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Today has led to my saying more derogatory things than usual about front-wheel drive automobiles and General Motors.
The thermostat in my beloved Century has gone kaput. It’s cold outside, and I’m making a trip in it tomorrow upon completion. While taking apart more things than I ever imagined for such a seemingly simple item, the question occurred to me: What has been the most annoying auto repair you’ve undertaken?
The ones I should do but have so far procrastinated on.
Or the ones where I kept throwing parts at it, only to find it was some very minor thing I overlooked.
Or the ones that happen repeatedly but far enough apart that I forgot what I needed to do to fix them without a lot of grief and re-learning.
That covers annoying. Most difficult? Hmmm….
Cooling system issues on my Explorer. I’ve gotten to be very good at heater cores and radiator replacements on my ’95 Explorer, and have gotten the 12 hour heater core job down to about 6 if I’m hustling.
There is a lot of overlap with the two adjectives. I’ve had worse, yet I’ve never had to take so much off to access a thermostat placed under an intake manifold. It’s a 3.3 liter.
That has to be the worst place for a thermostat ever. It’s an eight hour job if I recall correctly. Thus the part is $5 and the labour $800.
Man! I used to have an ’84 Century with a V-6. I’m glad I never had to replace the thermostat on it. The only thermostat I’ve ever replaced was on my brother’s ’74 Nova, with a straight six. It took me just a few minutes, and IIRC, the only tool I used was a monkey wrench.
Replacing a starter in a 67 VW bug outdoors, in the rain, in three inches of ground water, on concrete, 15+ winds with an temperature of around 40. The car was NOT raised. I found what I thought was a convenient depression in the concrete near my apt in Boston….
Well, it was a good idea the day before. Sunny, dry, and a prematurely warm early spring day.
I have literally been there and done practically that myself. I was foolish enough to bring a car to college in downtown Boston, a ’63 Bug. In February it wouldn’t start. No start, no pick up girlfriend in Providence for the weekend. Roll around under the car on the cold icy-hard street with bare hands holding icy-cold tools upside down.
I had an RX3 that was almost rebuilt at the curb in front of my house in base housing. The most frustrating is the one you threw dollars and and it still wouldn’t be fixed. That car represented several of those mostly centered around ignition or carburation. IMO Mazda struck out on that one but it was very strong when right.
1984 VW Rabbit diesel starter. Bought a reman starter from a national chain franchise store. It was junk — the drive slipped. Took it back and got another. Junk too. Went to a different store and exchanged it. Junk. They didn’t want to take that one back either. It had an intermittent short in the windings, but the store’s automated tester said it tested as good.
Last store in the area had one that I refused to even take. It was only 1/2 as large as the others, though it had the correct drive end. Looked like the rebuilders mated the motor from a starter for gas engine with the drive for the diesel starter. I wound-up getting a refund altogether.
From then on, I have either bought brand new (not reman) starters and alternators, or bought the parts to overhaul my own. I haven’t even had good luck with brand new starters, but that’s another story. Hope I haven’t jinxed myself now… This morning I picked-up a new alternator to replace the one in my pickup.
I have learned this many times, the hard way. Do not buy reman parts, it’s not worth it.
Reman parts are fine; it’s buying from the “chain stores” thats the problem. Nothing screams “I’m a cheap screw” like shopping at Pep Boys! (or Autozone, or Shucks, etc…)
I’m about to replace the alternator in our ’05 T&C for the third time (in about a year – the rubber piece in the pulley keeps failing). O’Reilly’s is going to be gently asked to upgrade me to a “new” one this this instead of reman.
Replacing the brake booster on an 1995 Toyota FZJ 80 is not a big deal… If you live in a country where the steering wheel is on the right side. In the US, the booster is placed behind the throttle cable, intake manifold, abs actuators and a whole bunch of other stuff. To achieve a forward movement of the brake booster by about 3 finger widths, one has to strip all of the intake, fuel injector rail, coolant hoses, electrical harnesses and other things off of the engine. When I started to doubt my resolve and look for the easy way out, several garages refused to work on it… Some were biased against land cruisers, but at least one mechanic had done it and would never do it again. I hope that the new booster will last!
Well, I was a professional auto mechanic for a number of years and I would have to say it was a FWD Cadillac trans replacement followed by a v6 Mercury Mystique trans replacement followed by another string of trans replacements. When it rains, it pours.
Since leaving that line of work, the most annoying auto repair is any one my neighbors ask me to help with.
The fuse panel on my ’78 Rabbit. Since when is a fuse panel a tuneup item? Not hard to change, but a pain in the ass to have to do on a regular basis. I’m no fan of Bosch electrics, they make Lucas look good.
Putting the engine back into a ’67 VW Squareback in the driveway without a lift or special tools. Pretty easy in a VW Bug, but the Squareback has a huge hard rubber duct buried forward of the engine, that connects the engine fan cowl with the body ducting from those little side grilles. With the car on a lift and the engine on a hydraulic jack and with some experience, it’s probably not too bad. But under the car in the driveway you don’t dare try it without bolting the engine back onto the tranny first. It was a weekend of hell that turned my fingers and my patience into bloody shreds. Rear-engined station wagons are fundamentally Wrong.
Why was the engine out in the first place? To replace the fuel injectors in a vain effort to get the Bosch D-Jetronic system running right. But after ten years of analog components aging and drifting out in the heat and cold the “computer” was the problem. All that suffering and the damned car ran no better.
It wasn’t even my car, it was my girlfriend’s car. I ended up marrying her. As it turned out, I should have learned from suffering on her damned car, that I couldn’t fix her either…..
Gaaaah! You just reminded me of when I had to replace the transaxle in my ’71 bus. No floor jack, so I used a bottle jack and bricks (jack one side up 4″, prop with a brick, put the jack on a brick on the other side and raise 4″… wash, rinse, repeat). The engine had to come out first, of course.
Then I found out the junkyard transaxle was already worn out, so I had to do the whole thing over. The second junkyard transaxle worked fine, thankfully.
Headlight bulb blew on my C35 Nissan Laurel yesterday, Had to remove the entire headlight to change it! What were they thinking…
But the most hilarious “what were they thinking?” nomination goes to Mazda. This was the recommended procedure for changing a headlight bulb on my old ’05 Mazda6:
1) jack car up
2) remove front wheel
3) remove plastic wheelarch liner (held in by those plastic screws that just go round and round)
4) reach into front of guard and replace bulb
5) reverse steps 3-1.
The car was leased, and the service agent would replace bulbs for free, but c’mon, every real man wants to replace his car’s lightbulbs himself! (And with my Dad being a retired mechanic, he’d shoot me if I didn’t do simple stuff myself!). Eventually, when the lease was up and my sister bought the car from me, I’d got it down to a fine art – turn wheel inward on affected side; remove two of the plastic screws; bend plastic wheelarch liner enough to pop arm in; replace bulb by feel; use plastic screws to force wheelarch liner to resume previous shape; finish.
I had the same reaction the first time I tried to replace a headlight bulb on my wife’s Chevy Trailblazer. As I understand it, there are two ways to do it: 1) From the outside of the vehicle, remove the grille; 2) from the inside of the vehicle, remove either the battery or the air cleaner, depending on which side of the car you are on.
In the vehicle the Trailblazer replaced, a 1995 (North American) Ford Escort, a headlight bulb could be replaced by opening the hood, reaching underneath, manually unscrewing a cover on the back of the headlight assembly, and reaching in to remove the bulb.
Removing either the battery or aircleaner are the recommended options on my Laurel too, but being a diesel the battery’s huge and heavy (and I’d have to re-programme the stereo) and the air cleaner has way too many clips and plastic screws to remove first. Headlight removal was actually Nissan ‘s recommendation for my R33 Skyline, hence I tried that on the Laurel and it works a treat. Just have to hope the light beams are still aligned when the lights are reinstalled!
I seem to recall changing a sealed beam on an 85 Crown Vic required removing the plastic grille to get at the plastic headlight trim, which needed to come off to get to the screws that held the sealed beam in place.
Probably the timing chain replacement on a Toyota 22r, its not really that hard but I didn’t know what I was doing. Timing cover/antiifreeze leak and massive oil pan leak. On that motor you either pull the head or the pan, I ended up doing both. All in all it was a good teaching experience.
Worst thing I can think of was replacing the master cylinder on a 58 buick, you would think there would be plenty of room but it was bloody knuckles bashing around under the dash and lots of “modified” tools before we finally got that monster loose. When It went bad again 10 years later I took it to the shop- they ended up needing to borrow the tools we had cobbled together to get it out!
You’ll like this one. 1989 Chrysler LeBaron convertible. One day it just stalled on the freeway. I pulled over and it started right up again. Got going and it stalled again about 5 miles down the road. Just plain died. Electrical stayed on, but tach just went to zero and stayed there.
For three months, mechanic after mechanic tried throwing stuff at it. Nothing worked. They said it was fixed but I would take it out, head to work, and it would stall after several minutes. Got a bit of money back from mechanics who couldn’t fix the problem.
Finally took it to an old Armenian gentleman who had a shop in Glendale, California that I had been referred to. My friend told me this guy could fix anything that wasn’t wrecked.. He had the car for an hour and called me.
“Richard? It’s fixed. Come get it.”
“Huh? Are you sure? What was wrong?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here.”
Apparently (according to this guy) the Mitsubishi 2.2 liter turbo engine had a camshaft sensor in it that would shut the engine down when it detected something wrong with the camshaft (I’m typing this after 16 years so if I misstate something, forgive me. I’m not a mechanic). The sensor was intermittent and was sending a signal that something was wrong with the camshaft, shutting the engine down, then resetting itself.
Charged me $75 for putting in a new sensor. I never had a problem with that again. Bought the old guy a bottle of champagne for Christmas.
Replacing a rear suspension bushing in my ’93 RX7. Or rather, not replacing it, but replacing the whole damn trailing arm. Turned out that the bushings were not removable, or at least that one wasn’t. They installed a new arm (after waiting for it to arrive from Japan), charged me $550, and gave me the old arm.
It was such a gorgeous piece of forged aluminum that I cleaned it up and hung it on the wall of my office.
Indicater bulb on my Xsara its just reachable with finger tips but drop it and the guard liner has to come off to find the bulb, 45 minutes I thought I was cleverer than that oh well.
I feel your pain.
Annoying? Allow me to share my ’83 S10 bright-light indicator fix. This is how it went down….
1. removed hush panel.
2. Removed lower plastic dash panel, breaking lap-cooler hose in the process.
3. slid PRNDDSL indicator cable off steering column collar.
4. Loosened column a few inches to prevent cluster from scraping top of column.
5. Removed LH and center dash bezels.
6. Looked for microscopic wave washer that popped off left glove box lid stud when center bezel was removed.
7. Unscrewed trip-set knob from inop trip odometer.
8. Removed plastic instrument cover lens and inner gauge bezel with 7/32″ socket to expose 2 10mm lower cluster nuts.
9. Removed LF speaker grille with T15 torx bit and ratchet for speedo cable access, being careful not to snag edge of speaker on dash (snapping off spkr grille mounting studs — I did this previously)
10. Depressed tab on back of speedometer through access hole while carefully pulling cluster free.
11. Snaked hand behind RH of cluster to remove far right cluster light with attached fiber-optic ash tray light being mindful that PRNDDSL shitt quadrant cable didn’t snag on hole in dash pad. Removed cluster.
12. Removed bright light bulb socket from cluster and sanded both socket contacts and 194 bulb contacts because bulb isn’t burned out to begin with.
13. Repeated process for all bulbs in cluster.
14. Pushed cluster back into dash and tested all functions.
15. Reversed steps 11 through 1 but stopped at step 3 and because automatic shift quadrant cable was pinched between cluster and dash pad assembly.
16. Repeated steps 3-11, fishing cable correctly through hole in dash pad.
17. Tested all functions again. RH turn indicator was out.
18. Removed cluster again……went through bulb pile & replaced stupid socket & 194 bulb with integrated PC194 assembly.
19. Reassembled and tested.
20. Turned lights on the following night when leaving work to see both turn indicators and bright light indicator glowing steady, pegged fuel and temp gauges, zeroed oil and volts gauge readings..and of course no instrument cluster lighting.
Oh that sounds familiar…and not in a good way. My speedo light kept kept going out, which was kind of annoying as I like to know how fast I’m going so as to avoid the constabulary. Banging the top of the cluster made the light sometimes come back on again. Had to go through a similarly painful process as you. The dash cluster removal process began with the removal of the ashtray and cupholders so as to remove the screws that hold on the centre console trim which needs to be removed to get at the screw that holds the fake wood trim that hides the cluster-mounting screws…
So, pulled dash cluster out, cutting thumb on stupid metal clip that holds fake wood trim on. Found the bulb holder had twisted loose in its hole. Tightened it, tested, put it all back together. One screw left over and airvents now rattle.
Two days later, no speedo light again. Went home, switched lights on, speedo light still dead, immediately repeat cluster removal process, by time cluster is unscrewed all lights are working and test fine. Decide to go and buy new bulb and bulb holder anyway. Car won’t start without half of what was removed being plugged back into the loom… Install new bulb+holder, test successfully, reassemble – finding home for leftover screw from last time.
One week later, airvents rattle-free but speedo light starts going out again, banging dash works intermittently and for varying periods of minutes. Remove everything again – getting real good and quick at this now. Swtich lights on, all bulbs working perfectly again, bulb holders all tight. Scream. Note that glowplug bulb-holder is slightly larger than speedo’s. Swap them over, forcing larger holder into speedo hole. Reassemble.
18 months later speedo light has been perfect – and so has glowplug one…
It’s nice to know I’m not the only one. 🙂
One of the cluster lighting bulbs went out in my ’86 C20 this week…That cluster is also a thrill to remove.
Definitely changing the front anti-roll bar on my Alfa 156. You need to support the engine and unbolt the lower engine mount, unbolt the steering rack, unbolt the front subframe, remove the exhaust from the manifold back, unbolt the exhaust heat shield and lower everything down to provide just enough clearance to feed the old anti-roll bar out and the new one in. A right bloody faff, when it wouldn’t have been too difficult just to have it go under the subframe.
Made a hell of a difference putting GTA SW ones on though. Worth it.
Pic of it in progress: http://www.flickr.com/photos/81749070@N07/8057384979/in/set-72157631700205806
The water pump on our old “98 Ford Contour V6–a nightmare. Zero room to work. First, the wheel has to come off, then something like three plastic shrouds, serpentine belt, and 3 or 4 other random things that you need to either maneuver around or find special tools to reach. All this in the parking lot of our college apartment complex in the blazing Florida heat. Glad to be rid of it. Then, I almost bought a Mitsubishi Diamante. Almost. Dodged a bullet on that one.
Well, my first car was a Vega. No further explanation required.
More recently, I would say the sorting out process for the ’95 F-150 4WD I bought a couple years ago. It was super-rusty/scaly underneath, and for the first six months or so (even after repeated pressure-washings), every time I rolled underneath, I’d come out with two eyefuls and half a mouthful of rust flakes.
The front rotors were badly warped when I bought it, and I figured it would be an easy hour job to replace them. Hah! You have to pull the whole hub assembly apart, and the rotor is a press-fit onto the hub! It took about nine manhours to do the first side and maybe three for the second.
Took it to get an alignment after a couple weeks, and the shop said my u-joints were all about worn out. So back up on the jackstands—I replaced six out of the seven on the truck, and guess what? The whole front hub assembly had to come off *again!* I had the process down to under an hour by that point, though.
I also had to replace the front fuel tank (rusted out and leaking), which involved removing the bed. Had to cut the bed bolts out—they were solid lumps of rust underneath.
And it never stops… the *rear* tank just started leaking last week, so I get to do the job all over again. At least it will be a lot easier to remove the bed this time!
I seem to remember replacing a water pump on my brothers 67 A100 Dodge van that about drove me crazy
Gotta be the starter replacement on my Le Car. Clearly, the entire drivetrain including accessories had been installed as a unit, and in retrospect, it probably would have been simpler to just pull it that way, rather than pulling off all the things that needed to come off to get to it.
Replacing the heater blower motor in my 76 New Yorker. Next time I’m just going to cut a 12 X 12 hole in the right fender well and save myself an entire day’s blood, sweat, and profanity. I’m getting too old for this s……..
The V8 in any Lexus. Driving A 400 back from a auction for a buddy we stop and eat. We go to leave and the car would not start, so I look under the car to look at the starter and I see no starter. In wisdom known only to Toyota they put the starter in the middle of the vee under the intake manifold. Did not even keep the car it went right back. The cost of the repairs were more than the car.
GM did that with the Northstar also. One reason I’m glad I put about 300 miles a year on mine, I hope to never have to replace the starter!
Ah yes- Winter in Denver, and I’m replacing the clutch in my 1978 Ford Fiesta. Ford used an engine designed for North-South use and adapted it for an East-West application, and thst brought a whole slew of problems to the table.
But when it’s all said and done, changing the clutch is mostly about the tedium and then plugging along to the finish line. The aggravating part occured when I stepped on the clutch pedal and felt the clutch fork mounting bolt shear in two. The bolt was located inside the bell housing, so as Ed said, it was “Wash Rinse, Repeat.”
This stuff never happens when it’s 75 degrees…
ALL repairs done before the age of the internet were annoying. Now with the ability to have a laptop plugged in and sitting on the fender and watching and playing/pausing a video on YouTube for almost any imaginable repair makes it so much more bearable. If nothing else you can see that a normal person else has actually done whatever it is that needs doing before and survived…
This all dawned on me back in 1999, I had just puchased a new to me 1993 Audi S4, the third day I had it, as soon as I would hit 4000rpm’s the gar would buck and lose all power, just like if you hit the rev limiter. Totally repeatable. I was freaking out, thinking great, the dealer is going to bend me over…
I went on the internet and found an Audi S-Car site “S-cars.org” (remember this is early internet days, you’d search “Audi” on Ebay and get less than 75 items TOTAL for sale…, Amazon was not a household name…) and emailed the editor asking if he had any idea. It was 11pm in CA at the time. Within 10 minutes I had an answer to look behind a cover on the firewall and I would almost certainly find a loose one-time-use hose clip attaching a boost line to a small device. I ran to the garage and could not locate it, emailed back and within 10 more minutes he sent me pictures with arrows and notes on them, sure enough I went back to the garage and found what he thought I would. The next morning a new 69c hose clamp fixed it for good. He was based in Iowa (Thank You Darin Nederhoff!), no idea what he was doing up at 1am…). That was the moment I embraced the internet and realized its power, have owned several (many) cars since then that I would NEVER attempt to own without the collective wisdom out there. The money savings have been astronomical vs. the real possibility of having to run to a dealer or specialist for non-obvious or non-routine issues with the internet resource.
For a couple of years in the late ’70s, Chevy would sell you a Monza with a 305 V-8. Pretty much a factory version of the V-8 Vegas I used to build in my driveway, just more expensive and less well put together. In order to change the #8 spark plug you had to unbolt the engine mounts and jack up the engine. Very nice to work on. Lots of these cars got 7 cylinder tune ups over the years so if you were working on an old one, there was a good chance the plug was original, which added to the enjoyment by requiring lots of grunt, followed by the inevitable knucklebusting sudden release. Good times.
There are lots of worse jobs out there but this one always p-ssed me off.
Heater core on an Aerostar.
The second time, the van was old enough that I knew I wouldn’t be repairing the non functioning A/C. Taking a hacksaw to several of those lines and pulling stuff out made an impossible job merely miserable.
My friend the former Ford mechanic says the special disconnect tools don’t really help much either.
2nd place: Pulling the pan off any transmission that doesn’t have a drain plug.
I hope that Aerostar heater core isn’t as bad as the ’87 Taurus Wagon I did several years ago. This pic was taken halfway through the job. Thank goodness the A/C was shot because I had to disconnect the evaporator.
Doing any adjustment or R&R on the distributor for a 84 Ranger V6. Ford had almost no room between the firewall and the distributor shaft, and to complicate things, they put a crossover pipe nearby. At the time, I didn’t own any crow’s-foot wrench adapters, so it meant lots of contortions with box and combo wrenches.
Didn’t help that to swap the engine, you better have the distributor off so you don’t destroy it. Getting the shaft on the right tooth, well, that didn’t happen. Had to get it towed to the shop where they figured that one out. Oops.
I didn’t have to time the engine much (hall effect sensor, at least), but changing the ignition module on the distributor was its own particular trial. I’m glad for the coil packs in my wife’s 98 Ranger…
Second most annoying: due to ignorance, I used DOT 3 brake fluid in my ’64 MGB. Two winters in a row I lost a wheel cylinder seal, and once an entire wheel cylinder due to corrosion in the bleeder. It always picked a really cold day to die, too. After the first time, I made sure the hand brake would actually stop the car, eventually…
Lets see….either the serp belt on my v6 vitara, or having to drop the rear bumper on my 70 buick lesabre to change the taillights…..what brilliance of design!
RE: the LeSabre: Been there! It’s always the outermost bulbs that go.
i can tell you my easiest cars to work on was a 79 datsun 210&77 corolla(still driving the corolla)but the most challenging car was my moms 84 honda accord&i had to remove 37 parts&hoses just to be able to reach water pump&timing belt.that day i promised myself to stay away from hondas&still keeping that promise after 21 years.
A simple one that gave me a lot of grief was changing the water pump on my ute “in the field” (aka beside the road 3hr from the nearest town). The pulley is plastic and is supposed to be fitted with a shop press. Long story short, it took 3/4 of a day and had to use a sledge hammer to put the pulley on the new pump. But it was heartening to see that the cars that would pass every half hour or so (yes quite remote) would stop to see if help was needed, and a local farmer helped with the use of a vice etc.
The most annoying ones though are the result of mistakes
On the flip side, as my ’71 VW bus had no rear bumper to remove, I could pull and reinstall the engine (once I owned a floor jack!) in about 45 minutes, including putting tools away. Armed with the Idiot book, the Beetle has got to be one of the most roadside-repairable cars ever made.
Citroen AX distributor- I had the car twelve months before I even knew it had one, it was buried so deep under various ancillaries. Just try finding a replacement too…..
I put a $3,000+ transmission in a Toyota Matrix, and shortly thereafter ran a red light and totaled it. That was pretty annoying.
Yup. A couple of years ago, I sucked it up and spent 4 figures on the timing belt/water pump/other related crap repair on my $2600 96 Odyssey. 4 weeks later, an elderly lady turned left in front of me and totaled it. As I was on the way home from filling it with gas, might I add.
How about replacing the +100k mile 305 with a brand new 350 crate engine in a 79 Impala, then having it stolen 2 months later. That wasn’t pleasant.
Yes, had something similar happen to me, had banished it from my memory until I read your post! Back in 1999ish I’d bought a NZ$1,200 ’86 Accord EXL-S (JDM model, B18A 1.8L twin-carb) as a runaround.
The oil pump stopped working a while later, and oddly enough the car did too shortly thereafter. My mechanic contacted Honda NZ, and as luck would have it they had several of those engines that were new but old stock that they wanted to get rid of for NZ$800. I thought $800 for a genuine new Honda engine? What a bargain, I’ll get it popped in and onsell the car for a tidy profit.
So my mechanic ordered the new engine and removed the old one. The engine duly arrived, and turned out Honda made a mistake, it wasn’t a B18A. It was a B18-something else, that wasn’t compatible with my Accord without expensive modifications to the computer etc. So back it went to Honda and an engine from a wrecker went in. Which blew its water pump a month later…
All up, replacing the engine cost me $2,500, twice what the car was worth. My dreams of a new Honda engine and a quick resale vanished. I hated the car’s handling (being a JDM model, it was terrible compared with the NZ-new ones, and is easily the worst-handling car I’ve owned), so I sold it to a mate for $1,200. He had it a week, hadn’t finished paying for it and totalled it by ignoring a giveway sign and being hit from both sides at once. All the doors were jammed shut and he had to exit through the sunroof. Even though Dad was a Honda mechanic at the time and liked Honda engineering, I swore never to buy another…
Any repair on a 90s Taurus based Continental with the 3.8 engine.
The most annoying repairs are the ones that seem so simple and turn into nightmares. 2 weeks ago, my son’s 89 Grand Marquis had an electrical glitch. He told me that the instrument panel lights had quit. Research and experience told me that it was the headlight/autolamp switch. But hey, you have a GPS for speed and a map light on the ceiling to check your fuel, so let’s wait until its warmer. Then we discover that the taillights are out too.
First, buy a switch. This requires driving to the NAPA warehouse (fortunately, one hour before closing on Saturday) instead of ordering one online. An hour and a half later, we start. Then I see the problem: if you can see it, you can’t reach it. If you can touch it, you can’t see it. Two hour later (after having to move the fuse panel), we are finally getting the new switch in, and the brittle plastic connecter starts to break apart, requiring one terminal to be manually clipped into place with really long needlenose pliers.
When the job is finally done, everything is fine – except that the autolamp will not shut off so long as the ignition is on. Daytime running lights anyone? Either we got a defective part, or I clipped one lead to the wrong terminal on the switch. I must let my right hand heal before even thinking about doing it over.
Hmm, let’s see a Jaguar series III evaporator of Volvo v70 steering rack.
Here is a painful one that will make everyone laugh…
I was probably 16 or 17, my mother pulls into the driveway in her 89 Pontiac 6000 STE and there is a ticking from the engine, almost a rapping noise. At that point the car probably had 50K miles on it, and my father was religious about 3000 mile oil changes then along with every other month waxings, weekly tire pressure checks etc…Ex military, enough said.
Being the budding young shade tree mechanic I diagnosed it as a lifter. Dad arrives home from one of the long dissapeared New England based computer companies and is pissed to hear about the problem. We start it up and he listens, thinks, thinks some more, all the while I’m pressing the lifter diagnosis and how I’d like to fix it by replacing the lifters on the 3.1 V6. Eventually I wear him down and he agrees to let me do it (he is pretty hot and pissed at this point).
Flash to the next day…I get home from school, having stopped at the auto parts store to buy lifters and I’m ready to tear into it. I spend a few hours ripping apart the intake manifold, making sure I keep the rockers and pushrods in order, doing everything I can by the direction in the factory service manual (the first check Dad usually writes after getting a car home is to order the factory service manual). I yank all the lifters, they all look brand new, nothing unusual, if anything I feel stupid replacing them because they look better than the store bought new lifters.
I get the engine all buttoned up by 11:30 or 12:00 midnight, very proud that I’ve done this all by myself. Jump i the drivers seat to experience that moment of euphoria, you know the moment, right after you feel like you did a major repair and its time to see if everything is “fixed” factory fresh. This could one of a few ways…the car might start and run beautifully with no ticking. The car may not start because I screwed up and didn’t connect something…didn’t put the rockers back in right…didn’t do…who knows…Or the car could start up and make the same noise.
I turn the key, the engine roars to life in the late 80’s early 90’s GM “sporty V6 exhaust” noise sort of way (pre GM’s move to resonators and large capacity mufflers to match the other makes at running silent and having no personality)..
The first feeling is joy and relief, it started and ran. Then the horror set in. The noise was still there! Fast forward about an hour, 1:00 AMish on a school night, my father enters to find out the result. Needless to say he was not a happy camper. I believe I heard what I like to call “compound swears” that night.
So the car is out of commission for a couple of days until Saturday rolls around. Dad and I start to try to diagnose it again before he throws in the towel and takes it to the dealer. I want to say it was about 3 hours into our investigation when Dad decides to start taking the spark plugs out to see what they look like. He grabs for the first plug wire, first wire on the front left of the engine. When he pulls on the wire the plug comes with it! I actually stepped back for a second because I could feel the garage getting really hot. Without looking up he asks me “didn’t you put new spark plugs in this last weekend?” (I had a habit of doing it on all the cars once a year because it was my form of therapy, some people golf, I putz around with the cars).
Silence…I finally manage to get out a “ummmmm yeah”. Dad pulls the plug now dangling from the wire, screws it back into the head finger tight, and then torques it down with the socket wrench. Without another word said, he gets in the car and starts the engine, the only noice is the burble of a Pontiac exhaust and the normal mechanical noises of a healthy 3.1 V6. Dad gets out of the car, closes the hood, and walks into the house.
To this day he has never said another word to me about it.
Yes folks, I forgot to torque down the spark plug on the #2 cyl and it manages to walk its way out of the head enough so the car ran fine but made a rapping noise from the spark plug banging around.
You know how some things just hit you where you can’t stop laughing. That could have been my young ADHD self that did that. I’m a car and bike fan but not a very good mechanic. Good story Philhawk.
Can I pick a motorcycle repair? Most annoying is valve adjustment on the 1986 Honda Interceptor 500. Remove rad to dig down to the front head, remove tank to dig down to the back head. Once you’re there the valve adjusters are buried deep in the head casting, and so tiny that you can hardly get your fingers in there.
If I must pick four wheeled vehicles, it was the annual front brake job on the 1996 Windstar. That thing just devoured brakes, and it was particular fun to do the job in the snow.
ANY repair to a 1990 Jetta would fall into this category. My favorite car to drive was a steaming pile to keep on the road. Engine electrical, cooling system, and exhaust repairs. Constantly. A miserable car to work on, with every bolt positioned precisely to remove copious amounts of skin.
Replaced it with a 2001 PT Cruiser Limited Edition 5 speed. Dead reliable. Not even remotely enjoyable to drive.
Oil pressure sender on an ’89 Beretta 2.8L. It was probably the first real repair I had ever attempted. Scumbag mechanic tried to convince me that the engine was shot, and oh I should talk to his buddy, he’ll give me a good price on a used car. So I decided to just fix it myself. Spent untold hours (in another cold Boston parking lot) trying to get that thing out with all manner of tools. Finally broke down and bought the stupid 1 3/4″ oil pressure sender socket to get the damned thing out, only to discover that the new sending unit has a 1 1/4″ nut. Back to Autozone… I still have both sockets, I’ve used each of them exactly once.
I first thought of an electric fuel pump I’d put on my first ’57 Chevy…victim of a gas tank improperly flushed by a client of the small-town radio station where I worked.
It was 1983, I’d been married for a year, finances were tight so a new tank was out of the question. So was getting the client to stand behind their work. I forget how long we suffered with having to pull off the road, get underneath, pull off the hoses and get ‘er flowing again. Had to have been a year or better…but I remember it getting better as time went on. Eventually I went back to a mechanical pump and put a new carb on and it was once again reliable…and I made a point, whenever pertinent, to never ever do business with Willcox Automotive in Cortland, NY.
But I think the all time worst was the ’93 Taurus SHO the wife and I bought for our son’s 16th birthday. Don’t get too excited, it had been off the road for four years when we bought it…two of those years under a tree. Virtually every steel line under the car was rusty or leaky. Worst of all was the lower trans line to the side of the radiator, one nut that had to take every bit of an hour to remove.
The rest of my travails with this car are written somewhere in the annals of CC Comments. I won’t rehash here…and in all fairness to the car, had it been continuously driven or a Western/Southern car 90% of my issues would never have occured.
Rust is a cruel and sadistic thing.
But for all the times back when I was trying to get that Taurus roadworthy, that I wish he’d said “Dad, an old S-10 pickup/Blazer would be cool”…
…guess what my son just bought?
A two-owner, clean as can be, all the records in the glovebox, 139,000-mile ’99 Olds Bravada. It’s his third S-10 style vehicle. He loves ’em almost as much as I love my ’97 Blazer.
Have you had to do an alternator in the SHO yet? I distintly remember my father putting a dozen (no lie) in my mother’s 94 SHO over a 2 year period. I think the first 4 were reman units, and the last 8 were new. That 3.2 was a beautiful engine to look at, and had pretty good power and sounds for the time, but man, that alternator was not fun to replace. If my mother haddn’t liked the car so much he would have traded it in after the second alternator went.
One more for the books…My Father getting even sort of.
purchased an 84 LeSabre for an everday driver to keep the Firehawk as a toy only. Purchased from a friend of the family who’s father had recently passed away, car was more or less immaculate. 110K miles, no rust, A/C, 307 and the famous TH200 transmission.
Was at my girlfriends house one night when the car lost reverse. Managed to push it out of the spot with help and get home. The next day was spent trying to figure out how to tackle a broken TH200 in a $800.00 car and not feel like I was burning money. Everyone wants $2000.00 to do the job. As you might imagine, no way am I shelling out that kind of coin for a $800.00 car. So, the idea of a $125.00 rebuild kit seems like a decent investment and a possible learning experience.
Everything went pretty smoothly. I yanked the transmission out on a transmission in about an hour, and had it apart all spread out about two hours after that. I was actually amazed at how easy it was once I made sure I kept everything in order. I discovered that the reverse failure was all because of one o-ring on one of the clutch packs (first gear I believe). I put everything back together, replaced all the o-rings, put in all new clutches ect… I was pretty happy and amazingly confident that it would work when I put it back in.
Flash forward to right about the time when the valve body is suppose to be bolted to the transmission. As some of you know, its a maze of passeges, balls and a ciruit board like plastic cover with specific holes in it to allow fluid to travel in the appropriate directions. I need to add that the rebuild kit came with about 20 different “circuit board” looking valve body parts, all a little different from each other but none are actually identified in any special way. Time for a break for lunch.
I walk back down after some lunch to find my Dad messing around with the valve body and shuffling the stack of circuit boards with a puzzled look on his face. You guessed it, he wanted to take a look at the workings of the valve body, took the original circuit board off, dropped all the little balls out of the valve body and somehow mixed the original circuit board in with all the new ones. AHHHH!
What can I do? I have never had the heart to disrespect my Dad no matter what the situation is, so here goes the task of trying to figure out how to put everything back in place without any kind of referance materials. The rebuild instructions had nothing, transmission books had nothing and the internet had nothing.
Transmission went back into the car and worked beautifully with a few exceptions. It now started out in second gear and shifted to third on its own. If you wanted first gear you had to manually select it, than manually shift to second gear also.
Drove it like this for a week, bought a junkyard transmission and swapped it in the following weekend, put a for sale sign on it that Sunday. The car sold in 20 minutes.
Purchased my recently non-driving Grandmother’s 93 Lebaron Sedan and life went on…
Why didn’t you just swap the valvebody from the junkyard transmission?
BigOldChrysler….I will answer your comment with a question Sir…
Why couldn’t you have asked this question to me in December of 2002? I really could have used that suggestion then! LOL, I called my father right after reading this and his comment was “son of a bitch, that is a spectacular idea, why did we do that!”.
Oh well, live and learn…
I’ve had a continuing problem with the steering rack on my 89 E30 Cabrio. I have replaced the rack 3 times under warranty; finally, I complained to ZF and amazingly managed to get them to ship me an M3 rack and pay for the install. Corporations, beware!
I’ve mostly done repair/maintenance work on Fox-body Fords, as my daily drivers have been newer cars. They are some of my favorite cars to drive, simple and honest they are. Fox-bodies are easy cars to work on, especially with a Windsor V8. But there is one thing that is a pain to replace, the heater core. It’s buried under the dash on the passenger side. Being that it’s a unit-body car there is no access hole in the engine bay. The only way to get at the heater core is to unbolt the dash and move it forward. If you have a manual HVAC system in you car it’s pretty easy to do. Just unbolt the dash, pull it forward a bit, cut a hole in the heater box, remove the core, put in a new core and seal the box with some silicone, and reverse the procedure. That is unless you have electronic climate control. My Thunderbird does. I that case you have to deal with all the servo motors and wiring for the system. God forbid you break anything because replacements are not really available. Plus the heater core has a unique shape to clear the climate control equipment, meaning that it’s not the same as the standard HVAC core which is shared between the Mustang and Thunderbird. No it has to be special ordered and costs twice as much as the Mustang/standard HVAC T-bird one. There is no way to make the non-climate control core work with the climate control system as it’s too big to fit in the heater box. The one in my Thunderbird lasted 20 years and I changed it 5 years ago. Hopefully, since the car isn’t driven at all in cold weather, the core will last another 20-30 years. The 1991 Mark VII I just bought appears to have the original heater core. It has the same system my Thunderbird does. I’m hoping I don’t have to change it anytime soon…..time isn’t on my side though.
Speaking of stupid thermostat location why did Ford but the lower bolt for the thermostat housing behind the timing cover on Windsor V8s? It’s such a paint to get at. You need a box end wrench and lots of swearing to get the bolt off.
The thing that kills me about the Mustang and T-Bird heater core set up is that on the original Fox body the Farimont they did it so right. Open up the glove box, release the catches so it can swing all the way down. Remove a cover held on by a half-dozen or so screws disconnect the hoses and pull the core out like an 8-track tape. 30 minutes plus burping the cooling system.
Any repair requiring use of a coil spring compressor. The Chinese “PowerBuilt” units must have been designed for all cars and light trucks except 70’s – 80’s GM products (which happens to be the only stuff I work on now).
Spending almost half of a day with my father in law almost completly tearing appart my daily driver and beater 1996 Toyota Tercel engine. It was running on 3 cylinders and I had recently changed the sparkplugs, sparkplugs cables and ignition coils. My father in law checked cylinder compression, fuel injection system by swapping injectors and nothing. He took out the valve cover and everything was fine. Suddenly he asked me if I had a piece of electrical or speaker cable. I found a piece and gave it to him. He took out the spark cable of the offending spark and connected the speaker cable I gave to him to the spark plug and the coil. I turned the car on and all of the 92 furious horses came back to life and the engine was running perfectly. It turned out that the cheap spark cables that I had purchased a week before, came with a faulty cable. That engine uses 2 coils and 2 cables that go to the other 2 sparkplugs. I went to the parts store, purchased the Toyota replacement cables and problem solved. Lessons learned that day: Just because it’s new, it doesn’t mean that it cannot be damaged, don’t be cheap, and also always be grateful that your father in law and your brother in law are car nuts and mechanics. I only have to pay for parts whenever one of our 3 cars needs repairs and is something I cannot do by myself. Even if I have to hear my father in law talking about how good were cars in the good old days in contrast to the dispossable cars of today.
When I was a senior in high school the timing chain slipped on my 64 Buick Riviera. I got it all apart, but some of the bolts broke when I took off the water pump and timing chain cover. I went to the auto store and bought new bolts that were slightly longer than the original bolts, but I did not realize this until later. I put everything back together using the new bolts and it would not turn over, it was like the engine was locked. My dad bought the car from me before I left for college and later he had the engine rebuilt. When they tore the engine apart, they found that the longer bolts I put in had gone through the block into the piston and that’s what locked it up. I heard about that one for a long time.