None of us is a prophet or the son of a prophet, but just about every one of us as a professional mechanic has warned customers of impending vehicular disasters, just to be ignored for one reason or another, only to be vindicated later. For example, there was a pretty blonde who had us do an oil change on her SUV – it was, as I remember, an Asian make with a four cylinder, and while we had it in the service bay, I could hear the timing belt slapping the plastic cover.
“You’d better bring this thing back tomorrow and let us put a timing belt on it,” I told her. “If this one jumps time, fixing it will be expensive. It’s not a free-spinner.” Then I had to explain what “not a free spinner” meant in plain language, which she seemed to understand (not). She had me order a timing belt, which I did (I told her we’d need to check the various pulleys and the water pump, too), but she never showed the next day, the next week, or the next month. About three months later she stopped by my office to tell me her timing belt had failed about six weeks after our conversation and it had cost her $1,500 to get her ride going again.
More recently, another procrastinator I know complained of a coolant leak on his 2005 Power Stroke, and I showed him the crack in the degas bottle that was dumping his coolant. I then called the parts store for him and found that they had one on the shelf for less than $50. I change the degas bottle on vehicles sometimes when I flush the system just to get rid of the rust-stained old one. Well, this guy didn’t have the $50 that day, and so he decided to keep adding coolant, planning to change the jug later. The short version of that story is that he destroyed the engine – a 6.0L PowerStroke – and well, that pretty much mothballed the truck, which will probably never be driven again.
Lest I appear too judgmental, I have to recollect one of my own procrastinations. Back in 1981, I was driving a ‘66 VW Bug, you know, one of those with the little brake fluid reservoir behind the spare tire and the steel line feeding through a stupid rubber grommet in the top of the master cylinder? Well, I had to add brake fluid regularly because it was seeping out around the grommet, and one day, as I pulled into a convenience store parking lot in Port Arthur, Texas, I hit the brake and had no pedal. The fluid was gone. I jerked the park brake and the cable broke, and I jumped the curb and smashed a newspaper machine with the bumper of the bug. The impact ducked the front of the bug in so that the headlights were painting the ground about ten feet in front of the car, and so I chained the bug’s bumper supports to the back of my pickup, backed up, and jerked the front back into shape. But in that case, I was a procrastinator in my own right.
Usually the decision to procrastinate is economy related, and we’ve all known of customers driving around with grinding brakes, dry-rotted tires, slam-shifting transmissions and dripping water pumps because they simply don’t have the money to do any better.
Sage advice
The 2002 Elantra that headlines this article came to us for an oil change, and to its credit, this car had worked very hard to earn its keep and it had gone enough miles to circle the globe eight times. This one was way overdue for a timing belt, and while somebody had replaced some of the hoses, that plastic and aluminum radiator was on borrowed time. Let me digress here long enough to voice my opinion, i.e., that high-mileage vehicles that have aged through more than a few summer seasons should have their radiators replaced as a preventative measure, but make sure you choose a reputable brand!
To her credit, the Elantra owner did let us replace the timing belt, because I told her how those engines literally destroy themselves when they jump time. The last one of these little Korean in-lines we saw that jumped time was in a Kia Sephia that snapped the heads off multiple valves and beat the daylights out of one piston, ruining the cylinder head for good measure. Customers don’t often take timing belt intervals seriously enough. The lesson I try to teach everybody I know is to pay attention to the recommended timing belt change interval, or else you’ll be sorry.
A couple months later, the Elantra owner left me a voicemail asking if we could replace her engine. When I called back and asked her why, she told me the car had developed a radiator leak and had had some overheating episodes. The short version is that this Elantra suffered from the same kind of procrastination that the above-mentioned Power Stroke did. The coolant leak was discovered, water was added a few times, and a radiator was purchased, but the tyranny of the urgent kept the car on the road until it gave all it had, and now the crank was shoving pistons whose rings no longer had temper – the once-lively powerplant had now become a compressionless boat weight. Now she had also purchased a $600 used engine and needed it installed.
In the bay
In the service bay, my guy jerked the engine and transmission out as a unit – which is the smart way to do one of these. A previous student had replaced the engine in a 2005 Kia Sportage, which sports the same mill, and he found out the hard way that reading the shop manual first is better than winging it on one of these. I had told him that, but his procrastination in finding the right way cost him quite a bit of grief. Thus he worked himself into a mess on that one trying to swing the engine away from the transmission and bring it out of there. There wasn’t room for that. The Elantra job went a lot smoother because the guy doing this job chose to read the instructions before all else failed (good idea!). My recently developed mantra for newbies is, “before you wrench, read.” In this case, that approach paid off.
Sometimes I’ll have a team of two do jobs like this, but engine swaps and other such jobs are best done by only one guy, because that eliminates the “he said, she said” element. What that means is when two are working on the same job, one of them either bails off the job before it’s done, or they leave things loose, claiming they thought the other guy had tightened it. Personal responsibility goes a long way toward making the job a better one, and if the wrench guy is a one-man show those kinds of mistakes are usually mitigated.
The replacement engine was drop shipped to the shop, and when we got it mounted on a stand, we threw a timing belt and a water pump on it for good measure, and then went to work moving the transaxle from the old engine to the new one. We examined the torque converter seal, which was still soft and pliable, and replaced the half-shaft seals in the transaxle.
Well, while this job was under way, the owner of the Navigator called – you know, the one we put the timing chains and cam phasers in a couple months back? On the phone, he claimed the Lincoln was “doing the same thing,” and he went on to say that it had run very well for weeks, but then when it was sold, it began running poorly 30 minutes after the purchaser left on it and the vehicle had to be bought back. He was an easy fellow to get along with in spite of that bad experience. I told him to bring it in, and we’d have a look. This was troubling, because we had used aftermarket components, and after the job was done, there were people who warned me that it was a bad idea to use anything aftermarket on a timing chain job like that because of the way the tensioners are made. Well, we’ve put quite a few aftermarket timing chain kits on with no issues, but had this one bitten us? We’d see when it came in.
The two false “same problem” cases
When we did our test drive and code scan on the Navigator, we duplicated his concern, saw a flashing MIL and found cylinder number six tossing a misfire code. This three-valver would need a set of those dandy $15 apiece spark plugs and possibly one coil, so that’s what we did. The timing chain tensioners didn’t fail after all. And yes, we were dummies for procrastinating in replacing those spark plugs when we did the timing chain job. And believe it or not, the best way we’ve found to get all those spark plugs out without breaking one is by jerking them out of their holes with an impact wrench. It breaks the carbon bond between the snout of the plug and the head.
For another follow-up, our regular readers might remember the F-150 we discussed in the same article as the Navigator – remember the one with a water-damaged junction box that was keeping things on and killing the battery? Well, the windshield leak had been repaired, but not before he procrastinated a bit, and it rained a time or two during that interim. Since screwball electrical problems started happening again, with various different electronics shutting down as he was driving, he bought another junction box from the Ford place, then had a friend help him install that one. Afterward, they determined the alternator was the problem because the battery was slowing dying as the engine ran. The alternator was replaced, but after that work was done, the theft light was flashing and there was nothing showing on the odometer but dashes. Had this chain of events happened at a shop, most customers would have sworn the mechanic was an incompetent boob. That’s when they called for the “calf rope.”
Before I even made the trip, I asked if there were two keys available for the truck, and the customer answered that there was only one key, so I made him come up with a second one just in case I had to erase and re-burn the keys.
When I stopped by the guy’s house to see about the truck, I saw the theft light flashing, and while my scan tool would talk to the Hybrid Electric Cluster (HEC), the PCM wasn’t communicative at all.
In these situations, I like to disconnect an injector or the IAC and see if EEC power is present on the red wire, because the EEC power relay also feeds the PCM. In this case, with the key on, I saw a very dim glow at injector number one instead of the nice bright light I got at the battery – voltage was being dropped somewhere between the battery and the business end of that circuit and since this wasn’t my first rodeo, I had an idea where to look first. I gently propped my test light up in such a way that it would remain in contact with the EEC power wire at the injector, then tapped gently on the EEC Power Relay to see the test light get very bright, I heard tones, and the Theft light stopped its infernal blinking. When I switched the key off and back on, however, the problem returned, making it impossible to use the quick way of programming the new key. I moved the fuel pump relay to the EEC power relay’s socket, and at that point I was able to start the engine and program the new key by simply cycling the first one.
On the road again
The Elantra engine job went like a song. The new radiator was installed, along with all new fluids, filters and belts, and the test drive went well except for the fact that the left front wheel started making a bit of noise. It turned out that the otherwise fastidious guy who replaced the engine had procrastinated in regard to applying the torque wrench to that wheel and it drove out of the shop with the lug nuts barely snug. We caught it, though, and tied up that loose end before setting the air pressure in all the tires and applying a windshield sticker with her next oil change mileage. Then we had to retrieve the car after it left because of a loose transmission line clamp. Oh well, the point is that no matter who’s doing the learning, procrastination is the best teacher.
