One particularly cold day, I was on my way home from work and I saw a couple of women standing by a black Cadillac crossover that was parked in the grass beside the road. I pulled over to see if I could lend a hand. I was in my uniform, and I assessed their situation — quite simply — they had a flat tire on the right front. I opened the hatch on my Explorer, got out the small jack and four-way lug wrench I carry, and went to work changing the tire. I do this kind of thing regularly when I see people beside the road with flats, because almost nobody knows how to change a tire any more, and rural Alabama isn’t as dangerous as a big city. I was about half done when a wrecker arrived, and the wrecker driver watched me finish changing the tire and said something about the donut and how it should be installed on the back. I pointed out that this donut was the same diameter as the regular tire, so the gears in the differential wouldn’t suffer. I heard the driver tell the women he was on the other side of town when he received the call and wished he had been able to get there sooner.
It was about that time that I realized I had accidentally bumped the wrecker guy out of a roadside assistance call. I would never have changed the flat had I known he was on the way, but they didn’t say a word about having called anybody. It was then evident that they thought I was their roadside guy because of my uniform – and the wrecker guy showed up in jeans and a bomber jacket. As I was putting my tools away, one of the very confused women asked in her crisp British accent if they needed to sign any paperwork.
“Nah,” I told her as I closed my hatch. “I’m just on my way home from work.”
The 2004 Trailblazer
A customer came walking into my office asking if we could put an oil pump on the engine in his Trailblazer. He was an older fellow who had convinced himself that a new engine heart would silence his suddenly noisy powerplant. Out of respect and diplomacy, I spent more time discussing his request than was necessary. Semi-knowledgeable customers like this usually need their thinking gently redirected, and I convinced this fellow that, before we spent the time and effort fiddling with the timing chains and everything we’d have to hurdle on the way to installing the oil pump he had already bought, we needed to do some exploratory surgery, and after a short dialogue, he saw my point.
I wrote a work order, and we removed the oil pan to find large slivers of at least one rod bearing swimming in the pan-sludge – some of which was still clogging the screen. We pulled the rod caps one at a time until we found that #2 had burned out and shed the metal that had wound up in the oil pan. He’d need an engine, and that was that.
This reminds me of another fellow a few years back who was doing some contract work with a group of builders on a local campus. He came to me one morning and told me his Ford Ranger 4 cylinder had begun to rattle a bit, and that the oil light had come on just that morning. I told him his oil screen was likely clogged with sludge. In the parking lot, that character drained the crankcase oil into a large-mouthed jug and used a little flashlight to examine the oil pump screen through that tiny hole, and sure enough, it was clogged. He got some kind of aerosol spray from the parts store, along with oil and a filter, and working through the oil drain plug hole, he cleaned the clogged screen and then did what he could to flush that stuff out of the oil pan – all by just removing the drain plug. And he fixed his Ranger — at least, temporarily.
The 99 Mazda 3.0L, a Caravan and a Freestar
Nick is one of my guys, and he told me his truck was losing water and running hot — it had a leaking hose, but he had added water and had driven it until he had damaged it to the point that the compression was pushing its way into the coolant. Blown gaskets prevailed, and it was his only ride, so we got started yanking the heads off. If he was fortunate, head gaskets would be all he’d need, but he wasn’t fortunate — as it was, he needed a cylinder head, and that ran the bill up a bit. He finished the truck, paid the bill, and got his ride back.
The college owns a 2005 Dodge Caravan with nearly 200K on the clock, and that vehicle’s status changed from being driven every day to being driven about once a week, and a parasitic drain suddenly raised its ugly head. About half the time whenever a driver would obtain the keys to use that vehicle, the battery would be dead. With the PICO connected via an inductive clamp, we discovered a significant drain that evaporated when the accessory relay was removed, and when we’d remove that relay, we’d feel the “click” of the relay coil releasing — that relay was remaining energized constantly after it should have gone dark, and that was keeping the radio, power windows, etc. up and running even after the driver had exited the vehicle. It wouldn’t do this every time, but we caught it doing this during our diagnostics. On this vehicle, the front control module energizes the accessory relay, and that module is part of the TIPM — the smart fuse box, if you will. With the scan tool connected and the problem present, we saw no reason why the accessory relay should have been remaining energized, and we were lucky enough to find the right replacement TIPM for $100 at a local salvage yard. Game, set and match on that one.
The 2005 Freestar wasn’t overheating, but it was an occasional no-crank. We found that we could bypass the secondary terminals in the relay socket and the starter would spin, but that there was no juice at all making it from the ignition switch to the starter relay coil. The theft light wasn’t blinking and there were no related codes, so we checked connections between the ignition switch and the starter relay and found a time-corroded set of chalky terminals at TR sensor pin 12 that turned out to be interrupting the current to the relay coil. Had this been a high-current circuit, this oxidized terminal would have melted the connector. That one was an easy fix.
The 2004 Land Rover
A guy came to us with a 2004 Land Rover that was leaking brake fluid and had a no-blow problem with the A/C — the blower was dead, and one of my guys did some Googling, as young guys with smartphones are wont to do — it seems that half the people who owned a Rover of this generation had a dead blower motor and nobody seemed to know the root of the concern, but everybody was running overlays. With a desire to know why, we dug up the schematic. In the panel, the fuse was good, and power was passing through it, but when we finally found the blower relay (which was annoyingly difficult, but Identifix® has the information, albeit for an RHD vehicle), we discovered that there was no power at the relay common terminal — it had nothing to deliver to the blower motor.
Backtracking to the fuse panel connectors, we found the wire that was supposed to be feeding the relay and it was dark — it turned out that the innards of that fuse panel had gone open, and now failed to deliver voltage to the motor — the fuse panel was the weak link in the chain, and it had fallen prey to time, chance and obsolescence. But rather than launching a nationwide search for a salvage yard replacement fuse panel for a 2004 Land Rover, and rather than having the guy get a title loan just to buy a new fuse panel, we opted for the workable fix that would strengthen the chain rather than simply replacing the weak link. An overlay isn’t a bad fix in cases like this.
This blower situation isn’t that uncommon and never has been, because blowers pull a heavy load. Back when Ford vans still had glass fuses in the panel under the dash, they would develop a similar problem — they wouldn’t necessarily blow the fuse, but the fan would fail because the solder would melt out of the end of that glass fuse due to heat and resistance within the panel, and Ford had us cut the wires at the panel and install a 30-amp breaker.
In the Land Rover’s case, we got an inline blade fuse holder and a 30-amp fuse, and beginning at the battery junction under the hood, we fed a 12-gauge wire through a loom back through the bulkhead grommet to the relay common terminal, and the blower was resurrected with a solid, lasting repair. I showed the owner where the new blower fuse was and how we had run the overlay through loom along the harness, and he was a happy camper.
The Land Rover’s master cylinder was leaking at the reservoir grommets and we replaced the master cylinder, reservoir and all, to stop the fluid leak — that was a straightforward fix.
A problem two years in the making
The title vehicle for this article is a 2008 Chevy Impala with a 3.9L V6 and 124,654 miles on the odometer that came in on the hook with the report that it was making a horrible racket and couldn’t be driven. What we found was that the #1 spark plug had blown out of its hole. That’s the one under the alternator. Now, this is one of our company cars, and while I didn’t dig into my records when the vehicle first came in, I didn’t remember us ever replacing the spark plugs on this one — not in recent history anyway. It was also sporting a set of replacement wires, which I didn’t remember us replacing.
The problem was that when we tried to install another spark plug in that hole, we found that the plug would tighten down to a certain point and then pop loose again — over and over. Using the Autel inspection scope’s magnified image, we saw threads that didn’t really look that damaged, but the fact remained that a spark plug wouldn’t screw into that hole and tighten up. Looking more closely at the actual spark plug that had blown out of the hole, it appeared that there was some kind of gray material in the threads. What I later realized was that the gray stuff in those threads was probably due to the fact that the spark plug had originally been screwed all the way in, but it hadn’t been properly torqued, and that it had spent a long time bouncing in the threads and slowly screwing itself out of that hole until it was dislodged by compression and combustion.
My initial take on this situation was that no matter how, where or why this happened, we needed to come up with a fix. The alternator had to be removed, and we had to decide what we were going to do about that situation. Another close-up scope shot revealed threads that looked fairly normal, and the threads on the spark plug didn’t look stripped, but I opted (right or wrong) to put a thread insert in that hole for good measure. Of course, when tapping threads in a spark plug hole, it’s wise to first force air into the throttle body and turn the engine over until positive pressure is blowing out the spark plug hole, and that’s what we did. An entire new set of plugs was installed and torqued, and at the time of this writing, the car is still on the road.
But when I researched the work we had done on that company car over the years, I found that somebody under my supervision had replaced the spark plugs some two years ago — almost to the day — but I couldn’t find a record of who did the work, only that we had purchased spark plugs and wires for that vehicle back then. The fact that the errant spark plug stayed in place for two full years before leaving its hole was amazing — that car has gone tens of thousands of miles with multiple drivers. And there was no evidence that the spark plug had overheated, either. Time and chance had struck again.
Rust-ravaged by time
Speaking of Impalas, a 2006 model came to us needing brake work (scrubbing in the rear), and this one had spent its prime years in New York. With that in mind, the readers who live in those northern road-salt climates know what time and chance does to cars up there. One of my students made the remark that cars in the South rust from the top down and cars in the north rust from the bottom up. Down on the Texas coast, some of the shops used to regularly spray the underside of cars with oil to protect them from the salt air. I’m not sure if anybody does that anymore.
The left rear inner brake pad was long gone on this Impala and the caliper piston was kissing the rotor with every brake application. If that wasn’t enough, the car was blessed with enough rust — particularly on fluid-carrying lines — to make it very dangerous to drive. The fuel return line had even rusted through back near the gas tank and was leaking, and the brake lines were one heavy application away from a sudden death situation. It would have been a matter of time before the brakes failed, and it was only by chance that this vehicle wound up on our lift before it happened.
The brakes got replacement rear rotors, a new left rear caliper, and brake lines to the rear, which we built with bulk tubing, complete with ISO and double flares as required. The leaking fuel line was replaced from stem to stern with a new steel line, but I had to cut an 8mm return line pipe off an old fuel pump and compression-union it to the replacement fuel line so the plastic quick-connect would work back at the tank. Oh, and we also replaced the rusty fuel filter that looked just about as bad as everything else under there.
That encounter was a victory — time, chance and entropy had done their best to render this vehicle undriveable. But with some of our time, we undid enough of the entropy to hopefully remove chance from the equation.
