A Quick Disconnect retaining clip.
If you ever turned your own wrenches you probably had some swear worthy moments. Most recently it took me one full hour to replace one burnt out light bulb in the high up brake light of a ’08 Hyundai Sonata just because there is no access hole to it from underneath. It was frustrating but not all too bad because some Youtube sleuthing prepared me for it.
Frustrating to no end was my attempt to fix the clutch on a ’97 Mazda B2300. It was difficult at times to put it in first gear and one day it completely failed to engage. I managed to crawl the truck home and park it in the drive way. Good thing I wasn’t depending on that truck and I could take my time to fix it.
I figured I needed to replace the slave cylinder and found out it is the concentric type that requires the removal of the transmission. A Youtube shows how to do just that in your own driveway and I went to work. Since this was the first time for me I was prepared for some inefficiency and learning experiences. After all you ought to do new things as you age in order to ward off the onset of dementia.
My frustrations started with “disconnect the quick disconnect of the hydraulic line.” Mine was neither quick nor was it disconnecting. A Google search did not go far. I found a few related links with the same question but no useful answer. Therefore I cut the line and ordered a master cylinder as well.
Then there were the rusted in bolts on the cross member and some near impossible to reach bolts on the clock housing. One of them was particular inaccessible. I could put a regular wrench on it but there was no room to move the wrench. I could put on a socket but there was no room for the ratchet. So I bought a set of through sockets and managed to get it out. That’s still in the realm of the expected and a welcome excuse to by nice tools.
The guy in the Youtube laid under the transmission and supported it on his knees to lower it on the ground. He remarked that it may look like he is giving birth to something. I didn’t feel like giving birth to anything and hoisted it down with a ratcheting strap from inside the cabin. Now comes the easy part: unscrew two bolts, remove the slave cylinder and put the new one in. While there I replaced the clutch too, no problem at this juncture.
I also had a hard time removing the master cylinder. It really was not all that difficult once I was familiar with it. That done I reassembled everything in reverse order. I hoisted the tranny up from inside the cabin and had it lined up with the engine using two Allen bolts in the bottom mounting holes as guides. But joining the transmission up with the engine proved difficult. There was a one inch gap between them that did not want to close. I had to figure out that the coil spring of the throw out bearing has to be compressed. I bench-pressed the tranny in place and kept forward pressure on it until I managed to put a proper bolt in. Uffda! I buttoned it all up. Man, was I sore the next day!
Now we have arrived at the truly frustrating part: reconnecting the Quick Disconnect of the hydraulic line. I pushed the male connector of the master cylinder into the female receptacle on the slave cylinder. The retaining clip inside of it supposed to make an audible click and after that it should be impossible to pull the line out again. But mine came out again. And again, and again….and the line leaked brake fluid on me. If air gets into the master cylinder you must take it out again and bleed it on the bench like this video shows:
Google to the rescue, I thought. But the searches uncovered only descriptions on how it supposed to work along these lines: “put it in straight by hand” and “open the bleeder on the slave to relieve pressure as the lines connect”. But none of that helped in my situation. And all hamfisted ways failed as well.
Therefore I posted my question on the Ford Enthusiast Forum. Hanky replied and suggested there could be a problem with the compatibility between the LuK slave and the Dorman master cylinder. I found a LuK master cylinder online and swapped it out. I connected everything and took it for a test drive. I reversed out of the driveway, put it in first and stepped on the clutch to shift into second gear. At that point the pedal was hard as a rock with no movement at all. It even bent under my foot. With some help I pushed the truck back into the driveway. Weeks ago the quick disconnect supposed to disconnect quickly and it didn’t. Now it supposed to stay together and it disconnected by itself!
Is this the time to throw in the towel and have it towed to a real mechanic?
This looks like an appropriate policy to me.
Rather than enduring the shame of declaring defeat I was determined to fix this thing myself. I was in no hurry though, meanwhile it was cold and I really did not need the truck even though it could have been handy at times. It stayed in the driveway and I kept looking over the old bits that I hadn’t thrown away yet in order to wring the secret out of them. I repeatedly looked at pictures of quick disconnects on the interwebs.
This seems to be an OEM retaining clip.
One piece appeared to be the culprit. Inside of the female receptacle rests a stainless steel clip that looks a bit like a crown with long and short tines. The long ones are straight and the short ones are bent inward. I made sure to straighten and bend them the way they supposed to be before I connected them. But every time I pulled back on the line to test if the connector has engaged it came out again!
Meanwhile I could not trust this connector to have the needed strength to be reliable if it ever worked. I thought of getting a new one but that would require purchasing a whole new slave cylinder. Then I decided to go to the Wrench ‘n Go junk yard in Des Moines and get a disconnect there. I lucked out in the Dodge section where I found a truck with a manual transmission. As a bonus it had an external slave cylinder that made it easy to cut out the disconnect. They didn’t even charge me for the part. In it I found an original clip. Compared to the aftermarket piece it seemed to be of slightly thicker stainless and had a continuous top rather than a row of long tines. And there were short tines bent inwards. They clicked audibly into the groove on the male part and kept it in place no matter how hard I pulled on the line. Hallelujah!
Finally I had it back together, made my test drive and sold the truck. This part, the size of a finger ring, cost me more weekends and grievance than I care to admit. But there is hope that this episode delayed the onset of dementia by at least 18 hours. And that is something a mechanic cannot do for me.
Here is the question: What was your most frustrating automotive wrenching experience?
Trying to replace the rear bumper on my 1995 Plymouth Voyager after 15 Central New York Winters. I just had the local mechanic blow torch the rusty hulk off instead.
I did install a new bumper later that Summer with help from Dad though I left the plastic cover off so it would be easier to keep the new bumper clean.
Clutch slave cylinder on a Sprite/Midget. You can only get a 12 point box end on it and turn it 15 degrees at a time. Takes about 20 minutes under the little car to get that one bolt out. Do it on the cold cement floor in the winter for even more pain and frustration.
Pretty much anything I did on the ’95 F-150 4×4 I bought locally (midwest) was a nightmare project. It was a lump of rust underneath and bumping anything with a tool always resulted in a shower of rust flakes.
Having the right tool for the job can make all the difference, too. I had to replace the front wheel bearings in my ’64 Beetle not long after buying it from the son of the original owner. The inner race is a press fit on the axle stub, and I sat out in the cold hammering away with a cold chisel each evening for most of a week before convincing them off. When I did the same operation on my current ’62 and ’63 Bugs, I used the proper puller, which made it a ten-minute operation per axle beam.
When I restored my 1950 Ford 8N tractor, one of the radius arm pins was frozen tight, and I kept having to up my game trying to get it out. I finally stuck it in my 20-ton press and started pumping with alternating applications of PB Blaster and MAPP gas. I had so much pressure on it, I was afraid of something giving (with resultant shrapnel), so I stood behind the side post of the press while I pumped. I went as far as my pucker factor allowed, then left it sit overnight. Hit it again the next morning with more PB and heat, and it finally broke loose, with a pop louder than a gun going off! I had to put substantial pressure on it all the way out. You can see what it did to my support timber in the pic.
I replaced the lower control arm on my 98 Altima. First the ball joint would just spin and not let go of the nut holding it in place. Then the front bushing wouldn’t come off without resorting to an angle grinder. Finally got it back together after the better part of the day.
YouTube videos can sometimes be dangerous as it looked like an hour job at most. When the front hub packed it in on the passenger side I realized after seeing the 3 part videos and numerous tools I didn’t have that this job was better left to the professionals. $400 later I think I made the right call.
Many years ago in the middle of a cold Colorado winter when I had no indoor workspace I snapped off a manifold-to-head stud, the rearmost one, in my Slant-6 ’65 Valiant. There was no gasket leak there, I just put a wrench on the nut and went tightening because it seemed like a good idea. It was not. The correct repair is to remove the manifolds, centrepunch and counterdrill the stud stub, extract the remains if possible, overdrill and put in a threadsert or Heli-Coil if not, and reinstall the manifolds. That would have been far easier than my repair: a long, bloody, expensive, and frustrating comedy of ignorant errors and dumb mistakes involving a hammer drill, a fraudulently-named “EZ-out” that wasn’t, a jigsaw, a tap extractor that couldn’t, JB-Weld, a flexible Plexiglas heater, and assorted other inappropriate tools and supplies.
We’ve found our winner, folks!
I can’t stop laughing!!!!
You’d think that’d’ve learned me good, but it didn’t, so—surely it can’t have been the same winter; I hate to think I’ve ever been quite that teachproof!—I decided the Valiant’s timing chain wanted replacing, and that it wanted replacing badly enough to get started on a Sunday afternoon.
So: Drain the coolant, remove the radiator hoses (spill some coolant), remove the transmission fluid cooler lines (spill some AT fluid), remove the power steering belt, the fan belt, the fan, some of the oil pan bolts, remove the power steering drive sheave, take note the sun has gone down and the ambient light is no more, remove the crankshaft pulley, remove the timing chain cover. That was all quick to type, but it took multiple hours and involved much toolsearching and messmaking and periodic hand- and foot-thawing.
The original T-chain had maybe 1/8″ if we were
rounding upwilling ourself to see it because otherwise we would’ve lacked a reason not to put ourself out of our self-inflicted misery. Or if I’d been smart I’d’ve taken the hint and closed the engine back up without attempting to R&R the chain and sprockets.But really, does any of this sound like I was smart? Even just a little bit round the edges, maybe? No. No, it doesn’t. So onward I forged: remove camshaft sprocket, remove T-chain. Try every available method, short of torch heat (guess I had at least one working brain cell) to remove crankshaft sprocket. Fail. Decide to leave original crank sprocket.
Install new T-chain, hoping the timing mark on the new cam sprocket is compatible with the mark on the old crank sprocket—sometimes they’re not. Slice front section out of old oil pan gasket, splice in new, hope it seals. And speaking of seals, what are we going to do about the crank front oil seal? Pry old seal out of timing cover, clean recess of 3-decade-old scunge. Try to be careful using hammer to install new seal, but caution is difficult with frozen hands.
Put everything back together, reinstall everything—harmonic damper, pulleys, belts, brackets, hoses, radiator, lines. Another quick two lines to type, representing hours of frozen struggle.
And that’s why I found myself some ten hours after the ill-advised start of all this, trying to get up off the concrete where I’d been variously on my knees and on my back all afternoon, all evening, and well into the night. It was probably another hour before I got to bed (shower, etc).
Very few hours after that, I had to get up again. I mentioned it was a Sunday afternoon, right? Yeah, the day after Sunday is Monday, which was a school day. The car was very difficult to start and ran poorly all the way to school. It was baffling—and still is—how and why my idiocy at the front of the engine necessitated some rather large carburetor and choke adjustments; as I say, there was not enough T-chain slack to have warranted replacement, and certainly not enough to have required compensatory carburetion adjustments. Best explanation I ever came up with is that the car was giving me a well-deserved spanking. I made the adjustments in the high school parking lot (in the snow again/still) with wrenches borrowed from the auto shop.
So what had possessed me in the first place? Well, the car was low on power—lower than a stock ’65 Slant-6 Valiant should be, it seemed to me—and as a devoté of Smokey Yunick’s “Say, Smokey…!” car advice column in Popular Science, I’d dug up the phone number for his “Best Damn Garage in [Daytona Beach]”, called him up, and asked his advice.
“Well,” he said, in a slow basso drawl, “pull the timing chain out of it and hold it sideways, horizontal. If it droops like a limp peter, there’s yer problem.”
I don’t blame Smokey. From his standpoint—assuming an enclosed garage in a balmy climate and the skill, experience, tools, time, and light to take an engine apart and put it back together in a couple of hours—that was a perfectly reasonable suggestion. I don’t imagine he could possibly have thought I would head out in the snow and dark on a schoolnight.
I could’ve and should’ve just popped the distributor cap and kept an eye on the rotor as I hand-turned the engine first one way and then the other, to check for substantial lag between moving the crankshaft and the rotor turning. That would’ve showed me there wasn’t enough T-chain slack to worry about, and the ease of doing so would’ve clued me in that the car was low on power because the engine was low on compression.
Aw, well. Live and
learngradually catch on. At least the sprocket marks turned out to be compatible!Amazing stories that sound like they require a full article.
I’m just parking this here ’til I finally do my time in the COAL mine.
Sounds like a great party!
It might’ve been, if I’d been old enough to drink.
Swapping engine in my 2002 Envoy. Way too long and too tall to do with just an engine hoist, besides it being way too difficult to remove and reattach all the connections (seems like they liked to hide them under bracketry and such). Changing plugs on my brother’s S10 Blazer has to rank right up there too. Number 3 plug for the V6 is mounted right behind the steering shaft.
Never did a whole lot of wrenching, for these very reasons. I will suffer an anyerism. Did I mention they call me “The Hulk” at work? The day I couldn’t get the toilet paper on those gigantic rolls to feed out of the dual roll dispenser is legend at the dealership.
That said, on my ’80 F-150, my first truck, I recall installing no less than three throw out bearings (and the clutch disc and pressure plate too, just to be safe) because it rattled when my foot was off the clutch pedal. I didn’t know better, everyone said it’s the throw out bearing that’s rattling. Figured it out when the contraption of connecting rods from the pedal to the release fork failed, finally. Each female connection in those rods were wallowed out. I suppose there should have been some sort of bushing in them, but there wasn’t. When my foot was on the clutch pedal, everything tightened up; when I took my foot off the pedal the linkages all slopped around and rattled. That was a tough, expensive lesson to learn. Those clutch assemblies were not cheap, especially to a 21 year old kid such as myself. I think Ford converted to a hydraulic clutch linkage in 1982.
Details!
Professional.
You’re doing it wrong – missing one of these:
That was standard operating procedure to unbolt the latch of a locked deck-lid, via rear seat area.
Ah yes, the “GM Upper Bellhousing Bolt Removal Tool”
Tracking down and repairing a coolant leak under the dash of my wife’s ’86 Mazda 626 is probably the worst episode I can recall, at least as far as jobs I wasn’t being paid to do go. The usual source of leaks on these cars was a valve seal, and the dealer, 100km away from where we lived at the time, didn’t want to sell me a very expensive heater core without trying that first. I let myself be talked into it.
To get the core out required removing the entire dash, and I only had the weekend to complete repairs before my wife needed the car for a planned trip. Not having to replace the core sounded good to me. I was allowed to use a bay at work as long as I was out by Monday morning. So the clock was ticking. I picked up the parts to repair the valve on Friday afternoon, drove home and started the repair. Long story short, the valve wasn’t the problem. Early Saturday morning off we went, back to the dealer for a core. The one his computer showed in stock was in fact one that had been sold once, returned, and was obviously damaged. If I recall correctly the flat rate for replacing a heater core was something like 9 hours so no way was I going to chance it.
There was one at the dealer in a nearby town, and we phoned and verified that it was correct and intact. One problem, we were an hour away and they were closing in an hour. Just made it. Now we were 2 hours from the car, so we headed out. On the way out of town after picking it up we stopped for lunch at a drive through burger joint. The car ahead of us was a nearly new Jeep Cherokee, and just as the guy got to the window an electrical fire started under the dash. It made a lot of smoke and the person in the vehicle behind us decided to back up, couldn’t negotiate the driveway curve in reverse and ended up high centered on the curbing. By the time the fire was put out and the drive cleared we’d lost another hour.
By the time I was able to start work it was late afternoon and I wasn’t a happy camper. The job fought me every step of the way, and it was pushing midnight when I got it all together. At least the old core showed definite signs of leaking so I thought I had it beat. I had pressure tested everything before reinstalling the dash, just in case, and nothing leaked. However, once I took it out for a drive it became apparent there was still a problem.
I spent the next day pulling it all apart again, and discovered a pinhole leak in the new core. The dealer parts department made it plain that the core was non returnable once the packaging was opened and mentioned that they were very easily damaged during installation. With nothing to lose I broke out the solder and carefully patched the damage. After reassembly, remarkably it held. By now it was Sunday afternoon and I’d had more than enough. Unfortunately I’d broken a couple of plastic clips and fasteners during the repeated dash and trim removal sessions and now the car had several new rattles and buzzes. Which required several hours of my time the following weekend along with yet another trip to the dealer to remedy.
That was far from the only problem we had with that Mazda, which went away in favour of a Honda shortly afterwards. I can’t say I miss it.
I cross-threaded the fourth (and last) spark plug on the Miata back in August, which left the plug sticking out about 1/4″ and rendered the car immobile. It wound up sitting in the garage for more than a month (the phrase, “we may need to find a junkyard replacement head” ringing in my ears) before I finally had it towed to my mechanic.
He fixed it in about 15 minutes, only charged me $40.
Front struts on my wife’s 2006 Pilot, specifically compressing the springs to swap out the struts. It took a day and a half, and a second set of spring compressors to do the first strut, half a day for the second one (one learns from their mistakes), and an hour to swap the two rear shocks.
I will never do that again. After I went through that ordeal, I began seeing companies selling full strut/spring assemblies.
1995 Mazda Protege. Replaced one of the driveshafts, it had a cv boot tear and was finally clicking. Decided to replace the ball joints, too, they were just bolt-in affairs. How hard could it be?
There was a mid-year change to the ball joint and steering knuckle. The ball joint shaft changed to a larger size. Guess which ones I purchased? I *thought* they slid in a little too easy.
Test drive got about 2 blocks away before I had to call AAA for a tow back home. Had to replace the *other* driveshaft too – it separated at the inner CV joint when the knuckle pulled out of the ball joint and splayed the wheels out.
Reinstalling the head on a ’74 Opel after a valve job… while bolting the camshaft sprocket back onto the cam I dropped one of the bolts down inside the timing chain cover. I searched with a light and mirror to try to find and fish it out. Finally became convinced it went all the way down into the crankcase, so I put in a new bolt and finished the job. And of course… when I cranked the engine to the timing chain broke on the bolt, which had jammed against it. Frustrating for sure, because it was my own pure stupidity.
The award for the worst wrenching experience goes to my 1982 Buick Skylard, wait, excuse me, Skylark.
The big bolt that held the subframe to the chassis broke in half. I couldn’t even unscrew the top half so I had to cut the firewall open to access the top half. I was too lazy to remove three other bolts and see the whole engine and gearbox drop to the concrete floor. I didn’t weld the sheetmetal back, and it sort of caused the loud whistling noise. Being deaf, it meant nothing for me, yet it was screamingly deafening for my hearing friends.
That wretched car had weird fuel filter housing in the carburettor, meaning I loosened the cover the opposite of what I normally would do to loosen the nuts and such. That stripped the thread, allowing the fuel to leak out and spontaneously burst into a bonfire under the bonnet. It took me five weeks to figure out where to attach the spaghetti tubes (for emission control system).
The result? Skylard with its tiny 2.8-litre V6 motor had prodigious appetite for volatile remainders of dinosaurs. About 40-45 litres per 100 km. I ain’t shitting you. I considered installing 200-litre fuel tank because I was so sick of stopping by the petrol station every two days just to sate the motor.
I sold the car to a guy who later used it to shuttle the illegal immigrants across US border from Mexico. How did I know? I got a curious letter from ICE whether I still owned that damned car or not. I guess he ran out of petrol while crossing the border and got a very helpful service from the border patrols…
Changing the coils on my daughter’s Chevy ? (Same car as a Pontiac Sunbird). The coils sit between the engine block and firewall just above the oil pan. No room for hands or wrenches. Finally had to loosen a motor mount, lever the engine forward, stick a block of wood between the head and firewall and pray to God that the wood block does not slip and let the engine crush my hands. Apparently Snap On makes a special tool to safely hold the engine forward.
I much prefer to work on my W124 Mercedes Benz, MB engineering makes for an almost zen like experience. Once you study how MB built it, the R&R and repair procedures are totally intuitive.
I have had MANY frustrating repairs but the one that probably takes the cake was a rush job to fix an oil-in-coolant problem with my 1985 Celica. Iron block and aluminum head so head gasket was the obvious culprit. I was leaving for a summer road trip the next day when I found the water/oil milkshake. I pulled the entire engine apart in the car, which involved intake and exhaust manifolds, all sorts of hoses, wires, etc. Had the head resurfaced, new gaskets, etc. Had a LOT of hours in it. Started it back up and it immediately made another milkshake!!! There is still a wrench hole in my dad’s garage wall. Turned out that the timing chain guides that had failed had allowed the timing chain to eat through the side of the timing cover behind the water pump and it was able to seep water into the oil pan. The kicker was that the timing cover was much easier to replace than the head gasket since you don’t have to remove the intake and exhaust systems.
In 1994, I foolishly tried to bring a 1983 Plymouth Reliant (wagon, manual) back to life. It had a blown head gasket. When I attempted to fix it, one of the head bolts snapped off in the block! Talk about shitty quality control. I persevered only to find that I shouldn’t have bothered. Nothing but problems thereafter.
I gave it away and it caught on fire for the next owner, which satisfied me! Burn in hell, K-car!
My wife and I received an 82 Honda Prelude as a gift from a family member. It was to be my wife’s new daily driver. It was a stick shift and I thought I could teach her to drive a manual transmission. Things went badly and the clutch was toast. I figured since I was going to drop the transaxle anyway, I would convert it to an automatic.I wasn’t the first conversion I had done. My friends at the salvage yard informed me I would need to replace one of the manual specific half-shafts along with the transaxle. They did not have the parts and a search came up empty. I did find a complete identical recovered theft, bought it and went to work. The automatic transaxle would not bolt up to the manual block. If I lined up the dowel pins, the bolt circle didn’t match. If I bolted up the bolts, the dowel pins wouldn’t align. It took me hours to figure out the mismatch. Now I had to swap the block. I didn’t even try to disconnect the maze of CVCC vacuum lines, I unbolted the head and set it aside, disconnecting no vacuum lines. Just when I thought I was done, it turns out the carb linkages were different and I needed to swap the throttle cable.Thank goodness I had a whole donor car to scavenge from!
My worst was probably my first serious repair on my first car. Sure I had done oil changes, tune up, and put in a stereo, but this was serious, clutch replacement. I had a buddy who was into cars and working on them too. His dad also did more serious work so had jack stands, a real jack and a larger assortment of tools, so we decided to do it at his house.
Now I had the professional all domestic Motor manual as my guide so we dug in. The first frustrating part was shifter removal. According to the manual you needed to peel back the carpet to gain access to the boot retaining ring screws. The problem was getting it over the shifter. 2 or 3 hours later we were ready to start the serious part. There was the expected usual dirt and grease and hard to access fasteners but that all went pretty well. By that time it was getting late so we called it a day. (lesson #1 the book isn’t always the “right” way to do it)
Get the clutch changed, go to stick the trans back in and that is when the problems started. We struggled and struggled to get the trans back in. We fought for hours, and then fought again another day.
His dad started getting mad because of my car taking up space in their driveway. So he said he would take a look. He quickly figured out that the motor mount are closer to the back of the block than the front. So a block of wood under the oil pan and a little jacking and the engine was now at the same angle it was when we pulled the trans loose. (lesson #2 pay attention)
So now we could get the bellhousing and block parallel and mostly lined up. But it still wouldn’t go in. So another consult with my friends dad and he had us get the trans back in a gear and then we could turn the output shaft which would in then turn the input shaft so the splines could line up and the transmission slide on home. (lessons #3 & #4 make sure you leave the trans in a gear and leave the driveshaft in the trans if at all possible, makes it easy to turn, is nice leverage when positioning the trans, and gear oil doesn’t spill out the back)
I went through the problem of getting the splines to line up on my first clutch job on a 74 vw van. Luckily the idiot manual made mention of this part. Unknown to me was that there were 2 bolts holding the top of the transmission in place and wouldn’t let it drop enough to clear the engine below the back bumper. Finally the guy I bought the van off came by and showed me how to remove them. A later van I bought someone had cut the back off (the earlier models had a removable plate) presumably because they didn’t know about those bolts.
Sometimes your mistakes teach you more than any high school auto shop courses can.
I’d say your own mistakes will teach more than you’ll learn in any class.
Another lesson I’ve learned is if I’ve done a repair that involved a lot of trial and error and missteps is to immediately make notes of how I finally accomplished it including diagrams. (Even if I don’t think I’ll ever do the same repair again.) It’s so easy to forget important little details that can save you massive amounts of time at some future date.
Good point. I like to use a couple different colored paint pens, masking tape and zip lock bags with labels. These days having a camera phone for pictures before you take it apart can really help when you go to put it back together. I also where possible hand thread back any bolts or nuts back into their appropriate places.
The most frustrating job was replacing the transmission in my ’89 Jaguar XJS V12. Working room was very tight and I had to do it lying on the garage floor on my back. The upper bellhousing bolts were inaccessible from the engine compartment and their location could only be determined by feeling around from underneath. I ended up using over three feet of wrench extensions with the ratchet at the end of the output shaft. When I reinstalled the transmission I taped the top bolts into position before raising the transmission up. It was a difficult job. The funny thing is that I resisted the idea of removing them from underneath (as was described in the shop manual) and tried unsuccessfully for hours and hours, over several days trying to do it another way.
Here’s the taped bolts. An idea that was not in the manual but that I shared on my Forum.
This is a very, very entertaining thread, and I appreciate everyone’s willingness to share.
It reminds me of what a fraidy-cat I’ve become since the 1980s, as cars got more complicated to work on. I remember the cold garage floor (or shoulder of the road after a breakdown), with the rust falling into my eyes.
I tip my hat to all the CC’ers more able (and ambitious) than me–thanks again for the great entertainment and camaraderie!
+10 on both scores. Huge relief to hear of mistakes equal to my own, and scaredy-cat? I’ve become afraid to open the hood lest the immediate sweats of not understanding erupt.
Replacing the rack and pinion on my brother’s Chrysler mini van. I think it was around a 2005 model.
In my 45 years of wrenching this is close to being the biggest witch.
I can’t remember what triggered it but back in my early 20’s I had an epic “wrench throwing monkey fit” and ran out of 4 letter words and made up a few more. When I was done I turned around to find the neighbour kids, 4 and 6 yrs old, standing behind me. The little girl sheepishly asked “Whatcha doin?” and I was horrified at what just happened. Yes they witnessed the whole ugly episode.
I taught myself to talk through the problem in the form of a discussion with the offending piece whether it be a stuck fastener or sheared off bolt or what have you. I can usually be heard calmly asking things like “Why are you doing this to me? Don’t you have anything better to do?” “Would you like some more heat or some liquid wrench perhaps? Would that make you lose your grip and let me get on with things?” and “Did the engineers really design the head bolt in the back corner to shear off level with the block? I mean what were they thinking?” I have been asked why I am so calm when things go wrong while others would be cursing and throwing things. I simply tell them about the two small kids who hopefully never repeated what they heard way back when.
Some memorable moments of frustration:
I had an exhaust leak on the manifold to head joint on my ’93 king cab 4×4. Right hand side of the vg30 motor. I gained access through the wheel well and after removing the splash guards I found that the previous owner had already been in there and three of the studs were now SAE thread bolts cross threaded into the head. The job had to be done so I very carefully drilled and tapped the head for larger studs from under the wheel well. There was no way I was going to pull the head if I absolutely didn’t have to. I sweet talked that job right through from start to finish.
Almost any job that I have to do on my current daily driver. An ’06 Nissan Sentra. I swear that this car is screwed together with substandard counterfeit bolts and fasteners. They corrode and shear off at the slightest provocation and this is a car that has regular oil sprays. I apply heat to every fastener on the underside of this car no matter how clean it appears to be and they still sometimes shear off with even the lightest touch. There is currently a cheap wrench trapped in a small space where I had to drill out a sheared bolt that holds the rear strut in place. I bolted it from below and got a wrench on the nut above by reaching down through a small tube-like space above. Once torqued down the poor wrench is hopelessly wedged in there. I know that eventually it will pop loose and rattle like hell and that’s when I will retrieve it but so far six months have passed and not a klink from back there.
I have been pulling wrenches on many different cars and every repair you can think of for more than 35 years now so I’m sure I have forgotten a lot of them and nothing phases me anymore.
There’s an old Russian tale about how suddenly all the kids in a kindergarten started cursing in really terrible, foul language. So the director went to investigate and found that a few days prior to the outbreak of profanity, there were some plumbers there doing welding repairs on the pipes under the roof. The plumbers were called in and disciplined for cursing in front of children. “But we didn’t do anything”, said one of the plumbers, “All I said was, hey, buddy, can’t you see that due to your negligence, you are dripping molten lead on your comrade’s head?”
The list is too long. And, frankly, embarrassing.
Without making full admissions, it MIGHT include installing shocks upside down and driving on them for pogo-stick days before realising (I know, I know); actually welding up a version of the massive Extendi-Tool (pictured somewhere above) for enough length to undo a nut into a removed gearbox (it turned out to be reverse thread, and yes, I know); filing of wrong-sized brake shoes that were likely asbestos (who couldn’t have known?); inventing an upper engine stay (FWD engine) because I’d bought the wrong replacement engine (well, it looked the damn same and yes, I should have known); replacing a stiff-ish trunk lock with one that never did allow access to the trunk ever again…..you get the drift. Actually, get the drift so we can enlarge the hole and remove the tool I got stuck there, would you?
Before rushing to judgement, please add youth and maleness to my qualifications in doing these things. Well, most thereof.
I’ll add that the list of injuries is almost as large as the arrogance that led to them. (Btw, you’ll get sympathy for injuries generally, but not if folks actually knew why they happened).
I strongly suspect two phrases have preceded most of the amusing/injurious/insane-making escapades in the posts on this topic:
1)”I’m not paying/can’t afford to have THAT done.”
2) “I reckon I can reach that without undoing all of them.”
The two counter-phrases ofcourse, are, in order, 1) Yes you will and 2) No, you won’t.
Last summer. Helping the father-in-law remove some bits off his diesel Passat’s engine. The car was making ominous noises so he wanted to remove the offending part and replace it with better bits from one of two identical scrap Passat’s parked just feet away. Two hours into the job, dirty fingernails and bleeding hands; with each stuck bolt, we were moving further and further away from the actual bit that needed removed.
“Oh”, he says “Better check the bit on the part car is good to use”.
It wasn’t. Job abandoned and now he’s got three immobile Passats parked on his property.
Next time I see his head tucked under the bonnet of ANYTHING mechanical; I’m off to the pub.
Sharpish.
My career as an amateur mechanic has come with many frustrating repair jobs. Like justybaum, several, especially earlier on, were a result of the hubris of a young man. A memorable recent one was on my wife’s Subaru, my first timing belt job. Carrying my young man hubris into middle age, I bought the parts and went for it. After all, it’s just nuts and bolts, right?
The disassembly went well but reassembly was difficult; the new belt seemed tighter than the original, the camshaft pulleys just a hair too large. Finally, after much struggle, it went back together, but something didn’t feel right. As I torqued down the bolts holding the idler pulleys to the front of the engine block, they kept turning without getting to the final torque; I had, somehow, damaged the threads in the aluminum block.
Longer bolts, it seemed, should do the trick, and several hardware store visits supplied them. I put them in at a little less than the specified torque to preserve the remaining threads and forged ahead because we needed to get that car on the road. Fast forward to starting the car; the engine had a bit more valve noise than before, and a test drive revealed the folly of my effort-the belt came partially off, and I limped the car home, fearful that I had destroyed the interference engine.
The solution was to actually do the research, which revealed that there is a correct order for installing the idler pulleys, and that I would need to restore the damaged threads with Helicoils.
Disassembly number two revealed that the engine was not damaged, which was the first really good news in this job, and a trip to the auto supply for a new belt, tensioner and Helicoil kit brought the final cost of the job (ignoring my time) very close to that of paying a professional. Drilling into the engine block, knowing the irreversibility of my undertaking and the damage to my pride and finances that would occur if this job cascaded into engine replacement, was one of the scariest things I have done as a mechanic. Fast forward to starting the car, all was well, hallelujah.
Though I would go on to make more mistakes and experience more frustration, cost and time overruns on other repair projects, several subsequent timing belt jobs have been free of major challenges.
As I struggled to get the head on my 74 Datsun p/u aligned once again (my over-anxious brother in law Ed kept knocking it out of position), the late summer Phoenix heat was really taking its toll. Ed lurched his way in to the engine bay again and knocked the hood loose, which came crashing down on top of my head. “Sonofabitch” I screamed as I looked for something or someone to hit. I turned to the left and found my victim–the mailbox! Without thinking I slammed my fist into the metal side but missed, hitting the 4×4 that held it up. I gathered myself, wiped what I thought was sweat from my forehead and attempted to go back to the task at hand. Only my hand didn’t work anymore, and I quickly realized it was broken. Standing at the door with blood from my head wound pouring down my face, I calmly told my wife that I thought I broke my hand. Her screaming response was the icing on the cake, cause, you know, head wounds bleed a lot.
My worst is pretty subdued compared to many of the stories here, but it involves the Autolamp switch on my son’s former 89 Grand Marquis.
It was on a Sunday afternoon (of course, and made worse by the fact that he needed to drive back to school that evening) that he informed me of something like the taillights not working. After some messing around, I diagnosed that the culprit was the infamous Ford Autolamp switch. The only parts store that had one was the NAPA warehouse downtown. We sped there, got there before it closed, and got back home as it was beginning to get dark.
You would think that getting under the dash in a large car would be a piece of cake. Nope. There was simply no room. What I could see I could not reach, and what I could reach I could not see. Everything was either inaccessible or sharp so that it cut my hands.
As I worked through the process of figuring how to get the old one out, the plastic connector (made brittle by the heat of the failing switch) began to break apart. The car side, not the switch side. I momentarily envisioned a trip to a Ford Dealer (the male version of the Walk Of Shame) but eventually figured a way to connect the contacts and insulate them from the other contacts.
I think the whole process took something like 4 or 5 hours (including the trip to the parts store) and I looked like I had been playing pat a cake with Edward Scissorhands.
Oh my, there are a few. The left head gasket on a Cat 1160 stuffed in the front of a Blue Bird school bus. The whole job has to be done from the inside while kneeling on the floor. It is in there so tight, the factory had to notch the upper flange of the frame rail to clear the valve cover. The absolute worst so far has been the fuel pressure regulator on a 2003 Duramax. Buried beyond belief and it quickly turned into way more work due to substandard fasteners requiring the removal of the CP3 pump. Those motors are an absolute abortion that lived. They also have a defect in the fuel filtering that GUARANTEES fuel injector failure. Few things would please me more than getting ahold of every GM employee that gave these toilets the thumbs up and be allowed to express my displeasure with them.
If there is something on a car I haven’t had to repair/replace, it’s only because I have not yet owned a car with that optional doohickey. I’ve rebuilt engines, transmissions, diffs, CV joints (in the bad old days when they didn’t sell you a complete axle assembly but instead just the joint and boot), all with varying levels of obscenity and frustration but by FAR the worst single repair job I’ve had to suffer is the replacement of an alternator on a 90s Ford van with the 300 inline six.
The alternator is easy to get a wrench on, the bolts come on easily, and then the issues begin. You cannot physically remove the alternator without removing the fan shroud… and you cannot remove the fan shroud without removing the clutch and fan assembly. In Ford’s infinite wisdom they opted to use a screw-on assembly made of aluminum that threads onto the steel snout of the water pump. Now many of us know that these two metals tend to react to each other, often with results that are indistinguishable from welding or brazing. There is not enough room between the fan and the water pump to put a proper (enormous) hand wrench or crescent wrench on the clutch housing so I head to the local parts store to borrow a fan removal tool. I am handed a flimsy stamped steel “wrench” and head back to the house to re-attempt the removal.
Now be aware that it is 95+ degrees outside with absurd humidity and not a puff of wind to be found as I resume combat with the van. After creating an ad hoc “tool” to tension the serpentine belt as much as possible (since it kept slipping during prior efforts) I put the purpose-made wrench on the clutch and begin trying to turn. Of course nothing budges and I can feel the steel wrench starting to stretch so I cease efforts because I have no interest in paying whatever absurd price the parts store believes this crap tool is worth.
I am now covered in sweat, my hands look like I decided to clear a garbage disposal while it was still running, and this *#!? fan is still attached. I consider sawing the bastard off but discover the clutch fan assembly is a $300+ item, which tempers my enthusiasm for vengeance against this accursed thing. I decide instead to see if I can remove the water pump and pull the whole assembly out. Eyeballing says it’ll be awfully close depending on the length of the water pump bolts but I decide to try regardless. Through some minor miracle I end up with maybe 1/32nd of an inch worth of clearance and pull the entire mess out. I then take it to my work bench to figure out how to remove it. I chuck it in a vise, hit it with a torch (gently because I don’t want to melt the aluminum) and it stays stuck. Eventually I get a hammer and beat the cast iron housing off the pump, grind flats on the pump shaft, get a neighbor, and I stand at one end with a wrench and cheater bar on the clutch housing while he hits the pump shaft with an impact wrench. After 10 minutes it FINALLY comes loose… a mere 2.5 days after I started this debacle to replace THE ALTERNATOR.
I replaced the alternator, reassembled everything, and promptly called a friend working at a small used car lot and asked if he had anything with a Buick 3800 series II engine for sale. He did, and I told him I was bringing in the van to trade. They gave me $1500 trade value, my wife balked, and I told her that I would happily pay them $1500 if it meant I would never see that damned van again.
Serious question: Is there anything more useless than a screw extractor?
Asking for a friend.
I just had my biggest headache this past Wednesday. My source of trouble was asking my wife to help me for a second. She told me a day before that her car was clanking. Clanking? WTH does clanking mean? Could you be more descriptive. Well she hears the noise when she turns so I go out and look. Sure enough a torn CV boot and the noise is a clicking. Ugh!
Start on it the next day as I know I have boots in stock. When I get to moving the brake caliper off to the side so I can drop the ball joint out of the spindle is where the ordeal started. First, this is really heavy and yet it has been only 10 seconds. So I tie it up. Then, because the area is covered in grease I start cleaning it up and she wants to know why I bother. I’m anal about a clean work space, especially on a car, so the area MUST be clean.
I leave her out front and take the CV axle into the garage to do both boots. Might as well. As I am doing it she walks in, she did actually clean the car of grease, and asks why I am wasting time removing the old dirty grease? Because it is dirty? Finally ready to put it back in and sometimes you can push on past the C clip and sometimes you can’t. She is asking what is the problem saying try this and try that. Of course she has never worked on a car. I get up and go get a short 2×4 to place on the edge of the inner housing and give it a whack and on it goes. Now for reassembly six hours after starting. I have done a whole front suspension in six hours!
Please shoot me next time should I ever be dumb enough to ask for help again.
That would be a replacement of a heater core on ’01 Taurus with a Vulcan engine for me in Ontario in December. I’ve quickly learned that old plastic becomes brittle in below freezing temperatures in the blender door actuator. Replacement took 2.5 hours + a trip to the junkyard to get some plastic parts + time to replace those plastic parts. Iron block and aluminium heads had rusty coolant. Heat never worked. Got pissed off and drove w/o heat for 5 years. I had to use a credit card to scrape the frost on inside of the windshield.
Got tired, saved some money and bought an off lease car with working heat and heated seats. But since it’s a hybrid (uses gas to run the engine to produce heat) and I’m used to having no heat, I rarely use the heater for in town driving, mostly just to defog the windows. On the next car I’d like to have a heated steering wheel.
P.S. I’ve bought a hybrid not because I’m a tree hugger, but because I’m a cheap bastard. Although it’s a Lincoln. Go figure.
Got two items of note: first was changing a mechanical fuel pump in a late-80s Mitsubishi/Dodge Ram pickup. Theoretically the job was simple but there was absolutely no access whatsoever, My arms have a wrist & an elbow, they are not “flexible shafts”. That nasty job took the better part of day…
Second was replacing the clutch bellcrank on a 65 cuda 273 V8. Same problem as the first, no access visually or mechanically, had to do the whole job strictly by feel. I can think of a number of ‘jobs from hell’ but those two will always stand out,,,
I’ll go for a motorcycle repair. After getting new tires my Kawasaki Concours developed a terrifying front end wobble, so I decided to replace the steering head bearings.
I’d done it previously on various Hondas with no issues, so I propped up the 670 pound Concours and disassembled the front end. After a full week of slow but steady progress (Including creating work arounds for the nine Kawasaki special tools required for the job) I finally got the bearings replaced. The worst part was that unlike Honda, the good folks at Kawasaki had not left me a nice ledge to knock out the old bearing races. I wound up resorting to laying a big bead of weld on the inside of the race to shrink it out. This was all done on the hottest week of the year, and I was sweating buckets, also because if the weld didn’t work I would render the bike immobile. Luckily that trick actually works.
On test drive I no longer had terrifying shaking at 80 km/hr, and as an added bonus the buzz that had been driving me crazy for the last 5 years turned out to be a triple clamp bolt that somebody hadn’t tightened.
Another good reason to do your own work.
EVERYTHING on my ’95 Blazer. It’s like there was a whole team of engineers at GM sitting around a prototype trying to figure out how to make clearances JUST too small for a normal size wrench or socket. Not to mention the other team of engineers sitting around trying to figure out the right ratio of standard to metric fasteners used in every drive train component.
Even after I built the engine to FACTORY specs (GM FSM- hardcopy no less), the thing ran like a bag of hammers dropped from a plane.
Probably my worst experience was attempting to replace the evaporator core/coil from a 95 Mercedes S500. When someone warns you that you have to remove everything but the kitchen sink to get to the coil, believe them. Truth be told there probably was a kitchen sink in there too, because I had so many parts strewn about during the whole process (which took three weeks with what time I had to work on it). The worst part about that? You couldn’t move the car once you took out the brace that runs between the driver’s and passenger’s doors. Bye bye frame if you do.
On a more amusing note, tried once to overhaul the carburetor on a 74 Plymouth Satellite. Got more backfires out of the carb barrel than from the tailpipe. Gave up and just replaced the carb. Took a few weeks to regrow all the missing hair afterwards though…
Just though of another one, I was under my ’70 C10 working on the trailer wiring and managed to cut my scalp wide open on a sharp edge. I grabbed a towel and threw it over my heavily bleeding head, deciding to drive to the doctors office a couple of miles down the street. Holding the towel, working the clutch and shifter and fighting the armstrong steering caused my driving to be a bit sloppy, I got too close to the car next to me and the driver gave me the finger, pulled in front and started brake checking me. At a stop light I screamed at the guy, the bloody towel and my insane cussing caused him to quickly back down. Made it to the doctor’s office, they rushed me in and stitched up my scalp quickly. I had no wallet with me, stopped by the next day and paid my $40.00 bill! This was around 1984, how times have changed.
Two, both involving Jeeps. One was design: heater core on a 1997 Cherokee. Wow, what a brutal job…dash has to come out, heater box has to come out (which involves sort of standing on your head in the passenger footwell while using tools held directly above your face), A/C has to be purged-yikes.
The second was stupidity: Grand Cherokee, 4.0 six, water pump. The idiot who had replaced the water pump had put something on the bolts. RED. F-ING. LOCTITE. Snapped off two bolts, had to drill and Helicoil. (Fix-A-Thread to the Aussies here.) Whole job took almost 2 full (8 hour) days.
about the same, but on the Ford Explorer U1
Putting a am\fm cassette player in my Bronco II. The job itself wasn’t too bad, actually it was pretty smooth. Before I buttoned it all up I tried the tape player. The only tape I had handy was Beach Boys Christmas. I put it in, hit play and it sounded great. The tape player never worked again. 30 seconds of Little St. Nick and that was it. I named it HAL after that.