecker, I'm gonna remember that little trick. Why not take advantage of the fact that the bed extends out about the width of a parking lot island?
Just last week, we had a flatbed bring in a Chevy Avalanche that doesn't start. Since the driver couldn't figure out how to put it a parking space, despite our parking lot being unusually empty (Christmas/New Year's lull), he decided that dropping it on the sidewalk in front of the shop was a good place to leave it. His excuse was that his truck was 'too big' to fit in our parking lot.
My co-worker had almost offered to drive his truck for him and show him how it was done.
What really grinded my gears on this one was that the wrecker company was operating out of a university town. Now, I used to drive wrecker in a university town, and I know how college kids park, and how tight campus parking lots are. I sometimes had to get real creative to get the car out of the spot it was in. [Especially on impounds; some people think they're real clever when they park illegally. Making your car hard to get doesn't mean I won't get it, it just means it'll cost you more if I've got to hook and drop, or use Go-Jacks.] If he can't manage to dump a Chevy Avalanche—which isn't all that big—in the aisle of a parking lot, or even kind of sideways across two of the three spaces that are all open in a nice row, he really ought not be driving wrecker, especially in a college town.
Part of the reason that I got hired at the shop I'm at is that I'm an experienced wrecker driver, and even have the appropriate driver's license for the job. At the time, the shop I work for had a wrecker and would sometimes pick up customer's cars with it. Now, when I got hired I hadn't driven a wrecker in seven years, but I still remembered how to use one.
[No, this isn't leading into me tearing a customer's car in half or anything exciting like that; as it turned out I never drove the company wrecker, and the boss sold it a few years after I got hired 'cause it cost more (in repairs and insurance) than it was worth.]
My current manager also knows, or should know, that I used to drive wrecker; I've brought it up more than once when one of the drivers delivering a car does a particular poor job of unloading it in the parking lot, or when it's hooked wrong/without safety chains. I thing I even regaled him with the story of how I got a ticket for not using tow lights when one of the drivers left his tow lights magneted to a car he delivered and called us to find out if we had them.
For most of my career driving wrecker, I was in a sling truck, and as a result I got really good at backing something up with a trailer on it. So good, in fact, that one time when I was working at Firestone, we had a car or truck come in with a trailer on it, and due to the tightness of our parking lot, I found it more effective to back it all the way around the building and then pull it in forward in my bay, rather than turn it around in the lot.
While this was mostly a long-winded rant about 'kids these days,' it's also a blog post to see if you're interested in me regaling you about some of the stuff I did back when I drove wrecker. Granted, it was kind of light on 'what I did,' but believe me I've got stories. Some of them'll be a bit fuzzy on details 'cause it was a quarter-century ago that I was driving wrecker. Others of them have stuck with me for reasons, not all of them happy. Yes, I've picked up after fatal accidents.
It also gives me an opportunity to tell you about a time that I used my manager's Main Character Syndrome against him. A while back, I had to fix the tail lights on a JetSki trailer, and since we didn't know if the problem was on the tow vehicle or the trailer, we got both. Turns out it was the trailer. I pulled it around to the shop and fixed the wiring and when I was done the manager asked me to back it in alongside the building next door, which was where the customer worked.
I looked at him, all innocent-like, and said, "I don't know how to back up a trailer."
So he grabbed the keys from me and parked it and I went over to the other mechanic (who also used to drive wrecker) and told him what I'd said, and we both had a good laugh.
*GoJacks are a type of wheel dolly that fits around the wheel and then can be jacked up to lift the wheel off the ground. They've got four swiveling casters, so you can use them to push a vehicle sideways or make it turn or shove it out to where it's easier to hook up to—all of our sling trucks had a pair of them on the bed.
For those of you who are interested, the truck I most often drove was a 1994 GMC 3500HD sling truck with a 6.5L, and in the year I worked for that company, it had one transmission failure and the frame broke once and I can say that it didn't handle very well with a broken frame. It also experienced brake failure once while I was driving it and that was very exciting for all involved.
I'd post a picture of the truck, but it'd vanish in a day or two.
Did you ever do a blog post on how you became a mechanic in the first place? What did you study in college?
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No I never did.
My college degree is Theatre, with a minor in English (maybe). I wasn't sure what to do right after I got out of college, so I got a job driving wrecker 'cause that sounded fun, and then after about a year I got a job as a mechanic because Firestone promised to train me, so I went with that and it's had its ups and downs over the years (as I'm sure you have gathered by the blog posts) but overall it's an in-demand job that can't be outsourced or replaced with AI.
GTOger has some wonderful "No Parking and we mean it" videos.
Impressive stuff! I'd be interested in wrecker stories. (Though for the really bad ones, I may have to cover my eyes)
New pegasus specialty job! Automotive troubleshooting rainmaker!
Imagine a vehicle that is sitting in the repair shop parking lot, beneath a raincloud that is only big enough to cover that ONE car.
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They do, and I occasionally watch that channel for the laughs . . . I did impounds occasionally, and some of our customers were so used to their car being towed for being illegally parked, they beat their car back to the impound lot.
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Thank you!
I think I will write some, 'cause I did lots of fun stuff . . . and some not-so-fun stuff. Everything that falls into that latter category will have appropriate warnings on it.
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That is one job I hadn't considered . . .
I've done that once. Well, not with a pegasus, but there was a car that I suspected might only malfunction when it was wet, so I took it through a full-service drive-through car wash, then told the guys who were waiting to wipe it down that I didn't want that service and hauled off down the road hoping I could make it break.
It turns out that wasn't the problem. The actual problem was that the service manager had not told me what the actual customer complaint was, so I was chasing a problem that didn't exist. Once I got the real info, I diagnosed the problem in about five minutes.
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Much appreciated!
I’d like to read your wrecker stories.
Another vote for Admiral Biscuit's Wrecker Stories™!
Rain-induced failure? I've had that happen once. My old S-10 once shorted out while sitting in the rain. The rain set off the alarm and I had to unlock manually because it was completely unresponsive to the remote. I started it up and turned it back off. That stopped both the alarm and the remote detection issue. What's really weird is that it hadn't ever happened before and never happened again for the entire time I had it. I miss it sometimes; this incident aside, it was generally a lot more tolerant of bad weather than the Honda Pilot I drive now.
I constantly get into arguments with customers who insist they can use tow dollies to haul their rear-wheel or all-wheel drive vehicles, because "I've done it before!"
My co-worker has a nice speech explaining how exactly doing this without dropping your drive shaft will burn out your goddamn transmission. The short version is 'if you let your rear wheels run without power to your transmission, the oil will have nothing pushing it around, and the transmission gearing will go dry, and heat up, and then burn out if you keep going.'
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You mean "An AI can't do it yet. Rest assured, they're working on it because it's cheaper than paying you.
(looks at first picture...)
Oh! It's a Mac Truck.
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derpicdn.net/img/2020/8/25/2431030/medium.png
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it's a shame they moved and almost never have videos anymore... also I can never see e-scooters without hearing the jetsons sound and smiling.
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Noooooooo.
Sweetie, the Plutonium goes in the Back End.
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SweetAI Bot still needs some work then.
Admiral Biscuit's livelihood is safe, for now.
Yup, I'd be happy to hear more "Admiral Biscuit's Towing Trials and Tales"... and Yes, GoJacks are great inventions for moving project cars around in the shed.
Everyone has different nomenclatures for tow trucks... here the old pickup styles are simply called Hooks or Lifts depending on type. Beavertails are the slope backed rolloff flatbeds with ramps and your rollbacks are known as Tilt Trays here.
As for driver quality... yup, like yours, many here are pretty useless at placing a vehicle in a reasonable location and go for the easiest dump they can get away with. I had one dropping a friend's wife's car back while I was visiting a while back and he tried to drop it on the road as he reckoned the driveway was too hard to get into. I told him that if I could back a semi with a 40' shipping crate into it and down to their shed then he should be able back his dinky little 8 tonne tilt tray in!
Last time I needed a tow was a disabled car I need to get the title fixed on, and I was moving to a new place. I was pleasantly surprised that the driver was able to get the flat bed lined up to the garage and we didn't have to push the thing out by hand. Dropping it off was dead easy, a grassy former field where he simply needed it to be kinda level in one direction.
Before then, I had to be pullec out of a ditch when I got run off the road by a portable outhouse truck. The tow driver used a winch on a sling truck to haul my car quite nicely.
I've also had to pull stuck tractors and equipment out of fields, and there's an art to it. Never yank the chain or rope, make sure the angles are good so the pulling tractor also doesn't get stuck.
Anyway, back to fixing a manure spreader with a bent door, a skidloader that needs control adjustments glued down, a Ford L9000 13 speed manual that probably has a bad turn signal module, vaccinate and prep a bunch of calves for their next age group pen, and deal with the oncoming snow.
Yes. Very much yes.
My Dad helped his father, my grandfather, from the time he was about 6 or 7 years old towing wrecks in. They used a wrecker with a hand-cranked winch. One time they had one down over a long embankment and my grandfather must have been getting up there in years and that was the last time they used a hand-cranked winch. He bought an army surplus winch and a boom from somewhere and welded it up and no more hand winching! Back then there were no "jaws of life" and the wrecker operators were the ones that pulled the cars apart to get the bodies out.
My father started taking me out on wrecks when I was fourteen. He didn't take me on fatals until I was sixteen. The first fatal I was on was so bad that my dad sent me with one of his friends to get flares from the State Police. An old guy with alzheimer’s driving a Mercedes diesel wound out came about four miles the wrong direction on a divided highway and just about made it to where it became a two-way road when he hit a tractor trailer head on. The tractor trailer wound up with the cab hanging out over the bridge above the creek and had to perilously climb out of the cab and climb to safety. The Mercedes had the engine in the passenger department. Warning: Gross the fireman on the scene lifted the roof up off the Mercedes and promptly dropped it, saying there is no hurry. The man's head was missing from the eyebrows up and it was all over the place in the back seat of the car. It spent about two months in our parking lot stinking until they came and got it.
The first wrecker I drove was a 1976 C-50 shortbed with a Holmes 480 wrecker body on it. We had dolly wheels on both sides. A lot later we added a Kooma Car Kradle wheel lift to it as well. After a while the State Police demanded we have a roll back even though we didn't really need it. My Dad could have taught a master's class on vehicle recovery. But he got a used 1984 F-600 Jerr-Dan Rollback really low mileage and kept the wrecker for recovery, we took both to accident scenes if the Police told us the circumstances of the wreck, which they did because they liked and respected Dad. I learned a lot from watching the rollbacks that would come and haul our collection away when the insurance companies settled. I got quite good and learned a lot from their techniques. Dad never complained when I went out and watched them picking up because he knew I would put what I learned to practical use. When The State Police demanded we have a fenced in compound it got more difficult to pick up the wrecked vehicles and I watched how they would pick them up and added to my knowledge base. I never got as good as those guys because I didn't do it day in and day out, like they did, but I was no slouch, either.
My experience with wrecks fatal and otherwise made me a careful driver. When I was in school Driver's ed was mandatory and the teacher would like to show shock movies to scare the students into being better careful drivers. Me and another guy were in that class. He was training to be a paramedic and later worked on a medical transport helecopter.
We were bored stiff and were catching much needed z's. The instructor yelled at us and we both said we don't need to watch it because it's boring. He yelled some more and we started talking to each other about the stuff we'd seen in real life mentioning the smells and everything. The instructor turned green and never bothered us again when we fell asleep during those movies, because the real thing is just so far above the footage in those movies.
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There seems to be an overwhelming majority of people who want to see them. I'll have to figure out some formatting for 'em, and it might not be on FimFic, but if not I'll give y'all a link
Plus there's gonna be some memory issues, it's been over two decades since I drove a wrecker.
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I had a lot of S10s back in the day (the squarebody ones) and I could tell you stories about those trucks. Given the weird failures I had on mine over the years, a rain-induced one-time failure doesn't surprise me at all.
Yeah, I hear ya. They were decently dependable little trucks, and could carry more than you'd expect.
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I towed a 1980 Cutlass on a tow dolly. Backwards, so I wouldn't burn up the transmission. That was a terrible experience, that car was super squirrelly 'cause the weight distribution was way wrong, and I'll never do that again. I think it took me six or seven hours to do what's normally a two hour trip, and hills and curves were scary.
When I got my potato chip truck ready to tow, I knew it would be easier for the wrecker to haul it from the front, so I pulled the driveshaft for his convenience.
That's not true for all automatics, but it's generally true and it's safer to assume you've got one that will burn out of the drive wheels spin. You can get by this by having the engine running while you're towing the vehicle, that way the trans fluid cycles, but without rigging something up, there's no way to know from the tow vehicle if the vehicle you're towing is still running.
I actually had one tow when I was driving wrecker where the customer authorized me to tow it with the drive wheels on the ground, since the vehicle was obviously already totaled and he didn't want to spend extra money for me to put dollies under the rear wheels.
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You're right it's cheaper than paying me, but it's beyond the scope of current AIs or affordable robots.
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That's a great pun, but to me the truck looks more like a 50s Ford COE:
mystarcollectorcar.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/IMGP5325.jpg
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Noo . . . water and electricity don't mix!
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I think i have that sound in my mind but I'm not entirely sure I've got the right one.
I can say that when there were debates about what kind of noise electric cars should make, I always thought some sound effect from a futuristic show was the best idea.
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If you push the probe hard enough, it goes in wherever you want it to.
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At least she's cuter than Tesla's long-promised (and undelivered) automatic charging snake.
For now . . . we'll see what the future brings.
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I will say that GoJacks suck on dirt parking lots, but they can be used.
And everyone seems to want wrecker stories, so that's a thing I'll do in the future. How and where remains to be seen, but I'll be sure to let y'all know.
I like the term 'beavertails.' That was a style we had in the seventies and eighties, but as far as I know nobody does them these days.
Also "Tilt trays' is good.
They just don't make wrecker drivers like they used to. I remember one job where I was driving an International 4700 (don't know if you have those, but picture your usual medium-duty truck with side-saddle fuel tanks)) and I was standing on the fuel tank to maneuver around the corner to pick up the car--the mirrors didn't show me everything I needed to know, especially since I had to back through a gate not much wider than the wrecker and then turn 90 degrees to the left.
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When I got my potato chip truck towed to my house, I was of course conscious of the driveway situation that I have, and told the driver that if he could get it in a particular spot that would be great. He nailed it on the head, and charged me less for the tow than I was expecting, so I gave him a hundred dollar tip.
When I got my van towed, I let the driver drop it off on the street because my driveway is . . . well, it's on a state highway and on a curve, and I really didn't want to see that driver get T-boned as he backed in.
Sling trucks are the best for winching. Flatbeds can do it if they have to, but they're not very good at it.
Heh, I could tell you some stories about getting the towing vehicle stuck. One time, I actually planned for that and had a second wrecker on firmer ground to recover the first wrecker and the stuck Ranger.
This story I wrote on Offprint is based on a true story. Language warning.
Today I put another PTU in a Jeep Cherokee (I think I blogged about the last one; this time I did it even faster 'cause now I know what I'm doing), diagnosed a 2023 Silverado with a faulty intercooler coolant pump, test drove a Buick I fixed (probably) an intermittent stall on, monitored an intermittent CAN failure on a GMC terrain, and tried unsuccessfully to duplicate a 'runs bad on startup' problem on a Trailblazer--it's probably a failing cam actuator, but I can't prove it yet.
How much snow did you get? We got a few inches, nothing too nasty. Gonna be more over the weekend, they say. I'm planning to leave for other work an hour early just to make sure that I have time to deal with problems on the road.
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Will do, I don't know if they'll be here on FimFiction or somewhere else, but I'll post links so y'all can find them.
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One of the darker wrecker stories I could tell--and I was NOT the one working it--involved rolling a vehicle over to get the bodies out.
Also I love the old-school hand-cranked winch Must have been way back 'in the day.'
Ugh . . . I made a rule for myself that I would never ask when I was on a scene. The company I worked for generally only got called out after the paramedics were done and the bodies had been removed from scene, so I didn't see much that was too nasty. Did tow a few where it was unlikely that there were survivors, and one where I know it was fatal.
I worked in the last 90s, my normal truck was a 94 Chevy 3500HD, I don't remember who made the wrecker body. Most of ours were Century or Jerr-Dan, and most of the trucks came from Reed and Hoppes in Michigan. Learning new techniques is great; my first time working a difficult tow with a flatbed with the second company I worked for (an International 4700 with a Caterpillar and a seven-speed manual) demonstrated how to use snatch blocks, which I'd never used 'cause the other company I drove for was too cheap to buy them.
There's an art to recoveries, and every scene is an engineering problem--I worked several that took two wreckers to recover the vehicle for a variety of reasons, like down in a stream and on top of a rock, or firmly wedged between a pair of trees and the back of the truck is six feet off the ground 'cause it nose-dived in . . . . mechanic-wise, I did my second (or third, if you count a weird, time-consuming diagnosis) PTU on a Jeep Cherokee, and I learned from the prior attempts and got this one done quicker and now I know all the secrets and can bang one out fast enough to beat the book.
I just missed the days of them showing horror films to make you a careful driver. And I'll be honest, for years I was not a careful driver until one time I was blasting down back roads without a care in the world when I thought about what would happen if I met myself coming the other way around one of those blind curves, and after that I took more care.
:P The movie never has the proper smell-o-vision. . . .
I don't know if it would appeal to the FimFic audience in general, but it sounds like you've got a lot of great wrecker stories, probably more than I do, and I'd love to hear them. Whether in the form of blogs you post (and I know you've been reading my stuff for a while, you know the format: good story, pony pictures to lure people in). Or maybe someday we'll meet up at a con or whatever and can share some stories over the drink of choice
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Wow. You're rather knowledgeable about your vehicles.
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And then things went to Tartarus yesterday. One of the horizontal tracks on the 24' shop door came off the supports. Several hours later, with the help of a professional builder and a coworker, a loader and a backhoe, we got it fixed. So, not much got done around that. Found where the exhaust on a mid-2000s F250 was coming apart, not sure if I'll grind and weld the flanges or if it'll get sent out. Also the backhoe is having problems with restricted fuel/low power. Might be the computer limiting power thinking it's overheating, might be a re-clogged fuel filter, might be a pump, might be something else I don't know yet. Also have some fixes to do in the milking parlor in the brief period between morning and night milkings.
We only got a couple inches or so up here, thank goodness. I hope we don't get much more this weekend, though that's a secondary concern. With the nights going into the low single digits farenheit, equipment failures (especially gelled diesel and frozen fuel lines containing overmuch water), frozen water troughs, and similar cold related trouble will eat up everyone's attention.
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They did a supercut with all their scooter clips, just skip to virtually anywhere
If it only fails in the rain, it must be the fault of Filli Vanilli. Since it does not work in the rain, it is a short. That only narrows it down to miles-&-miles of wire. Seriously, although it is still a lot of work finding the electrical problem, now that you know that it is an electrical problem, it is a lot of less work.
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The joys of working on a farm, you not only got all the farm stuff to do but also fix all the machines in the downtime, such as it is.
Speaking of which, did I ever tell you about one of our customers who has a dairy farm and had an old Chevy truck that he drove for longer than he should have? At one point the back half of the exhaust fell off and it wasn't worth spending the money to have it professionally fixed, so he did it himself.
With stainless steel milk pipe, 'cause that's what was lying around.
Yeah, I'm so glad I don't have to deal with that. We had enough to make the parking lot at the shop unpleasant, and to require extra time to clean off cars enough to bring them in/test drive them, and of course the inside of the shop turned into a salty lake, but it wasn't that bad all things considered.
In my line of work, a week of really cold weather is good for business--as you've noticed, things freeze and break. Some years ago during a polar vortex, we sold nearly our whole stock of batteries.
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Not all that great; my first guess was that it was a Chevy/GMC and after I google-imaged that and didn't find a match, I tried for Ford :P.
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I am already imagining that the scooters get impounded by a garbage truck with the trash container picker-upper. I'm sure that's not how they actually get impounded, but I want to imagine it happening that way.
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"A lot less work." LOL, intermittent electrical problems are the worst. It's not just that it's finding something in the wiring, it's the fact that most of it is buried behind stuff or otherwise not easily accessible. Couple of weeks ago I had an intermittent electrical problem on a Ford F150 that affected one circuit.
It took me eight hours to find.
5833876
Well, it isn't a Mustang, anyway.