Some of my automotive screwups. · 8:37pm Aug 11th, 2017
I was just passing the time watching some YouTube videos, as one does when they know they've got lots of things to do but don't really want to just yet. Anyways, besides all the other fun people I subscribe to, there's this grizzled mechanic who works on Audis and VWs and other fancy furrin cars that occasionally gets my interest. Mostly when he talks about improvised tools or why you should save money and buy your tools from Amazon instead of the tool truck, that kind of thing.
Point is, he had one where he talked about some of his bigger screwups.
I'll confess, I didn't actually pay all that much attention after the first one, 'cause I was thinking of some of mine. And I came up with a few that would be interesting for a blog post, so here we go!
We might as well start with the one I blew up. Well, not literally, but I did destroy the engine.
The car in question was a mid 2000s Chrysler Sebring. Those came in several different varieties: a coupe, a sedan, and a fancy convertible. This one was a sedan.
Most of the time, when there are variants of a particular model, they're all built on the same platform. So, going back to the 70s, you might be able to get a convertible, sedan, coupe, or station wagon all built on exactly the same chassis. They'd have the same engine options, and aside from different body panels (like if you have a roof or not) they're mostly the same. And the oil filter catalogue would list them all together. For example, "Impala" and then you'd have a list of the engines that went into that car and what oil filter each different engine took.
This is not what Chrysler did with that series of cars. The three different body styles were three different platforms, and in fact they were quite different. Not only in terms of how the car looked, but even which engines were available on which platform.
Unfortunately, there were two different 2.4L engines. Completely different . . . IIRC, one was a Mitsubishi motor, and the other was a Chrysler engine. And those two engines took two completely different oil filters.
Looking at the oil filter catalog was somewhat misleading, since it listed all three separately. Of course, it also included the engine code after the engine size. And a smart tech would have verified that the engine code in the book matched what the car had, and if it didn't, do some more digging.
I wasn't smart.
At the time, I was working for Firestone, and I noticed that the car had a Firestone oil filter on it, so I just matched up the number. After all, that filter was clearly working, right?
Well, the last guy had gotten lucky.
I'm going to step back from this car for a moment to give you a bit of a gripe. Most everything on modern cars is metric; unfortunately, not everything is, and even worse, there are a couple of metric sizes that are really, really close to standard sizes. Close enough that you can screw a metric lug nut on a standard wheel stud or a standard brake line fitting into a metric wheel cylinder. . . and it almost works, but you can't really ever torque it down right, and sooner or later, it will work loose and fall off. If you're lucky, that happens right away.
As should be painfully obvious to everyone reading this, I'd grabbed a metric filter when I needed a standard one or vice-versa, and blissfully threaded it on and filled the car with oil, and off it went.
For a grand total of about six hundred miles. Between the heat cycles, the engine vibrations, and the fact that the threads were wrong, the oil filter finally parted company with the engine, and in rather short order after that (I would assume; I wasn't there to see it) all the oil went out of the car, at which point the engine seized up.
To the best of my knowledge, that's the most expensive screwup I've had in my years as a mechanic.
The next story also involves a dead engine, although this time it wasn't my fault. I mean, I guess I contributed since I wasn't forceful enough in rejecting shoddy parts, but . . . anyways! On to the story!
Besides oil, which the engine clearly needs in order to function, it also needs engine coolant. [Unless it's an air-cooled engine, of course.] And that coolant needs to circulate, which is the job of the water pump.
All a water pump is in a car is a little impeller wheel mounted in some kind of housing. And usually what fails on them is either the seals in the shaft, allowing a coolant leak, or the bearings fail. The rest of the system is generally pretty robust, which is why you can get rebuilt water pumps. How that works is some company takes the old ones, disassembles them, replaces the bearings and seals and maybe the impeller, and then they put them in a box and sell them back to you.
Obviously, some companies do a better job than others.
Some water pumps are pretty plain.
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This guy here's about as simple as they come (except for the fact that you can put the gasket on ten different ways and nine of them are wrong, but that's a subject for a different time).
Others are more complex.
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This one has a nice, beefy cast-iron housing, and it's also got two extra water pipes coming out of it--which some mechanics (mostly me) call 'antennas'.
Water pump antennas come in three different varieties, that I've seen. Some of them are threaded in; some are just pushed in, but bolt to the engine block to keep them secure (Dodge did this), and others are press-fit.
Of the three fastening methods, the last is the worst, IMHO. You're basically jamming a pipe into a hole that's a little too small for it and hoping that it stays put. Of course, in factory conditions, that tends to work pretty well. And even competent rebuilding facilities get it right.
So back to our car! This one was a mid 90s Caprice Classic, also known as Orca the Capricious Whale.
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(It wasn't actually a police car, but I just liked that image.)
It came in with a bad water pump. No problem; the service writer sold a remanufactured one, and I started tearing into it.
The first one I got looked like the rebuilder had just spray-painted one that they found in the mud at a junkyard. The aluminum was pitted from cavitation and corrosion, and the impeller looked sketchy as f
k. I rejected that one outright, and we ordered a second one.
The second water pump had loose antennas. Remember, on this car, they're press-fit in, and if they're loose, they're not going to stay when the coolant heats up and the cooling system builds pressure. Rejected that one.
The third one . . . well, that didn't fail any immediate visual tests. It looked okay . . . I wasn't terribly happy with it, just because the other two had been bad, but my service manager was getting upset that the car wasn't done yet, and he wasn't interested in ordering a new water pump for that car, or trying a different supplier, so in it went.
In hindsight, it should have been obvious that if you get two bad reman water pumps in a row from the same vendor, you probably ought to order from somebody else.
The antennas didn't come out right away, but they did eventually--within a couple of weeks--and the engine overheated and died. I don't know who ultimately paid for the repair, whether it was Firestone or the manufacturer of that water pump. I guess the moral of this one is don't use crappy parts, and service writers ought to listen to their techs.
Since we've already killed two cars, it's time to have a happier tale--a car that lived, despite my making a rather significant mistake. And somewhere I've actually got pictures of this repair, I think, although I'm not sure I really feel like wading through digital images from ten years ago to find it.
Ah, heck, I love y'all, so let's do it!
If you look closely, you'll see the front of the van behind the engine. Mechanically-inclined readers will note that there's no obvious hole where the engine came out . . . well, on Astros, it comes out the bottom. You get the engine, transmission, and front suspension all in one neat little package--that's basically the only way to replace the engine. Or the transmission.
As you can probably tell from the picture, the customer authorized the job, and I got to work on it. Everything went pretty smoothly, too. Got the old engine off the subframe, new engine on, put it back in the vehicle, and everything was pretty good.
Now, since it's been twelve years since I worked on this particular vehicle, I don't remember the exact circumstances of what happened next. But I do know that after I'd reinstalled the subframe on the vehicle and attached most of the parts that have to be attached after you've dropped a subframe, I discovered that the flexplate was on backwards.
Theoretically, in order to turn it around, I would have to drop the subframe again, remove the transmission, and basically do a whole lot of work that I really didn't want to. It would probably take five or six extra hours of work, just because I'd been dumb and not marked which side was which.
Luckily, this story ended happily: with a little bit of help from another mechanic, we were able to unbolt the transmission and slide it back just far enough that I could get the bolts out, drop the flexplate through the gap, turn it around, and put it back in.
The next one was one of those cases of the deck being stacked against me.
Some techs work for a particular type of shop--whether it's a dealership, or a shop that specializes in one or two types of cars. They have a bit of an advantage, since they tend to have lots of specific knowledge. Other techs, like myself, work on pretty much anything. We also have stuff we're familiar with, of course, and then there's the other cars where we read the service manual very carefully, because we're going in to a repair blind.
Such was the case with the Miata.
This job was gonna be a loser going into it: the customer wanted a timing belt as preventative maintenance (for anyone who has a timing belt engine in their car, you're supposed to replace those every now and then--check your owner's manual). And he'd already called Firestone's customer service number before we even looked at the car. We techs called that number 1-800-GET IT FREE, because of how they normally sided with the customer and not the shop.
So I recommended that he also replace the pulleys and tensioner while I was in there, and of course got shot down. And I really, really wish that this story was going to end with one of the pulleys going out a week or two later and the customer having to buy an engine, because that would have been lovely karma; unfortunately, that wasn't what happened.
Oh, and I also didn't mention this before--the guy wanted the car back by noon. In theory, that was possible: the book said that it took a couple of hours to do the job, and to be honest, Miatas have a nicely arranged engine compartment. It's not that hard to do a timing belt on one of them. Certainly compared to some cars, it's kind of a walk in the park.
I printed out all the instructions and tore into this dumb car. And I was doing pretty well--I had a little bit of guesswork on bolt sizes, since I don't work on that many Mazdas, but for the most part, things were going smoothly. I got the old belt off, compressed the tensioner, got the new belt put on, and everything was going according to plan . . . at least, until I tried to start the car. And it didn't start. Cranked over just fine, but it didn't go vroom.
Here's where I probably ought to explain how timing belts work, for those of you unfamiliar. In the simplest form, you've got the crankshaft, which is what the pistons attach to, and then you've got the cam, which is what controls the valves. They're on a 2:1 ratio--the crank goes around twice for each revolution of the cam--and the belt links the two together. So obviously, you need for the two of them to be in the right spot in order for things to work like they should. Usually, there's a mark on the crank gear, and another mark on the cam gear, and as long as those are where they ought to be, you're golden.
You also need to know that the pulleys that the belt rides on are keyed to their respective shafts, to keep them from turning in relation to the shaft, since obviously if the pulley can turn without the shaft turning, you'll never be able to get the engine in time.
Here's a picture to give you an idea. This isn't a Miata engine, but it doesn't really matter--the basic idea stays the same no matter how convoluted the timing belt routing is.
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I won't go into details of how the next part went as we tried to figure out why it wouldn't run--how I took it apart again to make sure it was in time, how we thought that maybe something else had coincidentally failed on the engine and misdiagnosed several other components. Ultimately, after several days we finally gave up and had the car towed to a Mazda dealer, to see if they could figure it out.
And they did. It probably didn't take the tech very long at all, since he knew what to look for.
There's a chance that one of you reading this already knows, but for the benefit of everyone else . . . .
The woodruff key that held the crankshaft sprocket in place was gone. The engine had chewed it up and spit it out, and that was a known problem with these cars . . . unfortunately, not known to me. Had I known, I could have simply taken the sprocket off and looked.
What that meant was that the car needed a crankshaft, and essentially that meant it needed a new engine. As soon as I'd loosened the bolt on the harmonic balancer, the engine was toast. Things held together as long as that bolt stayed tight, but once it was loose, the pulley would rotate freely on the crankshaft to whatever new position it felt comfortable in, and you'd never get the engine in time again, no matter how hard I'd tried or how many instructions I'd followed.
Upon receiving this sad news, our service manager informed me of what had happened, and he also said that the customer was understanding. That was kind of rare, to be honest, especially given that he'd called 1-800-GET-IT-FREE.
The service writer also told me that the guy was kind of sorry about how much time I'd spent on the car, and promised to bring his new car to me for service in the future.
Needless to say, I wasn't thrilled about that.
You see, at the time I was paid flat rate. That means that the amount of money I made was based on what the service manual said the job should take. Such a system has mixed results--and maybe I'll get into them in another blog post. Suffice it to say, I lost a fair bit of money working on his dumb car, and had little interest in doing any work on his car in the future.
Normally, something like that isn't something that I'd particularly remember, except that shortly after that incident, he came in for some service or another and as it happened, he was pulling out of the parking lot in his new Toyota at the same moment that I was helping the tool truck driver unload my new toolbox from his truck, and there was one brief moment where I thought about how satisfying it would be to give my new toolbox a little push and drop it right on top of that guy's Toyota. That would be a dent in my toolbox I'd be proud to own.
Great stories - thanks for sharing. Also makes me glad I don't need a car
Keys, splines, chamfers and timing marks. So much fun with those. Especially when the so called tension pulley is just bolted to a slotted arm, which means you have to press it in and then tighten up that bolt while keeping the pulley in place. I think they added camming since the old days?
Fucking timing belts. It really shouldn't cost $800 to replace, even if the engine has to be half disassembled to get at it and it requires fancy Sonic Screwdriver laser tools and shit.
When car shopping, make a point of checking if it uses a chain instead of belt.
But then, it was probably my fault for taking it to the dealer instead of asking the independent guy to do it. But still, got some nice reward credit at the dealer for a few free car washes and oil changes and stuff for that servicing.
Ha! I just watched my brother do a timing belt (+lifters +water pump +misc seals) on his Miata last weekend. And I also learned what a Woodruff key was a week ago since somebody is having trouble with their ignition on their motorcycle. Boy was I disappointed! It seems to be a fancy name for a cheap way to key a shaft to something.
Most of my oops stories are the same - simply starting a motorcycle oil change by removing the drain plug bolt... except since it's upside down I get easily confused and turn righty instead of lefty and cracking the aluminum crankcase (the cracking meaning a heli coil won't work). Yes, I have done this more than once!
How DARE you tell your customers to maintain their own cars! So very unprofessional!
Worked as a receptionist (overglorified greeter, in this particular case) at a dealership for a summer (side not: best damn fulltime, $15 an hour plus mandatory 8 hours of overtime job I ever had).
Had this one time where I was being a gofer to one of the dudes in the shop; he needed a part from our little warehouse and I ran for it, a gasket of some sort. I'm handing it off...
When the engine in the next bay freakin' splodes.
I don't mean "oh hey look smoke hahaha", I mean "BOOM".
Piston goes right by my ear.
(Sigh) I miss that job.
Have you ever come across electric connections that aren't the same as what you're replacing?
My dad's 98 GMC stopped working one day. After the standard procedure for finding why, we ordered a "new" referb alternator from Canadian Tire. With the clerk telling me that according to the computer it's what the truck uses 100% and it's all they have.
Now, an alternator doesn't sound like a big deal. But for whatever reason the computer needs the alternator to start. The old alternator had a simple clip connector with four prongs. Unclip, unbolt, done.
The new one had two prongs.
So because of the fact we didn't have any other alternatives, My dad and I played "guess which one will work" for about an hour until we found what ones started it and charged the battery.
Still works today, wonder why its connector was different though.
I have no idea what you speak of!
I got a 2004 Impala that had a coolant leak. Feared it was from the water pump itself. Nope. It was right behind the tensioner pulley. (Front wheel drive). Some sort of doverdever plastic thingy had cracked. Repair cost was reasonable.
I (barely) overheated my 94 Toyota Land Cruiser by forgetting a spring type hose clamp.... just last Saturday! I had recently taken the radiator out for new o-rings and a cleaning. Not much room in the engine compartment, but actually pretty easy work.
It was a bypass hose about as big around as my finger, which steadily leaked out coolant for about thirty miles. The temperature didn't start climbing until right around mile 28 or so. Pulled over, popped the hood, looked at the hose spitting steam around the pipe it was still sitting on, and said "huh".
I didn't have pliers to work the spring clamp, so I decided to use two bits of pipe (bottle jack handle) to attempt to work it, no dice. I decided the steam was not helping, so I used the same pipe pieces to vent the radiator cap. It didn't vent much, so I turned it the rest of the way, still using the pipe, thankfully. Nearly lost the cap when it bounced off the inside of the hood, and barely avoided getting drenched...
I ended up using the claw of a hammer to twist copper wire around the hose barb, which worked great. And i had a couple gallons of premix coolant handy to makeup the lost coolant, and have had no further problems.
I'm pretty impressed with this machine, actually. Nearly 300k miles, and some rough treatment, including some crap repairs (the PO is a nice guy, but he should stick to photography) and it still runs like a champ.
A mechanic screw-up made us lose our Suzuki Swift DDIS Diesel. It is an interesting story, so I thought I share it with you.
Our little Swift was special to me and my wife, we liked the little thing a lot. It was cobalt blue metallic, had silver checkered flag GT stripe from hood to tail.
On this day, we were on a little road trip, my wife was driving and I was on the passenger’s seat. We were driving down the autobahn at a speed of ca. 130 kmh, when I smelled the scent of diesel, we pulled in the next parking lot and opened the hood. You could see and smell that the car was losing fuel, the liftgate was covered in little diesel stains.
I am no mechanic but I now a little about cars and engines, not enough to repair my car or do more than simple checks and maintenance, so we called the German automobile club ADAC for help. They had a service called “yellow angels”, that means that they send you a mechanic to help drivers with a car breakdown, usually they are totally reliable and you can trust them completely. The guy they send to us was the exception of this rule.
He came, checked our car and found that the high-pressure pump of the common rail system was leaking. I asked him, if it was save to start the car again and drive home, or if we need a wrecker to take the car to the next Suzuki repair shop. He answered that we could turn around and drive home by ourselves. So, we were getting back on the autobahn to find a spot where we could make a U-turn.
Half a kilometre away our engine began to run amok, the engine speed rose without pushing the gas pedal and the car accelerated on its own. My wife panicked, I told her to push the clutch, shift to neutral and pull the car to the shoulder. She turned off the ignition, the engine still was running on its own, now the car sounded as it would explode any minute. White smoke came out of the hood and covert two lanes of the road. After a few seconds, the engine died.
Back then, I didn’t know enough about common rail diesel engines to understand what had happened. Now I do, the injection pressure of this type of engine has to be very high, so the high-pressure pump and the turbo are very sensible parts of this engine. If the pressure falls while driving the engine don’t get enough fuel, so the self-ignition of the diesel runs amok and eats up the remaining oil in the engine bevor it destroys the engine by pressure and overheating breaking the cylinder head gasket in the process. I don’t know if this explanation is completely correct, bud that’s how I was told by our mechanic or how I understood it.
I wish I had known that this could happen that day. I have an excuse, I am a layman like most people but I think I can expect that a mechanic would have known these facts and given us the right advise. I would not have complained if he had said that we needed a wrecker and that it is not safe to start the car again.
In the end, we lost a completely good car. This incident has happened nearly two years ago while I write this I’m still angry at this guy.
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You're welcome! They're a lot of fun to write.
There are times I wish that I didn't need a car. Like today, when I had to renew the plates on two of them.
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Yeah, and of course if you don't get it all lined up right you've got problems. Doesn't help when the manufacturer is stupid--there's a Ford product where the crank timing marks are on the front cover, so you have to hold it in place, rotate the crank, then take it back off . . . usually three or four times before everything is good. And Chrysler had an engine with fake cam timing marks on it (seriously, there was an extra mark that looked like it was the timing mark, but it wasn't).
Some automakers use non-keyed cam pulleys, which is an added bit of fun. The marks are then on the camshaft somewhere, and usually you need a special tool to hold them.
Most everybody's gone to hydraulic tensioners these days, although Chrysler kept using the dumb 'twist and hope' tensioner on their Neon engine all the way to the end of the Neon/PT Cruiser platform.
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Look under the hood of a PT Cruiser. Tha's a particularly horrible one to do.
And it's still better than timing chains on an Enclave . . . first step for those suckers is drop the engine and transmission.
And don't buy an early GDI GM product. The chain's less reliable than a belt.
A competent independent guy would have done as good a job probably for less. An incompetent one might have destroyed the engine, or left you with a misfire and rough idle you can never get rid of, at least not until the timing belt gets done again . . . the biggest problem with some of the newer cars is you need special tools to do a timing belt, and they ain't cheap. The set for Fords costs something like a grand, so we've got to do a bunch of timing belts on Fords to justify the cost. Or else improvise.
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Lots of boring stuff has fun names like that, though. A lot of that in woodwork, too: things like dados and my personal favorite, biscuit joiners.
Yikes! I've managed to assist in stripping the threads out of a few oil pans (usually because the last guy overtightened it, and when I go to take the drain plug out, I also get the oil pan threads with it) but never managed to crack an oil pan. Might not be a bad idea to invest in a cheap 3/8 torque wrench and use that to tighten (and loosen) drain plugs.
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Yes. Actually, more often than you think, we get wrong parts. Either because the boss ordered them wrong, or because they were boxed wrong. Or sometimes because the company that made it was dumb.
I don't want to bash parts guys, 'cause a lot of them are good. On the other hand, one time I went into Pep Boys and tried to get a part for my 78 Chevy pickup. 250ci inline 6, 3-speed manual transmission.
Guy at the counter said that there was no such truck.
I said that I had one in his parking lot and another one at home. But he was insistent that it didn't exist, so off I went to another store that had a halfway decent counterperson.
Technically, it shouldn't, although if the alternator's got two big red wires going to it, you're gonna have to connect them together--some GMs power some of the fuse panel directly from the alternator. And even if it does start without it, it obviously isn't going to run very long. Also, you want to avoid having those big red wires touch anything grounded, or things will get interesting, and not in a good way.
My guess would be that it was either boxed wrong, the guy at the counter was dumb (could be your truck has a weird option that made it get a different alternator, and he either didn't ask, or he just assumed), or the remanufacturing facility was dumb.
There were some alternators (Ford Taurus, IIRC) that came with a new connector, because the original design tended to melt. Likewise, GM truck fuel pumps from the late 90s to the mid 2000s come with a new connector, because the original design was bad. So that's a possibility, too, and it could be that the splice connector was missing from the box.
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Yeah, those stupid bypass tubes (everyone in the industry calls them 'coolant elbows') were a weak point on the 3.8L. We always replace them when we do intake gaskets, because it's dumb not to. It's actually a pretty easy fix. Something like six or seven bolts and you're there.
Some aftermarket suppliers make metal ones now, and if you have to replace them again, I'd go with the metal option.
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Oh, man, forgetting parts like that sucks. I almost sent out a Chevy truck last week without reconnecting the hose to the fuel filler neck. Guy would have been pretty upset when he went to put gas in it, if I hadn't remembered to put that back on at the last minute.
Having been subjected to a coolant explosion last year that thankfully only got my back, and only second degree burns . . . watch out for hot coolant, kids. It's no joke.
I'd recommend a new clamp at some point, but the twisted wire does work really well. My old glasses had one of the screws holes strip out, and I fixed it the same way. The wound up staying fixed like that for around five years before I finally got a new pair.
Toyota built some good trucks (also some really bad ones. . . ). For us, rust is the biggest problem; a lot of the Japanese pickups and SUVs have fully-boxed frames, and they rust from the inside out. Sometimes you don't even know how bad it is until the truck breaks in half.
I assume you've seen the Top Gear where they tried to kill a Toyota pickup? If not, here's the link to the first clip:
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Oh, man, I feel your pain. I had a Plymouth Duster that I really liked--it was a fun little car to drive. Unfortunately, the clutch went out on it and it was way too expensive for my budget to pay someone to fix, and I didn't have the tools to put a clutch in a front-wheel-drive car.
Also managed to total my old Chevy truck while I was test driving it after replacing the front fenders and fixing the speedometer. Guy ran a stop sign and broadsided me.
I'm a little bit surprised that the diesel ran away . . . I wouldn't have expected that myself, not from a leaking injector pump. Although I'm not much of an expert in diesel cars, since they aren't all that popular in the US, and certainly not where I live.
That having been said . . . even without the risk of a runaway, that guy never should have told you to drive it with an underhood fuel leak. There's an enormous possibility of fire, and a roughly zero percent chance of you being able to put it out before the car's a total loss, even if you have a fire extinguisher with you.
I'd strongly discourage people from driving a car with a fuel leak anywhere, mind you, but underhood is particularly dangerous. There are just too many hot things in there that want to start a fire.
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Sure have! Tough little beastie.
Oh, and I did put the spring clamp back on, later, but wasn't impressed with its strength, so the wire's still on. I got a few worm drive clamps in about the right size, so I might throw one on.
Oh, and you mentioned the Ford alternator connector that tended to melt? Turns out that everything they made for several years had that. My '90 Bronco originally did, but someone got ahold of a kit to convert it to screw terminals at some point. Unfortunately, said kit seems to not have been a commercial success, so I can't get one to install on a new alternator. What's more, none of the alternators the local parts place has in stock seem to come with the connector pigtail, and they don't stock the connector by itself.
But I don't blame the parts guys. They don't have any way to browse their inventory save through entering year, make, and model, and they don't build that database. And they don't box up the product, either.
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I went aluminium. Go big or stay home is my motto.
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I was quite impressed by the little thing. Makes me almost want one, to be honest.
We usually replace the spring clamps with worm clamps. The advantage of the spring clamps is that they can maintain pressure over their entire lifetime; on the other hand, when you replace the hose, that's usually the end of the clamp's lifetime, as well, and finding new ones is practically impossible.
I usually ran into it on the Tauruses and cars of that ilk, but I'm not surprised it was a common 'feature' on other Fords. Back when we were doing those, I worked in a shop that was in a city, so we didn't work on too many older pickups/SUVs. Probably why I never ran into it on them.
Yeah, you're probably going to be hard-pressed to find that repair pigtail anymore. A high-quality new alternator might come with one, but odds are that the cheaper remans don't.
At Firestone, we used Bosch new alternators, and they had the pigtail kit in them. Mind you, this was ten or more years ago now, so I couldn't say what they're using now.
Yeah, that's true. Some of the older guys are pretty good at matching things up because they know their uncatalogued well and are willing to go into the back room and open boxes to find what you need, but for the most part, that's getting less common, and probably a lot of them wouldn't do it for some random guy, either. I've gotten them to do it for me, but then our shop is one of their biggest customers, so they're gonna go a little bit further for me than they would anybody else.
Heck, just yesterday I told the parts driver to tell the store manager to give me a new hat when she got back to the shop. I told her to tell him that I'd broken my old one.
Two parts runs later, I had a new hat, completely free of charge.
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That's the way to go
Your comment made me think for a moment what kind my Impala had, and then I remembered it's got the crappy 3.4, not the 3.8. So I don't have coolant elbows. My common coolant leak is cracked cylinder heads.
A front driven car feels great especially with a good chassis. One reason we liked the little Suzuki so much, the Swift comes with nearly a sports suspension.
Nothing is more fun than that, especially on a winding mountain road. Only riding a motorcycle is better. The Plymouth Duster is a beautiful car, I always liked the design of classical US cars, simple, nice and clear.
Keeping other people away from crashing into your car seems to be a worldwide problem, I benefited a lot from learning to read in other drivers so you can easier predict their failures and be aware. It’s a little like reading the body language of a person, we even made a little game out of it. You could call it: What idiot is driving there?
Or I go whit the motorcyclist axiom: 70% of the people you meet on the road are dangerous, self-centred jerks who will try to kill you, the rest is not paying any kind of attention. This kind of thinking is mean but it helps staying alive and prevents from getting too cocky.
We were very surprised and shocked ourselves. I owned diesel cars for more than 15 years, this never happened to me before, after the incident I started to research the topic and found other, similar stories. We used to buy diesel cars because we drive a lot of kilometres. We live on the wavery countryside and I work for a hospital, mostly on nightshift, in the city, my wife is a private tutor and must drive to her clients. Normally the lifespan of a diesel engine is very long, the car before the little Swift was a Seat Arosa SDI we had to give it up because of new German environmental regulations. We gave it to my mother in law and it has now nearly 400 thousand kilometres on the milometer, the car looks really crappy but the engine works like on the first day. I think that adding a turbo to a diesel engine is a way to reduce the lifespan of the engine, sure you get more power out of a smaller engine but the turbo system is fragile and needs a lot of tending to. I would not be surprised if this is made on purpose, as part of planned obsolescence. More expensive diesel has electronical safeguard system to monitor the turbo system, I found that out while chatting with a guy that works for Opel/ Vauxhall.
One of the firemen who came to help us said if our car had been a gasoline car it would have burned out.
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Yeah, it does. And even a lousy one, if all you're used to driving is pickup trucks.
That was a car that stole a bunch of styling cues from the Chevy Camaro (of the era). And I really wish that I'd gotten to drive it on more twisty, hilly roads.
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Yeah, and I've missed a lot of collisions by assuming that the other driver is a complete idiot who got their driver's license in a box of Cracker Jacks. Unfortunately, this happened at a blind intersection, and I never saw him coming until it was too late.
That's what I learned from riding a bicycle. Every car is out there to kill you.
Usually, if you keep up on your maintenance, turbos are reliable. More now than they were, anyways. Well, at least in the US. I suppose I can't speak for the whole world.
Oh, yeah, no question. Diesels usually do, as well. Typically, once you get a fuel fire going, it's all over. It's harder to get diesel started burning than gas, but there's plenty of stuff under the hood on your car that's hot enough.