2021 [Mechanic] · 3:41am Jan 1st, 2021
2021 is nearly upon us . . . depending on your time zone, it might already be upon you, in fact.
Are things better on the other side of the temporal divide?
I don’t have to remind y’all of what kind of a year 2020’s been. Sure, there were some good moments, some moments of levity and we did get some good memes out of 2020.
I had my road trip (and I’m delaying the next blog ‘cause of this; so love me or hate me for that as you see fit) and I published some stories and we spent the year at work knocking it out of the park one month after the next, crushing our best year ever by over 10 percent. Some of us learned how to live without our normal socialization; others of us lived normally . . . gamers had been preparing for this exact thing for years, don’t you know. The rest of us had to deal with the fact that we couldn’t just go out and get a double vente mocha caramel pumpkin spice grande with extra sprinkles latte whenever our little hearts desired.
A better man might spend his time crafting an end-of-year blog post to focus on the positives of the year, might even rouse himself to make an inspirational speech. In fact, many have, but let’s face it, that’s not exactly my style. You want cute and fluffy, I’ve got stories for that. You want me going on and on about work, I’ve got blogs for that. And there is no more fitting way to end 2020 than me complaining about work, and maybe y’all learning a thing or two in the process.
But before we start, a cute pony picture:
One of our customers, I’ll call him Kennith, has several cars. One of those cars is a Chrysler 200, which in my opinion is a mistake, but I’m not a psychologist. Anyway, he brought it in one time for a suspected wheel bearing noise, I test drove it, determined that it did have a wheel bearing noise, and also something else I faintly heard. He authorized the wheel bearing, I slapped a new one in—which was really easy, ‘cause he’d already done it once with a bottom-dollar internet part. [Protip: don’t do that.] Took it for a drive after the repair, and the wheel bearing noise was gone, but there was something else, it sort of came and went, and I couldn’t pin down just what it was.
I told him about it, and he said that he knew about it and had been trying to diagnose it himself. Now, for most mechanics when a customer is trying to diagnose something themselves, it’s like visiting the automotive versions of WebMD . . . I always dread when customers bring up the internet. Granted, there’s lots of useful stuff there and if you know where to look, you can probably find your answer, but a lot of people rely on the first thing they find with a vague Google search.
Anyway, back to the point, in our conversation he mentioned that he used to work as a NVH engineer at Chrysler.* For those of you who don’t know, NVH is ‘noise, vibration, harshness,’ and as the name would suggest, they’re the unsung heroes who figure out why your sleek new car makes a weird noise or has a strange vibration over cobblestones or whatever. In fact, he’s probably more qualified than I am to identify and diagnose a weird noise on his car, and if he hadn’t figured it out, I didn’t feel bad that I hadn’t either.
“But Biscuit,” I hear you saying, “That doesn’t sound like a bad time.” Well, don’t worry, we’ll be getting back to it, but first we’ve got to have a little aside, and then we’ve got to talk about an Explorer.
First first, though, we’ve got to have another cute pony picture.
A lot of mechanics get paid flat rate, which means we get paid by what the book says for the job. Extra labor can be unpaid depending on the manager, which is bad; on the plus side if you’re really good at something, you can get paid for more hours than the job actually took. I get paid hourly, so it doesn’t matter (aside from the manager breathing down my neck) but I worked flat rate long enough that I get frustrated when I’m wasting my time on something useless.
Such was the case with the Explorerer. I won’t name names, but it came from someone who should have known better, and the complaint was that it ‘makes a noise,’ so I took it for a test drive.
It made a noise.
It made several noises. HVAC fan noise, wind noise, minor suspension noise, tire noise, an under-dash plastic pop noise (just once). . . .
When I got back to the shop, my manager asked if I’d heard the noise.
“What noise was I to have heard?”
“Did you hear any noise?”
I gave him the list, and the Explorerer left with no further diagnosis, and I wasted fifteen minutes on a test drive. Granted, that got me out of the shop for those fifteen minutes, so it’s not like it was a loss.
Like many Americans, Kennith has several cars. One of them is a Magnum, which was the kind of car the fevered minds at Daimler and Chrysler might come up with if they were trying to make station wagons cool again. The thing about that is that there’s a small but fervent audience who knows station wagons are cool and will buy whatever ones they can get their hands on, and then there’s the majority of the carbuying audience who wouldn’t be caught dead in a station wagon and who in fact would roll over in their coffins if you ever told them that a hearse was basically a station wagon with the rear seats folded down.
I’ll give them credit, it sold better than the Pontiac Aztek.
Said Magnum came in for a noise complaint. I pressed the manager and he said that the customer hadn’t told him anything other than it made noise.
Remember, Kennith is a retired NVH engineer. I don’t know what they teach at Chrysler, but I do know that I’ve got a three-page document from Honda describing noises to aid in diagnosis, everything from banging (sounds like slamming a wooden screen door) to zapping (sounds like a short, quick buzz).** Surely he would be better at describing the noise, what it sounded like, when it happened, etc.
I took it for a drive on my usual route and it made the kind of noises one might expect from car that’s more than 10 years old (I can’t remember the model year of his), got it up in the air and did a quick look-over, nothing obvious on a quick look.
Reported back to the manager, and he then disclosed that the noise happened over hard bumps and that Kennith thought it was control arm bushings.
I don’t know what goes on in his head sometimes (my manger, not Kennith) . . . like, I hear of doctors griping that their patients don’t tell them everything, thus making diagnosis and treatment harder. The doctor’s either going to find out anyway, or else s/he isn’t, and then you won’t get proper treatment. I usually don’t have the luxury of asking the customer so I’m relying on what my manager says; he could at least tell me the complete story, rather than feed it to me a piece at a time.
I’m just linking this one, ‘cause seizure warning
Source (same warning applies)
Interlude!
I used to drive wrecker. Not only are people not always forthcoming about what’s wrong with the car, they also lie about how they wrecked it. The number of people who claimed a tree jumped out in front of them, despite the clear evidence I could see on-scene of tire marks and whatnot going off the road and into the tree . . . like, I’m not a cop, I’m not a snitch, I’m just genuinely curious how you managed to get your car on its side in a parking lot in the middle of the day.
One time, I got called to the scene of a decked-out Porsche (not a looker, the real deal) in a ditch just beyond a 25 mph curve. Asked the driver how it happened, and he said, “you want to know what I told the cops?”
I said, “You told them you swerved to avoid a deer. What really happened?”
He nodded. “I took that curve at sixty-five, held it for two spins, and then lost it.”
That was more in line with what I saw, to be honest. And I’m sure the cops didn’t exactly believe his story, either; everyone knows that you hit the brakes for a deer and nothing else (only swerve for mooses [moosen?] and bigger), but odds are that they’d let him slide with that story
The only other thing I hate more than customers who aren’t forthcoming are customers who tried and failed to fix it themselves, and tow in a partially-disassembled vehicle for us to get roadworthy again. Remember that little exchange in Apple Honey’s Perfectly Ordinary Day when she was presented with a box full of most of the parts that had come out of the gearbox on the hay rake? Yeah, that’s happened to me before. Unless it’s a customer you know and love, best to send that car down the road, because there’s nothing but sorrow and frustration to come from putting a car back together that someone else took apart.
Which brings me to what I think is the perfect capstone to 2020.
I got to start out the week putting an engine in a 2007 Chevy Silverado. That’s not the kind of job I typically enjoy, but it’s gotta be done, right.
So imagine my delight when instead of tapping me for the engine replacement, the manager chose one of our new guys to try it instead. Sure, he’d be slow and need lots of help along the way, but that would free me up to get other jobs done, and the manager could supervise or I could, and so what if it takes him a week?
And to his credit, he did manage to get the engine out without breaking anything else and last Friday had started on transferring parts over, and I did mention that I put the engine back in, right?
See, he’s been out for the last week, possibly infected, so guess who got to pick up where he left off?
Now on the one hand, I’ve been around these engines, and I’ve taken them mostly apart and I think I’ve even replaced one. 5.3L displacement on demand.
Big jobs take a long time, and one thing that I advised him to do is put all the bolts he takes out back where they came from if possible. You pull the alternator bolts, thread them back into the bracket. That way, you’ll know which ones are the alternator bolts. Also taking pictures of how things are arranged; I did plenty of that when I put a cylinder head on a Toyota Land Cruiser—I’d never done one before, and I knew it would be weeks before we got the head back from the machine shop, and I knew I’d forget where things were supposed to go.
Naturally, he didn’t do any of that. He had some boxes, and he threw the bolts in whichever box was nearest, so for example I had three radiator bolts in one box (mostly with bolts from the front of the engine compartment) and a fourth in a different box (underbody fastenings). I had to spend extra time sorting out what went where, and also step back a few times and consider which order was the best order to put parts on, and did wind up forgetting one important sensor ‘cause I put things together in the wrong order.
My manager griped to a customer when I could hear him about how long it was taking me, and I threatened to pull the engine back out, toss all the bolts in one box, and dump my bolts tray in it too, for good measure.
They’d put the engine in the vehicle before I got tapped for the job, and there was stuff I would have put back on first, since it’s easier to install when the engine’s on the ground instead of the vehicle. Maybe a couple of those aren’t possible, but I would have known because I would have tried when I took it apart. Like, the AC compressor on those engines sits low and is hard to get to; normal procedure is to unbolt it and set it aside so you don’t have to evac and recharge the AC system, but we’ve got a machine and I know how to use it, and I’d do it if it made putting those eight stupid bolts in faster (I bet it does). Likewise, I worked around the inner fenders for most of the job ‘cause he hadn’t pulled them, then finally got frustrated and did what I should have did and yanked them out to make getting at the manifolds, Y-pipe studs, and spark plugs easier.
It was a work truck and the customer wanted it back by the end of the year, and I persevered and he got it back, running and driving.
Yay me.
Today was gonna be a slow day, a half-day, ‘cause it’s the end of the year and no one feels like working. I only had two jobs. One was a brake hose and a HVAC blower fan on a Pontiac Vibe.
The other was a clutch in a 1985 Dodge Ram.
Which I didn’t take apart. Guess who did?
And guess how well he sorted the bolts?
You might think that a 1985 Dodge Ram wouldn’t have all that many different lengths of bolts to hold the bellhousing and transmission on, and you’d be wrong. There are at least six different kinds that go into the bellhousing, so it was a case of taking the time to sort them all, test fit them, find out that I’m one short, find that it’s still in a bracket that holds the exhaust up, get it bolted in and then find out that the dust shield should have gone in first. Fortunately, after loosening a couple of bolts it can be shoved into place.
On the Chevy truck I at least had the advantages of having worked on enough of them to understand GM’s philosophy of what kinds of bolts go where. For this Ram, I was flying blind, and in fact there was one bolt and one rusted bracket that we never did figure out where it went.
There were also spring-washers it should have had on the shift linkage and clutch linkage that were missing, and so were all the hairpins. And to add to my frustration, I tried a couple of times to brainstorm with the manager, and he’d interrupt me mid-discussion to propose that certain bolts when where I knew they didn’t . . . unless you’re really determined, you’re not fitting a 7/16-14 bolt in a 1/2-20 hole (in metric, roughly, fitting a 12x1.75 bolt in a 10x1.5 hole).
I also found out as I was shoving it into place that he didn’t drain the trans fluid, and got a nice bath out the tailshaft. More than once.
But by lunchtime, it was in, and all but one of the bolts were in (we found the part it was supposed to attach, but couldn’t figure out where that part should go), and of course it didn’t work because the clutch rod is bad and apparently you can’t get one even though Chrysler used the same clutch rod for thirty years.
I’d probably still be at the shop fussing with that stupid truck except my manager got tired of being at work and so we left.
Y’all’ve heard Kenny Rogers; a wise man knows when to run.
On the downside, I already know how next year’s gonna start.
<takes deep breath>
I was gonna stay up until midnight and make sure this year really was over, but I’m too tired for all that foolishness. And I was going to get fireworks to celebrate the end of 2020, but I didn’t do that either. I’ve got gasoline and bottles and could make my own fireworks (for some value of ‘fireworks’), but I’d rather not end the year or start the new year in a burn ward, so I’ll give that a pass, too. Instead, I’ll reflect on the fact that 2020 brought us—willingly or not—new ways to communicate, new ways to celebrate.
Footnotes:
*It’s worth mention that Michigan is still the auto capital of the US, and lots of people work in the industry. If you’re the kind of shady tech who relies on BSing customers to get repairs, you’re going to have a bad time . . . informationally, though, it’s great; I’ve talked to packaging engineers and ignition engineers and coolant engineers and circuit engineers. There’s nothing as revealing as how the industry’s changed when you fix an old gentleman’s F-150 that had a bad fuel pump driver module (we’ve talked about those before) and his daughter wants to look at the part. I show it to her and she starts to point out all the flaws . . . she’s a printed circuit board engineer. . . .
**when I get around to it, I’ll post that, ‘cause it’s useful for writers, too.
2021 will be a dumpster fire just as much as 2020. A change of date changes nothing.
I know you're supposed to eat a soba bowl, and hopefully dream of an eggplant for good luck.
Can they be combined, or would putting eggplant in the soba detract from the luck? Also, I didn't have any dashi, so I've got chicken stock with leek (I didn't have any green onion), soba, eggplant, nori and some chorizo I needed to use in the pot.
Underdash pop noise would have me looking for a bulging capacitor. But I wouldn't know how to get under the dash in the first place, so you wouldn't have to worry about me trying to self-fix anything.
On the other hand, my kitchen sprayer got stuck on, so I took the opportunity to descale the coffee maker for the new year and put the disconnected sprayer in the carafe. Nothing like hot acid to get a little button valve unstuck.
5426113
Dashi is just soup stock. Admittedly, there are traditional methods for making it and traditional ingredients, but you can make a dashi from whatever you want. Bon appetit and Itadakimasu!
listening to a mechanic complain about work, perfect end to this year. Although personally, this year was a bit of a mixed bag, plenty of good in with the bad. Covid threw a wrench in the works, but I graduated and got a job. New job is in person unfortunately, complete abuse of the whole "essential worker" thing.
I had several job apps out in Michigan, nothing came from those though.
Happy New Year, Biscuit!
it's actually moose for plural, although my favorite alternative remains meese (if it's good enough for the hellspawn that is the Canadian Goose, it's good enough for the "majestic" moose.)
Happy new year from central standard time, it’s 00:25 currently.
Good idea. Take a moment. Relax. Chill. Calm.
Our neighbors 4 houses down were launching fireworks. Not the little screamers, or the fizzy things, or the poppers... No. Legitimate fireworks. Things that would detonate into smaller detonations or go through multiple color changes.
I live in a wonderful 1950s storybook neighborhood exactly two variations on houses, adjoining yards, and no shortage of other neighbors. When I say 4 houses down, I mean the fireworks burst directly over our house.
And one roommate is a fire survivor...
So, take a moment. Relax. Chill. Calm. For now things are just fine. The rest of the worries can be fretted over later.
The blithering morons who design computer cases (for laptops, but some of this ire is for desktops) need to be... um... dealt with harshly. Particularly the ones that use nonstandard (i.e. not philips or regular) screws, of different lengths, in the same part being removed. The old Zbook G1-G4 cases were trivia: Slide the slider, remove the case cover, fix, replace. The G5 units REQUIRE you to unscrew the back to do anything.
I heard a rattle once in my car that I couldn't pin down ... until I put the window up and it stopped. Turns out that I had something in the back that the wind was moving.
5426090
The next two decades are going to be a dumpster fire. Hell, the world’s been a dumpster fire since AT LEAST the end of WW2.
5426316
Hex and torx screws are easy to deal with. The recent practice of putting the battery inside where you have to take the chassis apart to get at the battery is BS. You shouldn't have to unscrew the bottom to take out the battery to prolong it's life when tethering to a TV display and running off the AC for extended periods.
And virtually all laptops these days using a combo audio jack that doesn't do proper line-in is also crap.
But all of that pales in comparison to the practice of gluing everything shut and into place (which is mostly confined to phones and tablets at this point, but the bastards are salivating to abolish all Right to Repair movements as fast as their bought-and-paid-for politicians can manage).
Day 1 since the end of 2020. Raining already. Fireworks delayed.
Hell above the water. Horrible headache. Mother still has COVID, but is still surviving.
I think 2021 is going to be a great year!
How come?
Because every time something starts horribly, it only tends to get better! At least, for me...
Biscuit, have a happy and healthy new year, and if allowed by the travel agencies I might actually make my way to Michigan thia year and plan on saying hello.
Happy new year, Admiral, and may things go well for you in 2021!
5426294
I saw a flock of moosen! There were many of them! Many much moosen! In the woods! In the Woodes! In the woodsen!
5426493
Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretti nasti
- this worked for me!
Really thank you for writing down all those details (and even with style! so it reads like story, in other words easily and as fun reading) - a lot of people work their work but not everyone can describe it in such depth for non-professional audience.. I think this sense of work is something important you successfully transferred via Internet.
Have better New Year!
Happy New Year, Admiral! I do like reading about your experiences in the automotive world.
As a third generation mechanic I learned most of my trade through osmosis. What was difficult for me to pick up was being able to throw all the bolts in a coffee can and miraculously pick them all out and put them where they belonged. I cheated for a long while and then it was like a light bulb went off and I could do it.
We did not work on automatic transmissions. My dad could rebuild standard transmissions, but drew the line at the automatic ones. We would replace torque converters, but for the internal guts we'd send them out. So when we would diagnose that it was a transmission problem we would have to send it out to a place we could trust. Sometimes due to backlogs we would have to try a new transmission place.
One time we took a car to a new place and when we got it back and put it on the rack to check out the job, we saw that all the bolts were painted different colors to match the corresponding paint on the bell housing. All the guys laughed at that, but I remember that guy's pain. He had spray painted each bolt on the housing a different color so he could match the bolt to the over-spray on the housing.
Sounds fun. I was working on a Mercury Grand Marquis with an output shaft speed sensor code that I can't shake. Still couldn't shake it. So guess what I'm working on tomorrow, lol
You surely know how to keep our attention.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2012/7/26/57510.gif
Source.
Belatedly wishing you a better-than-last-year-at-least new year.
Always entertaining to read what you write and all the comments, too. A very happy, healthy and safe New Year to you!
5426090
Well, we’ll just have to see, won’t we? There’s a covid vaccine, at least, so that should help somewhat.
Plus, I just ordered a model locomotive I’ve wanted for twenty years and now I can get it. Sure, that’s a small thing, but it’s a thing.
5426113
No luck on either of those, unfortunately.
Hmm, that’s a good question; sometimes you can combine things for better effect, other times they either cancel each other out or make it worse. In the case of luck, I’m not sure the effects are cumulative, so it’s probably better to do one, then the other.
It was a plastic expansion type of pop, not a capacitor kind of noise. How to get under the dash varies by vehicle (and flexibility), but usually it’s just a matter of pulling a few plastic pins or screws for access to the common stuff, all the way to pulling the dash back or out for things that are more buried. Usually, the automakers try to make the things that might need replacement accessible, but they don’t always.
I used to have to descale mine all the time, then I started making coffee with distilled water and I don’t have to do it at all. I usually used vinegar, and the only problem was if I didn’t remember to run through two pots of clean water before making coffee.
5426127
For all the bad things, lots of people had personal victories during the year. Heck, we had a great year at the shop, surprisingly. Graduating and getting a job are both great things, congrats! Even if you’re stuck in-person . . . keep safe!
That’s a shame. Michigan’s a pretty okay state.
5426245
Happy New Year!
5426294
I refuse to accept that the plural can be the same as the singular. I’ll stick with my own ideas of moose and mooses; I won’t accept you metricizing my plurals
[Yes, I know it’s moose for plural, you can trust my pluralization as much as you can trust my metric conversions
]
5426300
Yay, you made it through to the next level of Jumanji too!
5426312
I’ve lived in one of those neighborhoods before. Currently, I live in a farm shack which is not dissimilar to the other nearby farm shacks, at least in initial construction; years of questionable additions have changed them somewhat. Mine’s got at least two, maybe three.
I went to bed before midnight, so I can’t say if anyone launched off fireworks (if they did it didn’t wake me up). A few years back I was in the city for the Fourth, and people were launching so many that there was smoke drifting across the streets. It was weird.
Ugh, I hadn’t even thought of that causing an issue with fireworks . . .
5426316
That’s one way to keep people you don’t want (i.e., the unwashed masses) from getting in to your product. Automakers do that, too . . . you’re griping about probably torx or security torx (the most common in electronics); we in the automotive world have philips, standard, pozidrive, torx, hex, square, eight-point, triple-square, the weird shape they use for some oil pressure sensors (it’s a malformed octogon IIRC), and now Chrysler added tri-lobe into the mix so you can’t take doors off their trucks easily. Be glad that computer case makers haven’t really aspired to play with fasteners the way automakers have.
Also, all the tools you’ll ever need are available from Snap-On. For a price. . .
5426339
Wind noise is its own special area of NVH. Like, a lot of cars with conventional antennas have a weird spiral around them, that’s in part to prevent wind noise from the antenna. And I can tell you that having one window (or two windows in the right combination) can make weird noises in lots of modern, aerodynamic vehicles, even if you don’t have anything they’re specifically moving.
5426350
We’ll just have to see, won’t we? I suppose the best thing to do is sit back and enjoy the ride.
derpicdn.net/img/2020/6/21/2380348/large.png
The way this sentence should actually have continued after the "despite" was "everyone knowing that trees are immobile". Seriously, are people actually stupid enough to think you'll fall for that?
…right, there are actually stereotypes to that effect regarding truckers. Fine, but it's still mind-boggling.
5426384
I agree, but I also recognize that there are manufacturing advantages of making fewer clips and access panels when it comes to assembly cost, and that factors into the final price.
One of our scan tools is a Toughbook, and I haven’t really played with it, but I think you can pull the battery easily. There’s a lot of other modules on it that look like they come out without any tools.
Another scan tool is a Snap-On Verus, and you can’t do much with that without warranty-voiding disassembly.
That’s probably what my cheap desktop uses, too. Luckily, I’m running audio output through an ill-advised set of components, so that’s likely not the major cause of sound quality issues.
And tech’s gonna get away with it for a while, but sooner or later they might find themselves in the same place as the auto companies were when it came to that . . . I hope, at least. Gluing does have some advantages in the assembly process (it’s cheaper, and if you’re trying to seal the unit, it’s more reliable than gaskets) but yeah it makes repair harder. During the time that my phone was getting fixed repeatedly, I don’t know how many times it went into the panini press at Sprint! stores before they finally replaced it.
5426395
We had an okay day yesterday for the weather; today it was a winter mix with basically everything. Snow, sleet, rain. Not great for driving. Or fireworks, I suppose.
We have the same superstition in theatre . . . a bad dress rehearsal is a good sign, it means that the show will go well.
5426427
Thank you!
AFAIK, they’ll let you in the US (why wouldn’t they; we’ve got I think the worst Coronavirus in the world, so it’s not like a potentially-infected tourist will make things worse), but they might not let you back into your home country without a quarantine . . . if you can, get the vaccine before you come over; we’ve got lots of nutters here who refuse to take the most minimal precautions to prevent the spread.
If you are allowed and do come over, I look forward to meeting you!
5426461
Thank you! Same to you!
5426493
i.pinimg.com/originals/f4/c6/4e/f4c64e4b2ab4527b5341a329cb1d36e0.jpg
5427159
I'm keeping as safe as I can. The area I moved to isn't as bad as where I moved from so there's that at least. Overall work is taking it pretty seriously (aside from the whole in person thing), our guidelines are pretty solid and we have MDs on staff keeping an eye on the situation.
I'm in Texas now. I think I'd rather have moved to Michigan though. I'm' in for some long not fun summers and I'd love to experience winter once or twice. Still, the job is worth it and It's better than I would have gotten in Michigan.
5427154
From reports I heard on the news there expecting restrictions to last until next Fall. Vaccine is not mandatory nor can the government force it and half the population probably wont get it. I know I dont plan on getting it.
5426521
Especially if the moose(n) were trained by YUTTE HERMSGERVØRDENBRØTBØRDA.
5426719
You’re welcome!
It was something I never thought of when I first started here, that people would be interested what I do IRL and might learn a thing or two along the way. There is something to be said about being able to describe technical knowledge in a way that the layperson can understand it, and if I do it well it’s at least in part because I’m standing on the shoulders of people who did it before me and inspired me to try it when it comes to auto repair.
Thank you! So far it’s been pretty decent
5426732
Thank you!
For me, a lot of it depends on the job and how long it’s gonna be before I put it back together. Some real commonplace stuff, intake gaskets on GM’s engines, for example, no problem. Something that I don’t do often? I’m going to take the cautious route, assume that I won’t remember where anything goes, and sort the bolts. This last engine job, I was missing one bellhousing bolt and I was sure which one it was, but my manager said it wasn’t, and to keep him happy I put a different, new bolt into it. Even though I’m sure that I correctly identified which bolt was supposed to be there.
Transmissions take their own special tools and knowledge, and a lot of smaller shops don’t have the space (or desire) to invest in rebuilding them. We outsource our transmission rebuilds as well as differential rebuilds (there’s a nearby shop that’s got good prices, and that’s all they do). We also don’t rebuild engines in-house . . . I think any good shop decides what they’re going to do in-house and what they’re going to sublet, and IMHO there’s no shame in not doing everything at the shop. I had one old-timer grumble that we didn’t rebuild our own wheel cylinders, but why? If I could get parts (which I can’t, at least not quickly), it’s going to cost more to have me do it than buy a new or rebuilt one from our supplier.
There’s nothing wrong with doing that. I paint-mark lots of things, chalk tires so I know when I put them back on they’re where they belong. I put arrows on crossmembers so I know which way it goes back in (if it could be reversed), number coils and ignition wires to make sure I get it right when I put it back together, ‘cause it’s easy to make a mistake and then you’re spending a lot of time you didn’t have to chasing down a problem you caused.
5426851
I don’t have any great advice for that one, probably nothing you haven’t already tried. I don’t know where they put them on the Mercuries, but I have seen one F150 that had a VSS code due to the rear end being rebuilt and the tone ring was never reinstalled. Of course the customer claimed that the speedometer had just stopped working . . .
Depending on the model year, the speed signal might be sent to the IPC and from there to the PCM, so it could feasibly be a network problem. One thing I’ve found on late 90s and early to mid 2000s Fords is if you do an all-module code-scan with the Snap-On tool and it pulls codes but won’t tell you which module set them, it’s got an IPC problem.
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Some of you come here for the articles, others for the pictures. I’m not gonna judge.
And yes, that’s how I imagine the jumping trees to be.
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Thank you!
5426902
Thank you! Same to you!
5427218 It goes straight to the pcm. But it shares a sensor ground with literally everything else lol.
"HAVC fan noise"
Is that a typo, or something I'm not familiar with?
"but odds are that they’d let him slide with that story"
Just guessing, but I'd imagine the thought process went something like "Well, from the look of that car, either he's so rich that he'd go to his couch cushions instead of the bank to pay the harshest speeding ticket we could throw at him, or the damage to the car's worse than anything we could legally do. And him swerving to miss a deer is less paperwork for us."
Again, don't know what the actually inner working might be, but that at least sounds plausible to me.
So, did you ever find out what the noise on the Chrysler 200 was?
(I misread what you were planning to get back to, and spent pretty much the entirety of the automotive section above the footnotes waiting for the reveal... and it left me still curious. :)
Though you don't have to answer if you don't want to, of course.)
"If you’re the kind of shady tech who relies on BSing customers to get repairs, you’re going to have a bad time"
You know, just the other day I was reading about a heating contractor who apparently used to demonstrate to customers how dangerous their old compression tanks were, and how they needed to be removed at once, by using a big magnet to demonstrate how over time they'd lost the magnetism absolutely essential to their safe function.
You may, perhaps, have spotted a small problem with this reasoning... and if I tell you, if you weren't already aware, that said old compression tanks were made of nice thick copper, back when it was cheap, you may both spot another slight problem and also understand why the helpful heating contractor was so very happy to take the tanks off the homeowners' hands for them.
(The account was being related in a book by Dan Holohan, who has a number of interesting stories (and I'd hardly say I've even read his work extensively). Actually, I think I may have mentioned him to you before...)
Anyway, thanks for the stories, happy new year, and good luck!