Mechanic: The Sad Cruze II · 2:33am Feb 14th, 2019
Comebacks. They’re the automotive repair version of people at the service desk trying to get a refund for the widget they just bought that they now realize they have no use for whatsoever, at least in general. Why, we had some lady one time call and complain that “ever since* we’d fixed her AC, it hadn’t worked.” We checked her service history, and we’d done some AC work on her car.
Two years ago.
We pointed this out to her, and she said that she just hadn’t had time to stop by or call.
Sure you didn’t.
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*”Ever since” are the worst words that mechanics ever hear.
There are a couple of categories for comebacks. One of them is that the customer is just trying to get free stuff, and I won’t touch on that, since every single person who’s ever worked in any kind of job where they interact with customers understands this. Or buyer’s remorse; that’s the other side of that coin: I bought it and now I realize that I didn’t want it after all.
There are times where we’re wrong about what was wrong with the car. I’ve covered some of those before, where the instructions were unclear, or else we get a misleading reading. Maybe it isn’t malfunctioning like the customer says when it comes into the shop, or maybe one problem has cleared itself up (temporarily) and we find something else. Or they complain about the wrong system, and we fix what was wrong with that system but it isn’t actually what they really wanted fixed. One day, I’ll get into customer communication issues (that has the potential to be a very long blog post).
Sometimes the part doesn’t work. We have our own explanations for that. “New” stands for “Never Ever Worked”; or the part might “exceed factory specifications.” There are some things we know about: Wells ignition coils for 3.8 liter GM engines that don’t meet spec right out of the box, aftermarket alternators that can’t be computer controlled, so the PCM just throws its electronic hands up and says “I have no idea what that alternator is trying to do.” Sometimes they’re obvious right out of the box, sometimes they aren’t. There are ‘universal’ parts that we disparagingly refer to as “cut to fit,” and there are the ones where quality control was clearly asleep at the switch.
And then there are the cars that are cursed.
We’re not talking a simple curse, here. This is the real deal; this is where some witch doctor or voodoo shaman or what have you laid a curse either on the car or on the tech specifically, and those are the real losers. No matter what we do as techs, it’s not going to work right, and the car’s going to be one of the shop’s albatrosses basically forever.
I’ve owned one of those. It was a 1984 S-10, it had been totaled at least once (it had a pink title*), and I got it cheap. And I put more money into it than I have any other vehicle I’ve ever owned.
Nothing made any difference. It was the same piece of s
t no matter how much I spent. Leaked oil like a sieve, things broke on it that have never broken on any other vehicle ever (for instance, the mechanical fuel pump fell off the block once), and no matter what I did, its condition did not chance one bit.
On the plus side, it almost always ran, even though every time it started, it sounded like it was the last time the starter was going to work.
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*In Michigan, normal titles are green, and salvage titles are pink.
Such was the case with the Cruze.
You may remember that it came in with a boatload of codes that were contradictory, and that it turned out to be a vacuum leak in the valve cover. And I can’t remember if I mentioned that the valve cover had been replaced before, but it was out of warranty when it came back in the second time for the exact same problem.
It also had cooling system problems.
Cooling systems on modern cars are complicated. In order for the engine to run efficiently, it has to be up to temperature, and because of emissions laws, you want that to happen as fast as possible. If it gets too hot, though, things melt, and that’s bad.
You also want there to be heat as fast as possible out of the heater, because that makes the customer happy, and that cuts down on idle times. Nobody wants to get into a cold car.
These days, lots of stuff on engines is made out of plastic, and parts of the cooling system are no exception. There are lots of fittings and housings that can be made of plastic and they’ll work just fine. The gasket needs to be special, of course, since plastic and aluminum expand at different rates, but that’s not an insurmountable problem, unless it’s a GM vehicle with Dex-Cool. Dex-Cool dissolves plastic if it’s exposed to oxygen. Luckily, cars tend to be operated in conditions where there isn’t any oxygen, though, so that won’t be a problem. 
That is, of course, a huge problem, one which GM has tried to fix multiple times with some degree of success.
And I shouldn’t bash them too much; Ford can’t make plastic housings or coolant bottles either. Not on their cheaper cars, anyway. Nine time out of ten, a Focus’s coolant leak is the plastic coolant housing on the rear of the block. The tenth time, somebody scraped the bottom of the radiator off on a road hazard.
We’d fixed that water passage on the Cruze before, and after we did, it came back for overheating, since the radiator cap had malfunctioned (because of the curse). Radiator caps (or degas bottle caps, as the case may be) have to be able to hold in a certain amount of pressure, no more, no less. This one didn’t get the ‘no less’ part right.
So it got a new one on its comeback, and all was good.
Fast forward a few months, past the second failure of the valve cover, and it was leaking coolant again. This time it was coming out of the other end of the engine, the thermostat housing. Also plastic.
In these, the thermostat housing is bolted directly to the water pump, and that’s another reasonably high-failure item. Given the mileage, it was sensible to replace the water pump at the same time. While that was a more expensive repair overall, it would save the customer money in the long run, since the car would need a water pump in the near future most likely, and we could just go and replace all the parts we hadn’t yet that fail on these.
The customer, who for some reason liked this dumb, cursed car, agreed, and I spent a pleasant few hours putting a water pump on it. In case you didn’t know, you have to take off one of the motor mounts, which means that you’ve got to support the engine from below. It’s a several hour job, but I’ve got a few of them under my belt [the nice thing about pattern failures is that you get lots of practice fixing them, and can get quite quick at the job], and everything went smoothly.
Hah!
The customer called the very next day. The car was overheating, which was something it hadn’t done before. Previously, it had leaked coolant, but the engine temperature had stayed good so long as the coolant was kept full. So my manager said to bring it back.
When it came back, after however long a drive it was from the customer’s house to our shop, the coolant in the degas bottle was boiling merrily. Incidentally, “boiling merrily” is something that coolant should never do.
After things had calmed down enough that the cap could be removed without the risk of severe burns, my manager determined that the fairly new cap had failed, and he got a new one.
In the process--said process also involved blaming a few things on me, even though they weren’t my fault and the Cruze was clearly cursed somehow--he bumped the radiator hose that went to the thermostat housing, and it started leaking.
There are several types of clamps in use on automobiles these days. Spring clamps, or constant tension clamps as they’re properly known, are the most common.
Worm clamps are often used after repairs, and were popular among the OEMs (with variants) through the 70s. Sometime in the 90s, BMW had the idea of using a wire bail to hold the thing together, and GM copied that design. It’s simple, and really easy to assemble. You just snap the thing in place, and done. Removal is easy, too: take the wire bail out, and the hose come off. Easy.
The system also relies on one or more O-rings to seal the coolant in, and in the case of our Cruze, one or more of them was bad, since whenever you touched the hose, coolant leaked out.
One thing that anyone who’s worked customer service for a while knows is that sometimes you just bite the bullet. We could make the customer buy that hose--it wasn’t our fault that it was bad. But we’d been the last ones to have touched it, and the water pump had been an expensive repair (about $600). He already wasn’t happy; this wasn’t the first time that we’d fixed his car and it had come back a day or two later with a similar problem. And even though that wasn’t our fault, it was just the coincidence or the curse, we were willing to do him a favor and fix it for no cost (for those who are wondering, the cap was under warranty, so that was no cost to us). The hose wasn’t terribly expensive, nor was it overly difficult to replace.
Once it had been put on, my manager thought that he ought to test drive the car several times just to make sure that it was fixed for good. That wasn’t unreasonable, so until noon, it became our shop car. Need to get a customer? Take the Cruze. Need to get a part? Take the Cruze. Need to get lunch? Take the Cruze.
Well, that last one was a lie. It didn’t last that long.
Right around noon, he told me that he had to give a customer a ride home. He took the Cruze, and I went on doing whatever it was that I was doing. That was a normal thing, and I didn’t give it a second thought.
A little bit later, the phone rang. I ran up front and answered it.
Him: I’m going to be a while. I got into an accident.
Me: What happened?
Him: I don’t know.
Me: Are you okay?
Him: I hit my head.
At that point, I didn’t know he’d taken the Cruze, but because I’m a curious chap, I looked out into the parking lot, and it was gone.
He called back a second time. Our new guy had to come and take the customer home.
And then a third time. Our new guy had to pick him up . . . only our new guy wasn’t back yet.
A few minutes later, an ambulance stopped in front of the shop, and my manager got out. He had a nasty cut on his forehead--from the rearview mirror--and some bruises, and he was still a bit out of it.
As he told the story, he’d waited at an intersection for a car, and then proceeded through, unaware that there was a truck that had been following the car. He never saw it, or maybe saw it just at the last second; in either case, it was too late.
And for as often as I’m unkind to my manger (and let’s be honest, he mostly deserves it), that is a dangerous intersection. Certainly, to an out-of-towner, it’s not entirely clear that traffic from one direction does not stop, nor is it entirely clear that you have to turn to follow the road; otherwise, you’re at risk of being broadsided. He, of course, did know, since he’s lived here for most of his life.
To his good fortune, the local cop only issued him a ticket for failure to yield at an unsignaled intersection, which I believe is a no point ticket. And I think that’s fair, even though he should have known. We have a bit of a special relationship with the local cops since we’re the ones who maintain their cruisers, and I suppose he could have scraped by with no ticket at all (I have several times, but that’s a different story); to make insurance companies happy, the cop assigned fault but no lasting penalty.
Yes, I’ve used this in a blog post before. Sue me.
And that wasn’t the only thing he suffered. He had a wound to his forehead that bled a lot, as those things tend to do, and of course he was stiff and sore for several days after. But more importantly, it fell to him to explain to the customer what had happened to his car.
The Cruze was a total loss.
I really don’t envy him that phone call. The customer was probably already not in a good mood; he’d spend a bunch of money fixing his car, and had had to bring it back a few days later for an even worse problem which was in all honestly related to the first problem. It was no fault of ours, of course, but it was still the system we’d worked on, and maybe if we’d done more diagnosis or test-driven it more the first time, we would have found the new problems.
The customer had surely expected to get his car back at the end of the day, fixed this time, and instead, he got a call that his car was dead, totaled in a road accident, and even worse, it was our fault.
Had he come in yelling and screaming, I wouldn’t have blamed him, and maybe he did some of that on the phone. I wasn’t privy to that phone conversation. [I was privy to a similar phone conversation: back when I was in charge and one of our guys accidentally backed a customer’s Mercury Villager (or as the customer called it, “the chick magnet”) through our bay door, totaling the door and denting the Villager. That wasn’t all that fun.]
There’s probably a lesson to be learned in all this. Don’t crash a customer’s car, I suppose. But more importantly, stepping back from the whole thing, I have to say that in terms of dealing with a car that was cursed, perhaps wrecking it was the best long-term solution. It will never again have a cooling system problem, after all.
If you’ve gotten this far, it’s time for some real talk. The incident with the Cruze happened last year, and I wrote this blog post back then. There was editing yet to be done, and of course lots of topical pony images to find and add . . . sometimes it takes just as long to find all the right images as it does to actually write the blog post, especially if I’m talking about something esoteric.
To my long-time readers, it’s no secret that I’ve got stuff that sits in the hopper for months or even years before it’s finished and sent on its way. And there are also things that I’ve teased that haven’t been written yet, such as the case study on the Sprinter (I’ve made enough progress that I’ve got an action video on YouTube*).
This was one of them. I wrote it not long after it happened. I was hoping to get a post-crash picture of the Cruze, but it got towed off to some distant impound lot. I’m sure I could have found a picture of a wrecked Cruze that would have been almost as good, but I didn’t.
And in all honestly, this one was on the way to the place where blog posts go to die.
To you, my loyal readers, circumstances intervened in your favor!
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*Okay, that’s my Suburban idling; I didn’t actually upload that action video to YouTube. I thought I had, but apparently not.
One thing that mechanics aren’t supposed to do is crash customer’s cars. And while I’m not totally innocent of it--I ran a customer’s Econoline into a lamppost once, and I also did some damage to a F-150 when I got the door with the post on the alignment rack, I have thus far managed to avoid crashing a customer’s car on a test drive.
Unlike my manager.
Y’all can guess where this is going, so take a sip of your favorite beverage.
Just today, I did front brakes on a Nissan Pathfinder. It also had a weird vibration from the front end which was caused in some part by the differential trying to vibrate its way out of the Nissan and into an actual SUV.
I’d been read the riot act on this particular vehicle already. My manager had looked it over and deemed it safe, then had me take it for a test drive, followed by yet another inspection. As I was giving him the results of my work, he went off to answer a phone call, ignoring the complete list. Then he took it for a test drive, too, and found that it had a front end vibration at 70 or 55 or 45 or 35--he kept changing his story--and he tore me a new one for not telling him even though I had told him and he’d ignored me.
But never mind that.
Now that it had new brakes, it was time to take it for test drive.
Y’all who aren’t living in a Winter Wonderland will have to use your imagination for the next part. The rest of y’all, just nod your heads as we go along.
Our weather in the last few days can be best described as ‘variable.’ There was snow and sleet and maybe a bit of rain, and it got above freezing and then it got back below freezing, and the wind blew, and the st flew, and there were drifts and blowing snow.
I took this dumb Pathfinder for a test drive and I only just made it around the corner where my manager had wrecked the Cruze and I was accelerating even though I knew that there’d been snow blowing across the highway because I needed to get it to 70 or 55 or 45 or 35 to see if the vibration was gone [it wasn’t]. It was a platinum edition, loaded with all the bells and whistles, so it would be fine.
Until it wasn’t.
I’ve lived in Michigan for most of 41 years, and I’ve been driving for a lot of those years. I’ve practiced skids and skid recovery, but when you’re on a sheet of glass, there’s nothing that you can do but hold the wheel and hope for the best. The rear end slipped, and then I was going sideways across two lanes, and I countersteered and took my foot off the gas, but it was too late already. She went left and then right and then she was off the road and into the gigglyweeds, and I was thinking that as long as we don’t roll we’ll be okay. And then we were in the corn stubble and slowing down, and I have to say for those of you who have never experienced it, looking through the side window at what’s coming up is always a stressful situation.
Do not recommend.
It didn’t roll, and when it finally came to a stop, I dialed it into 4wd [Protip: 4wd is for getting you out of trouble, not getting you into trouble] and drove back up onto the road. The guy who’d been behind me had smartly decided to stop and stay clear of the impending wreck. I can’t say if he was impressed with my cornfield jaunt or horrified, but I bet he didn’t make the mistake of accelerating over the ice just to see what would happen.
I finished the test drive and determined that the vibrations were still present probably--I wasn’t willing to drive fast enough to be sure. And then I pulled back into the shop and made sure that there wasn’t any corn stubble stuck to the thing, and we gave it back to the customer.
At the end of it, I can confirm that the 4wd works (got me out of a cornfield), and incidentally the brakes do, too.
And I can say that I still haven’t wrecked a customer’s car on a test drive. So that’s a win, in my book.
Jeeze. Glad you're okay!
5012728
I didn't even soil the seat. Win!
And then you have the truckers GPS jammer causing signalling errors due to positional stuff, that is if they have that predictive road condition stuff up and running yet. Bound to mess with something somewhere. What was it with aircraft? Two different cell phone networks happened to have a beat frequency that was a carrier for one of the controller networks or something?
May do customer contracts. Customer wants you to test drive to check it in non good weather, its their problem if the black box shows you were legal otherwise?
All I know is Gigglyweed has to be Tree Hugger's younger sister.
I get variants of that in the computer world. Build thirty laptops, and 29 of them work perfectly, then there's Bob. Walk somebody through doing something remotely on the phone for an hour of fail time, drive three hours to get to the site, poke one button and come home. (Seriously, *that* one. The one with the label on it. Sigh) Thankfully, I've never totaled a loaner laptop. :)
I've had my car issues too. Our Reliant, which wasn't. The RX-4 which stood for how many times a week it wanted to be in the car doctor's office. The Grand Caravan which *only* had engine trouble in the summer during stop and go traffic when the mechanics weren't around and did not leave a code. (but we did leave it with the mechanics for two weeks for them to drive around, make deliveries, and transport people without a single hiccup) The van that we put close to a thousand dollars worth of AC parts into the week before it got totaled. All little things, so far, probably relating to our habit of not buying a car with less than 100k miles on it.
Well that's a heck of a way to stress test your heart. Cheers for coming out of it without a scratch or having to do your laundry early!
Huh, the pegasus in that second pic is drinking a can of the same thing that I'm drinking a can of right now it looks like...
5012772
I know that AC one. '93 Cavalier that needed the AC fixed every summer (but was fine in the spring, no matter how hot)
Wow, all that happened when I got hit by a car was my front wheel got bent and my chain popped off.
Me: Your car needs brakes.
Customer: I just had brakes put on there!
Me: When?
Customer: Two years ago!
Me:
Did not know that.
That microsecond of time where the only thing that goes through your head is 'oh shit.'
Moral of the story is always drive to Eurobeat in Michigan. It has been well documented that that genre of music improves car handling by “Many%”
I had a Honda Civic hybrid. The thing was likely cursed. I assumed it was assembled under a baneful star. Never saw a windshield chip so easily ( though I drive a lot). A pickup truck driven by a teenage girl backed into my parked car and skewered my bumper with her trailer hitch. I was in the car at the time. I moved my car away from a potential fallen tree before a storm. Next morning, a different tree dropped a branch on it. The final straw was I had an oil change at the dealer on Friday afternoon. Engine seemed sluggish on the way home. Didn't go anywhere that weekend, drove to work Monday, on the way back, engine threw a rod and cracked the block...had just passed the drivetrain warranty period.
I will say you had a nice recovery, cornfield included.
Sounds like you had some fun. My cursed car was a 2002 VW Jetta 1.8T. Some of it was my fault, bottoming it out and taking out an oil pan, but that car was a royal pain to work on and it never completely felt right. It has sat for a few years and hopefully this spring I can finally haul it off to the scarp yard and get some money.
Diesel diesel diesel!
In my opinion, a squarebody diesel 'Burb is cooler than a sprinter anyway.
That is assuming the curse doesn’t carry over to the next car. Had that happen to a friend with a laptop and 4 replacements. I think AppleCare officially labeled the problem as “it’s cursed” in an official diagnosis at one point in the saga.
Lol, I got a brand new 2019 truck at the end of December. Went in to the dealership once in January for a radio/touchscreen/infotainment (its what they call it) problem. And, now its gone back a second time for the same problem, but they have to order a new radio/infotainment unit... and I am waiting for it to come in still.
Worth it entirely for Pony Cop Snoot Boop.
My cursed car was a 1994 Mitsubishi Lancer hatchback. Bought it from an old couple who were 'moving out' into permanent retirement on a HUGE motorhome. Drove it 15 minutes down the road to a service station, and some idiot in a big GMC pick-up backed into it, wrecking the front end and then took off. Managed to limp to a nearby wreckers, where they mostly straightened the front end rails and supplied a few parts to get it looking like a car again. Got it home, went through two second-hand radiators before forking out the reddies for a new one. Got the rail professionally straightened and the front end parts replaced (did most of the body work myself, save for the rails). I had it re-registered and back on the road no more than eleven days when another idiot backed into me at a set of lights, almost undoing all I'd done once again (only the replaced radiator support panel and the chassis rails escaped being damaged). Once again, a trip to a wreckers I'd been through before turned up an almost-duplicate of my car that had been rear-ended. It lost its front-end to my car. I kept it another six months before the clutch started to give way, and I finally traded it in on a much bigger 2004 Ford Wagon.
The first guy's pick-up was finally found in Victoria, in a wrecker's yard, interestingly enough.
The second guy actually walked up to an auto-shop and bought some stuff that helped the was-new, now damaged, radiator to hold together until I got home. Nice of him, but he had no insurance to speak of. So I bore the cost, since I wasn't going to let my insurer write-off one of the faster cars I've ever owned (The Lancer had a very non-genuine-spec 2.6L engine in it with a tricked-out racing gearbox and clutch set-up, which is why I finally ditched it, since getting a replacement was nearly impossible).
That engine is what got me nearly two grand as a trade-in, when the sales-guy recognised what it was, and wanted my old Lancer for himself. Something about a new body to wrap around that powerful engine. The most fun part was watching him drive it up into the workshop. I told him the clutch was very touchy... and the idiot floored it. He nearly buried it into the back wall of the workshop! Didn't matter to me, the deal was done and the Lancer was his... but it would have been a waste.
These blogs are like a mix of surgeon testimonial and real-life adventure story. Always glad to see one come out of the hopper.
Last saturday I had someone bringing back a tent, one that had a know problem, normally I'd take it back without asking questions. Except it was more then 9 years old.
Ive had a few one those, thought most namely a tractor. It was an old minneapolis moline UB. A brute of a thing really... if the thing ever ran well enough to move 10 feet. New wiring whole new ignition setup, doctored up radiator, new water pump... that thing hated me till the day the guy drove it on his trailer... then I bought a crew cab, long box one ton with a tbi 454... headaches like youve never seen.
5012739
I dunno--I feel like that one was overblown, but I’m not entirely sure. Lotta radio waves in the ether, and it’s hard to predict what might interfere with an airplane’s electronics.
Technically, they are supposed to sign a sheet of paper saying that they authorize us to drive their vehicle, although at our shop we generally don’t do that. I think that regardless of what the customer signs, it’s our responsibility if we wreck their car . . . and that’s what we have insurance for, really.
5012763
Very possible.
5012772
Believe me, we get our share of that with customers, too. Fortunately, most of them do know how to operate a motor vehicle, and we don’t have to teach them. Most of them. There was one older guy, he got a rental after he wrecked his Mercury, and he couldn’t figure out how to put it in park, so he came by the shop for us to show him. And left it running. In gear. Luckily, with the parking brake on (which actually worked, since it was a nearly new car).
I haven’t seen him in a while. I hope that’s because he lost his driver’s license.
I don’t know what a RX-4 is, which is probably just as well. As for the Reliant . . . well, automotive names tend to be aspirational, so I’d probably have stayed away from a car with a name like that.
I hate it when that happens. Sometimes it’s because we don’t drive it the way the customer drives it, and other times it’s just because vehicles can be little bastards when it comes to malfunctioning.
We had an Impala that did that, and then luckily one time it failed when I was driving it. I was never so happy to see a dozen warning lights come on all at once.
That’s the worst, when you fix a car and then it gets wrecked right after that. Sometimes the insurance company will make an allowance if you just had major work done, other times, it’s ‘screw you, Jack.’
I also rarely have cars with fewer than 100k miles on them, and until my Jeep, most of my fleet had well over 200k on it.
5012778
It was an exciting couple of seconds, I can tell you that.
5012784
Tab? I just bought a case of it a little while back, ‘cause my manager and I were talking about it and he thought it was extinct and I said that you could still buy it from Meijer.
5012786
That’s what happened when I hit a car with my bike, too. Well, except for the chain popping off; that stayed on.
5012789
This is why I’m glad I don’t do the up front stuff any more. I don’t have to deal with that.
That’s apparently why all the engines with the plastic carriers for the intake gaskets failed. And I’m sure you remember whenever you replaced a set, the plastic guide that held the gasket in was broken off. Also those dumb plastic coolant elbows on the 3.8s that you’d pull out and the end was gone.
Pretty much.
At least there wasn’t any oncoming traffic. That would have added to the excitement, and not in a good way.
5012790
Dragonforce is good when you want to go fast.
5012791
My dad’s Chevette was like that. It rarely had mechanical failures, but it was a magnet for vehicle collisions. It was the first car he’d bought new in about 12 years, and it was only a couple of days old when it got rear-ended the first time. While parked. Also rear-ended at a red traffic light, rear-ended at a tollbooth, I think hit in both sides one time or another, and finally totalled when somebody pulled out in front of it on Telegraph Road.
I did, and I was very happy for that.
5012800
There are some people who like VWs, and I’m not one of them. They’re just weird mechanically, and take a whole lot of tools people who aren’t VW techs don’t own.
We’ve got a customer with a diesel Beetle of about that same vintage that’s got tons of mechanical problems. I think he might finally have gotten rid of it; I haven’t seen it in a while.
5012810
It is, but the case study on the Sprinter will be way cool. Sometimes, when you turned on the parking lights, the windshield washer ran . . . and it wasn’t the multifunction switch.
5012836
Usually with cars it doesn’t, but there are two exceptions:
1. You, specifically, have been cursed, in which case it doesn’t matter what car you buy, or
2. You’re an idiot when it comes to picking cars.
We have some customers that fall into the latter category. Like the one that bought a 2007 Hummer H3 for something like $20,000 and it’s mechanically way worse than my $200 Caravan.
5012875
Ooh, nice shiny new truck!
I got a newer minivan last year. Not that much newer, though. It’s a 2007. And it doesn’t have a touchscreen.
One of our customers also had to have his fancy touchscreen radio replaced under warranty--I think his truck was a couple of years older, though. 2017, maybe? Some of those electronic parts take a while to get, and the dealer really has to jump through hoops to get one. In my brief time at a GM dealership, I ran into that once with some electronic dingus, where it had to be special ordered and there had to be a special case number put through before it could be warrantied.
5012878
That’s an adorable picture.
5015498
It is almost like VW doesn't want anyone other then their dealers from doing any work on the vehicles.
5012880
My current record is two days of ownership before the car broke (mechanical), and in this case, I’d bought it for $50 on its way to the junkyard, so it’s not like I expected great things. Sold it to another guy for $200 who fixed it and drove it for a couple more years.
On FWD cars, if you haven’t got good tools and a lot of determination, replacing the clutch is not fun at all. I’ve done a few in pickup trucks in my driveway, but my one FWD car that lost its clutch, I just sold for scrap. Wasn’t worth fixing (that was another $50 car).
That’s the kind of thing that’s fun for a weekend car but horrible for a daily driver. I learned that from a buddy that had a car like that. Things were constantly breaking and hard to find replacements for. Man, though, that car was fun when it worked.
I’ve got a panel van that people want to buy just becuase of the engine. If I didn’t have ideas for it myself, I could make my money back on that truck and then some by selling the engine and scrapping the rest.
Hopefully the engine survived at least.
I gave my Grand Marquis to a guy who was going to do a body swap, ‘cause it ran well enough that I thought it would be a shame to scrap it, but it also had a ton of mechanical problems (including no brakes) which I really didn’t want to fix.
5012910
Thank you!
I need to get back on a regular schedule of publishing them. I’ve just got a lot of other projects going on concurrently.
5013187
Freaking people, man. Like, I’m sorry you’re not satisfied any more, but our warranty isn’t forever, and just because we fixed one thing on your car doesn’t mean everything’s fixed.
5013577
Sometimes you’ve just got to know when a machine won’t work for you, no matter what. One of my s-10s was like that . . . I did an engine swap (I bought it with a blown motor), and it was known good--I drove the donor truck up until about a week before the transplant.
That motor never worked right after the transplant. I finally just gave up on it, and it’s sitting in my backyard, waiting until I get enough free time to pull the motor, trans, and a few other good parts back out of it.
Oh, I can imagine. I don’t think that the TBI 454 was a very good engine. And some of those trucks with GM’s OBD-1 engine management system had some really interesting faults.
5015504
I don’t think that’s entirely it--Audi and Mercedes and Opels are all built similarly, it’s just that we only tend to see VWs out where I live. For some reason, when I lived in Lafayette, IN, lots of people liked VWs and some of the other techs in the shop had lots of tools for working on them.
5015494
You misunderstand, the car hit me.
5015501
Tis very shiny https://i.imgur.com/2f2NW5c.jpg (the day i bought in, December 27, 2018)
Yeah, it took them about a week to get it (they received it Friday). Just dropped the truck off about 20 minutes ago.
5015495
Suddenly it all makes sense. And yeah those fucking elbows. I've had those things break literally days after installing new ones. Since then, I only use those pot metal ones Dorman makes. One time I couldn't get them for a couple days, told the customer tough shit, you're waiting. I wasn't about to have that shit again.
5015772
No, I got that. It was pretty much the same as mine in terms of damage to the bike, that’s what I was saying. I hit the car, ‘cause it pulled out without checking if there were bicycles and I couldn’t stop in time.
5015780
It is shiny! My new(ish) van is not so shiny, although said van has been driven by the author of My Little Dashie, which I think makes it special. We carpooled back from the dealership where I got it, and I let him drive it.
I assume you’ve got it back right meow? Hopefully . . . it can’t be that hard to put in a new radio and program it as needed.
5016285
Yeah, little known fact
The way it was made, though, there were other cooling system problems that Chevys rarely had . . . as I recall, the silicates in it were supposed to build up a protective layer on the cooling passages to prevent dissimilar metal corrosion and rust build-up, and I think if you compare the cooling systems of a 90s Chevy to a Ford, you’ll see that that worked. I’m sure you’ve dealt with bypass tubes and clogged heater cores on Tauruses. . . .
The metal ones are the way to go. Yeah, they’re kind of chintzy ‘cause they’re Dorman, but they don’t fail like the plastic ones do.
For a while we would only get them from GM, because those lasted longer than the Dorman replacements, but once the metal ones became available, that was the way to go. Used to stock them, since we knew it was something we’d use.
Ice is a bitch. Although to be honest, 4X4 doesn't always get the truck out. Best thing you can do is hope to God a friendly farmer or some other is in the neighborhood. I've bailed Dad out at least a dozen times on the same tract of land
; knowing him, I expect he'll continue to do so until he can't walk.
5027053
Agreed. Never gotten a 4x4 stuck on ice personally, but I’ve gotten a 2wd stuck on flat, smooth ice. Front wheels dropped off the edge of the ice sheet, and I wasn’t going anywhere. Likewise been up a few hills before with ice or snow where you get a good running start at it, ‘cause you’re losing traction all the way up.
My point of honor (or shame) is being shifted by a garbage truck when I got stuck once.
Almost got rescued by a garbage truck twice, actually, but the second time, there was already a wrecker coming to winch me out, so I turned down his offer of assistance.
I'm (not) sorry, but the booping ticket is just too good.