Motor Age Garage: Recovery efforts

June 24, 2014
No vehicle is immune from this kind of neglect. The amount of work we put into repairing them for their owners is what makes the difference.
My dad used to take me to his shop when I was a small boy, and so I kind of cut my working teeth on wrenches. And because just about everybody in our area knew my dad or knew of him, my connection to him meant that I never had a problem finding a job as a mechanic. Buying and fixing derelict vehicles was a way of life for us, and as I got older, I found myself noticing vehicles in our community that were sitting fallow without much wrong with them.

I was 19 years old when I asked a man named Oscar, why that 1964 Chevy pickup he once drove was sitting out next to a pile of tin with a flat tire – at the time, that truck was only 12 years old. Compare the age of that vehicle to a 2002 model today.

You don’t have to drive very far in this part of the country to find vehicles rotting away. Who knows why they parked this very nice Camry, but it hasn’t moved in at least two years.

“It was running when I parked it there a couple of years ago,” he told me. “It just needs that left front tire aired up and I think a battery would get it going.”

I knew that truck because I had driven it when it was newer, and I always loved those mid-’60s Chevy pickups.  So I bought it from him on the spot for $150, and it was very easy to get it running again.

Five years later when I was working in Texas, I took a few vacation days and made a trip back to Southeast Alabama. As I visited my friends, I dropped by to see Oscar’s son Danny, who also was one of my best buddies, and I noticed that his cloud blue 1973 LTD was sitting not 200 yards from where that 1964 Chevy truck had been parked, all covered with pecan tree smut. He had purchased that car when it looked brand new and was only a couple of years old, but that had been years ago.

This was causing the Malibu’s intermittent no-crank – replacing the battery did nothing to solve the real problem – we replaced this cable with a new one and the cop drove away with a big smile.

“What’s up with the LTD?” I asked. I wasn’t surprised at his reply.

“Well, it was running when I parked it,” he began. It was déjà vu all over again. Well, that one needed a tune-up and a battery, and while I didn’t buy the car, I did volunteer to get it running so he could sell it to somebody besides the junk man – and it ran really well.

No vehicle is immune from this kind of neglect. Not too far from where I’m sitting as I type these words, there sits a Toyota Camry of the 2002-2006 body style generation that is parked and wasting away for some reason, and a few days ago I saw a Mercedes of about the same vintage that has obviously been sitting fallow for months.

When we got the gas tank off the 626, we found this disaster, along with another thirty pounds of the same gunk in the tank – if the tank had been steel instead of plastic, we might have needed to replace it too.

The Story of the 626
“I put a used starter on it, but it started running really bad  and now it won’t start.” 

That was his original stated concern, nothing more, and as it turned out, he left out some crucial details. Initially, M. Brown and Bobby L. reported that the coil was weak, but I could stretch the spark almost an inch and it was bright blue – they had fallen prey to the bright sunlight syndrome, which masks the true mettle of a good spark. When we shoved it into the shop we moved on to check fuel pressure and found that we didn’t have any and we couldn’t hear the pump running. We also measured the current the pump was pulling and saw about 10 amps, meaning current was indeed being consumed by the pump, but if the pump isn’t humming it isn’t spinning and it needed to come out of there, so Brown went to work getting the tank down. More about that in a minute.

These were brake parts from the ’97 Accord, the one they drove until it wouldn’t stop any more.  When we called the owner and told her it had been knocked off the lift, she just told us she didn’t mind a dented fender as long as the car would still drive

Another vehicle that made an appearance at our shop was a gray 2001 Impala unmarked Alabama State Trooper car. It had been sitting up for a few weeks and was thought to have a security key problem because sometimes it’d start and sometimes it wouldn’t. They stopped using the car because they couldn’t trust it, and no cop needs a car with an intermittent no-start concern. Somebody had replaced the battery, but to no avail. We don’t ordinarily work on trooper cars, but somebody opted to bring us this one. Because so many GM cars of this vintage have Passlock and Body Control Module (BCM) problems, they assumed the concern would be something like that.

When we duplicated the concern, we did a voltage drop test and we found a 7.0-volt drop between the (side post) positive battery bolt and the starter terminal. That led us to a chalked up positive cable that had gone totally unnoticed by whomever changed the battery. I bought a replacement cable – well, two of them actually, because this one has a branch coming off that side post terminal that feeds the under hood fuse panel. 

This Expedition had a flat air spring – the one on the right had been replaced right before it was parked. We sold them on replacing the rear suspension with coil springs and the kit came with a full set of shocks. 

I removed the red rubber insulator from the cable, spread the ears of the terminal, pinched the secondary cable’s copper with those ears and soldered the second shorter cable I bought in there with a propane torch, fabricating a replacement cable that was configured and looked exactly like the original, red boot and all. Problem solved with $17 in parts. State college shakes hands with State Troopers, and the Impala that had been in moth balls for a couple of months is back on patrol surprising unwary speeders with its un-cop car persona. To be candid, I was kind of glad that one was gone because some students kept fiddling with the siren while it was in the shop.

Bobby got lucky with JB Weld on this one and managed to get the ceramic out in one piece, but the ceramic was nice and dry and we let it set all night 

When It Finally Fails
This set of stories wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the ragged 1997 Accord that came in with the brakes so worn that nothing was left of the driver side outboard pad but the sheet metal silencer. Furthermore, it had blown that caliper. While most neglecters will drive one until it doesn’t go any more, they literally drove this one until it wouldn’t stop.

While we had it on the lift, we had a one of those “perfect storm” mishap situations that sometimes happens in a shop, and that set of circumstances caused this Honda to get knocked partially off the lift by another vehicle (long story).  But to give credit where it’s due, that Bendpak lift’s arm locks did a wonderful job of preventing the disaster from being worse than it was, so kudos to Bendpak.

I also took in a job on a 1999 Expedition with a flat air spring on the left side. That big SUV was filthy with tree dust and had been parked for months when they got a traffic ticket on the way to the shop for an expired license plate. At the shop, we converted that one to coil spring suspension, washed it, and got it back on the road. While we were under the hood, we noticed that the cruise control brake pressure switch was leaking a lot; the old recall had even been done at some point. We replaced that switch to eliminate the fire hazard those switches cause.

Speaking of JB Weld, the 350 in this ’99 Chevy had been the victim of a serious patch job after the heater hose quick connect fitting broke off – it kept leaking and the owner’s friend kept adding more JB Weld. There are some jobs where JBW just shouldn’t be used!  When we were done fixing it right, the leak stopped

Then there was another Expedition, a 2007 model with a 3-valve 5.4L that needed spark plugs and a Coil-On-Plug (COP) coil. It was one of those with the problem-prone long-nose spark plugs, and there are a number of methods being applied in the field on these. The one that seems to work best (believe it or not) is to use an impact wrench, as destructive as that sounds, because wrenching hard and fast on these breaks that trouble-causing carbon bond and seems to work a lot better than trying to bring them out slow. My guy Bobby heated the engine up on this one and we ran some Motorcraft injector cleaner through the system to soften the carbon, because we had heard of people doing that to “grease the skids,” so to speak. But two of these came apart in their holes, and so we were in for some problem-solving.

I bought the $95 Lisle tool for shoving the porcelain down and getting the shell out of there, but Bobby decided to try getting the ceramic completely out of one by putting some JB Weld on the inside of the first threaded shell that had come out empty. He screwed it back in over the porcelain with the JBW in place. He let it stay there all night, and the next morning he was able to screw the shell back out so that he removed the ceramic in one piece, leaving only the hollow electrode shell in there, which made using the threaded Lisle tool easier.

On the other separated plug, he wasn’t so lucky, and we had to break the ceramic off and shove it down on that one.

This was our fix for the broken nipple on the Nissan – this heater hose manifold was robust enough to handle some pipe threads and a replacement fitting.

Speaking Of JB Weld…
I’m not here to bash JB Weld; it has its place, and most of us have used it at one time or another. After all, it did wonders on extracting the ceramic on one of those stubborn three valve plugs. And I’ve seen people use it to do some pretty amazing things when the mating surfaces were properly prepared.  But some people would, I think, build a whole car out of it if they could make it happen, and wild stories abound among back-yard DIY folks about magic they’ve worked with it.

One lady brought her 1999 Tahoe to us with a coolant leak where somebody had tried to screw that quick-connect heater fitting out of the manifold and had broken that pewter fitting off down in manifold.  They had then proceeded to cut the rib off the aluminum pipe part of the heater hose and shove it into what was left of the original fitting, then pack on what looked like about $30 worth of JB Weld. We had to chip a coffee cup full of that stuff out of the way, then chip that pewter out of the manifold threads so we could follow up with a pipe tap. We then screwed a good steel fitting in there and put a plain piece of heater hose with a worm type clamp on there that wouldn’t leak. We also flushed the 350’s cooling system and replaced the thermostat.

This tape job wasn’t sufficient to keep out unwanted unmetered air, and so a nasty vacuum leak and a rolling idle resulted – we found this with smoke and fixed it with the perfect rubber bell reducer from the Advance Auto Parts HELP board along with a piece of 3/8 fuel line hose and a new PCV valve.

On a vaguely similar note, we were replacing the passenger side cam sensor on a 2005 Nissan Pathfinder when that plastic heater hose manifold nipple broke off. This one had front and rear heat and that manifold is where the heater hoses all come together. Rather than buying that entire heater hose harness, I noticed that that plastic heater hose manifold was pretty thick where the nipple broke off. I tapped it with a half inch pipe tap and screwed a nipple fitting in there to reconnect the heater hose with a trusty worm-type clamp. It has turned out so far to be a reliable repair.

Then there was the Ranger with an ugly rolling idle, fuel trims in the stratosphere, O2 and MAF DTCs and a deteriorated PCV feed that somebody had tried to fix with tape (we found that one with smoke), and kudos to the Help board folks who had a 3/4 to 3/8 rubber elbow that was exactly right to replace the ruined one and fix it right.

Closure on the 626
When we got the plastic gas tank off of that 626, we found putrid, rotten gas in there (complete with the rusty-looking muck it turns into in extreme circumstances). I ordered a fuel pump and Melissa steamed out the tank, replaced the pump, flushed the fuel lines and popped a new fuel filter on it.

After that, it still wouldn’t start until we got rid of the six wet spark plugs that would never fire again. After changing the oil and replacing the ragged wiper blades with some new ones, we saw that Mazda drive out of the shop still sporting a 2010 license plate that might generate a traffic ticket on that one before it got back home. Who knows? It might just get that ticket from whatever trooper was driving the Impala we fixed.

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