I Am STILL Not A Wrench
In my Hooniversary contributor profile, I stated that “I am not a wrench.” Well, despite some vacillation, I recently proved the accuracy of that statement.
The Town Cow’s gimmicky luxury rear air suspension recently shot craps. I’d noticed an alarming amount of dry rot on the rear air springs last summer while changing a tire, so I knew they were going to give me trouble sooner or later. Early in the fall, the compressor began cycling excessively. But those cycles suddenly stopped altogether earlier this month and the “AIR SUSP” warning light on the dash came on. Over a three day period the TC’s rear bumper sunk lower and lower toward the pavement, and the ride quality deteriorated from magic carpet to buckboard. But, what to do about it? For the first time in a long time, I seriously considered undertaking a major car repair myself.
Yeahhh...that's not good.
I had no desire to fork out the cash to continue maintaining the unnecessarily complex, expensive and troublesome OEM air ride system. Fortunately, a few quick Google searches confirmed what I already thought: the air springs sat in standard coil spring mounts, and replacement was no more complicated than ripping out the old stuff and installing a new pair of rear springs.
My rear shocks had been in need of replacement for a while, so I was pretty pleased to find that for less than $300, I could buy a “conversion kit” that consisted of two springs, two shocks and instructions about what wire to cut (to disable the compressor and idiot light). Hmmm, for three bills and some knucklebusting, the Cow could be back in business. I asked my most wrench-y friend David (builder of a T/A that runs high 11s) to help me do the work, and he agreed.
But past experience gave birth to a recurring, nightmarish vision: it’s 1:00 AM, and I have to be at work in seven hours. There’s one stuck, rusty bolt that is either rounded off from my attempts to budge it without the luxury of air tools, or worse yet, sheared off. What was supposed to be a straightforward, uncomplicated repair is going horribly wrong. I couldn’t drive the car to the garage now even if I wanted to. Dave’s given up and gone home and I have no idea how to proceed. Regret floods over me.
I called another hot-rod insider friend, who gave me a line on a muffler shop that would be willing to do the work cheap, and I dropped my sagging Cow off the following morning before work. They called around lunchtime to tell me the TC was ready to go. You can’t get much more hassle-free than that. In the end, having them do the work cost only about $130 more than I could have bought the parts for myself (and that doesn’t take into account the possible expense of buying additional tools or perhaps towing should things go pear-shaped in my garage).
So, I’m still not a wrench. Sure, I missed out on the experiential know-how and satisfaction that I could have gained by doing the work myself. But I now have a much more firm riding, properly damped, coil-spring-equipped Town Cow without raising the ire of my employer, my wife, or my wrench-y pals. I can live with that.
Now THAT'S some ride height!
No related posts.
When my Dad had his Mk VII 3 of the 4 air shocks leaked. It made for an unusual stance when parked, looked sort of like a lowrider with hydraulics. On his Lincoln the compressor would usually pump the shocks back up to a somewhat normal height in a matter of a minute or so. He never replaced them.
[youtube 2Rlb0a6LEH0&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Rlb0a6LEH0&feature=related youtube]
I am STILL not your broom.
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Hey, time is money. You don't have to make a tonne of bank to know that $130 is a good price to pay for 8 hours of your life back. At the end of the day, if you enjoy wrenching, do it. If you don't, pay to have it done. I lovingly caress every nut, bolt and screw on the RX-7, but the Pathfinder goes to the shop every time.
Hey that happens. The fuel pump went in the Regal and my roommate convinced me we could get this project done ourselves. Given the expense of these in-tank jobs, and my willing to try to do it myself I eventually went with him on this after calling the parents for the OK and money for parts [it's their car and I'm a broke college student]. Well after buying a few extra tools [the roommate keeps a veritable stocked garage in the trunk of his Caddy] and taking a second trip [it gets dark early after daylight savings] we were finally able to get the tank dropped and it was surprisingly straightforward from there. In a few hours we were back on the road to our apartment 20 miles away….
THEN, after he left for the weekend, the car's pump started making noise again and fuel pressure was low enough to impede proper starting. I had a few reasons not to fuss with it again: A) I was alone B) I was taking a trip to Buffalo for a Sabres game C) The weekend before finals week and D) ran out of ideas. So I had to drop it off at a garage to tell me the pump wasn't properly connected to the fuel line at the top and that my tank now has a slight leak in exchange for close to $200. Ya live ya learn, but financially and timewise, I barely came out ahead.
I had a similar thing happen to me about a year ago. My old Honda just flat-out refused to start. I'd tried jumping it, bumping it, and replacing the starter motor, all to no avail. I eventually had it towed to a shop, and got a call scarcely three hours later: "Dead battery."
Huh!?
Apparently the battery was just weak enough to freak out the ECU,causing the cold-start circuit to hold open the injectors until the cylinders were just lousy with fuel. Thus, after my first few attempts to crank the car on battery power, not even a jump-start would make the thing light, because the mixture in the cylinder was impossibly rich. One fresh battery and $300 later (mistakenly-replaced starter+tow+battery), the car was back in service, and I was feeling rather sheepish.
This is why you have to own multiple cars. Old cars break down from time to time so in order to keep your life going smoothly, own more than one. That way you can fix one and drive the other and you are very rarely without transportation. Heck, right now my fleet includes 3 cars and a pickup (AMC Spirit, Olds Cutlass, Geo Metro, Nissan Frontier). The Geo is getting it's engine rebuilt, the AMC is getting rust in the engine bay repaired and a new engine installed, the Olds needs rear suspension work and the truck is getting new ball joints tomorrow. As you can see though it leaves me with two semi-usable cars. At any rate, I gotta go… the junkyard beckons!
I can relate. I purchased a set of helper air bags for my F150 complete with onboard air compressor. My wrench-y little brother insisted we could do the work in a weekend or less. It wasn't a lack of faith in our talent that held us back though, it was the fear of trouble shooting the system until that long off day I would part with the truck. I took the truck tot the local off-road shop and got myself a WARRANTIED installation. Thank goodness too because it was back in there once a week the following two weeks chasing down an air leak. The system has been trouble free ever since.
If you can't wrench on a RWD American car with a solid rear axle, all hope is lost
Ouch.
Just ribbing ya. If you only have one car and aren't sure of your mechanical abilities, I can't blame you. As others above have said, having more than one car pays off in times like these.
Being mostly a bike guy, my toolbox is strongly biased toward smaller-sized, metric hand tools, so having a lard-butt American car actually contributed to my reluctance.
I've never had a Ford, but I know that many older Chrysler and GM products have a comically nonsensical mix of Metric and English fasteners. I'd be surprised if Ford was different.
Really, it's just as well that you wussed out. I don't mind a certain amount of wrenching, but there are certain tasks I just don't like doing (like oil changes and exhaust work; I'll slit my wrists before I ever bleed brakes again myself).
I'm not sure what you mean by older but my '99 Cherokee, my '02 Ram and my wife's '05 Cherokee all sport a mix of metric and standard. WTF? Pick one and go with it.
My '96 T-bird is metric in the engine bay with the 4.6, but they might as well have used inch fasteners with the variety of head sizes they used. One time I swapped the belt idler pulleys because the bearings were getting dry and noisy, and when I was done I'd used most of my sockets between 8 and 15 mm.
The 95 GMC Slownoma I previously had, and my ex's 2000 Intrepid sported terrible mixtures of parts. By older, I obviously meant, "assembled at any point in the past."
Then again, besides the ex's Intrepid, I haven't wrenched on an American-brand (or -assembled) car in years.
Despite all the swearing I might do at the Corrado, you can do almost every repair imaginable with a 9mm socket. The rest of the repairs will require a 10mm, with a very rare exception of an 11mm. It's almost comical. I left my socket with the 9mm bit and a 9mm box wrench sitting on the rad mount for the entire time I last did major engine work on it, and actually didn't need another tool for long enough that by the time I did, I had forgotten where I put my tool kit.
I've heard that about VWs before.
That's what happen when you let a smart person or two have input on a car's design.
/still doesn't explain why a friend was told by his VW dealer that the power passenger seat in his former MKV GTI shorted out because it was "adjusted too much," which led to wires being stripped bare.
They must have let the British office handle electrics on that one.
My CRX is pretty much the same way. Anything that's not 10mm is 17mm, except for the upper shock mount bolts, which are all 14mm. I think there may be a few 6mm bolts around the exterior lights.
My 300zx is similar. Just about every bolt is a 10mm. I haven't had the pleasure of wrenching on any American cars really. My girl has a Saturn, but it's too damn reliable. Never needs a thing, just creaks, vibrates and rattles itself to wherever you need to go.
Yeah, I hear you, and I agree. I'm no wrench hero, but I've done my own work for years. I've never owned anything newer than 1974. I've had a VW and a few bikes, but everything else is American with a straight rear and/or front axle. I like to keep it simple, for the most part. No mysteries when the thing blows chunks or makes funny noises.
I replaced the Nearside CV joint on the A4 to cure an annoying noise that had surfaced. The job wasn't as much of a swine as I thought it would be, three ball joints to split, about ten bolts and a lot of pushing and shoving to pull it all apart, whole worlds of grease and shit to pack the new joint, then reassembly is the reverse of removal.
Such was my confidence that I booked the car for its yearly MOT roadworthiness test for lunchtime next day, meaning it would have to be ready to get me to work at 8:30. At midnight the CV joint was in place, reassembly could begin. Exhausted, at 2 AM the car was ready to come off the jacks for a test run. Unfortunately, in my haste I left the adaptor for the locking wheel bolts attached to one of the lugs. It came off somewhere on the test route.
Since then, I have no way to remove my wheels. Worse, the annoying noise remains.
I am not a wrench either.
I thought you HAD to be a wrencher to own an out-of-warranty A4?
That sucks. It's rare to mess with CV joints anymore when you can get a brand new CV axle for less than $100 in many cases.
You could be right! Truth is, that poor old A4 just soldiers on. I tried to replace it but just can't bring myself to do it. Here's my Audi and Alfa together:
<img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Oz4NWDHlOBc/TQfHLZk_xkI/AAAAAAAAANk/WkICrJVKGPE/s1600/snow4.jpg" width=400>
Isn't that the one with like thirty-leven ball joints in the front suspension? One of my Honda forums was WTFing over the parts diagram a couple of weeks ago.
That's the one, and all eleventy-twelve of them are nicely hidden to prevent getting a torque wrench in there. Much fun!
Hey SNOW! Aren't you in Jolly Olde England? Does that happen often?
Fortunately for me, I had much better luck with a similar wheel lock situation…after doing a mid-January, cold-as-hell brake job on my Cherokee, I managed to make the same mistake – leaving the wheel lock adapter attached to one of the lug nuts. Within days, I realized the thing was missing, and assumed it never to be found again. A full month and at least 1000 miles later, as I'm walking towards the Jeep after work, I notice the damn thing is actually still wedged in the lug nut! SCORE!!!! I still can't believe the thing was still there!
I once left the locking lug adaptor on the side of the road near Thunder Bay. I was carrying a lot of crap in the old Datsun and had stopped to jam some wedgie things in the rear springs to get the back end up a bit. I drove all the way to Vancouver then back to Toronto before I realized I didn't have the adaptor. Months later, the front brake pads got so grindy with metal on metal that I finally took the car in to a welding shop and had them put some regular nuts on the locking lugs.
When I was a tire monkey, it was a big deal to remember to turn off the air suspension on these cars before jacking them up or putting the on a lift. Otherwise, the system would get confused and overinflate one side or the like, leading to expensive repairs.
This is a job I'd do myself, but I sympathize. If you're short on time, tools or workspace, jobs tend to take longer and be more failure-prone. If that's the case, most sub-$500 nontrivial mechanical jobs are worth paying to have done.
Similarly, jobs that go significantly more quickly/smoothly with a lift or special commercial/industrial grade tools are worth paying for. For example, I've almost no interest in rebuilding a differential myself.
Actually, what happens if you don't shut off the suspension before lifting is that the height sensors will think the car is too high and deflate the bags. Then when you lower the car back to the ground, you have an ass dragger and have to wait for it to inflate. Having the air bags fully collapsed and inflated can damage them too.
What our friend Tanshanomi neglects to mention is that it is freakin' COLD in KC right now. I have a list of vehicular maintenance tasks that I need to tackle. If it wasn't so long, I'd be paying the experts with their fancy heated facilities to do it for me.
Yeah, I gotta get back into the garage to fiddle with the brakes again, but danget it's flippin cold in the garage. Must put large heater on my Hoonmas list. And weatherstripping and insulation…
…and scotch. Lotsa scotch.
This is the reason that I haven't been working on either of my cars, too.
Wrenching it yourself is a tough call. If it is something that you would enjoy, and get a certain level of "man, look at what the fuck I just accomplished" out of it, then it is probably worth undertaking. However, if you would rather have a shop do it while you were at work, then that is cool too.
When I lived with my parents, I had all my dads tools and shop at my disposal, so I would be happy to help him wrench, and wrench my own ride. Now that I live in a duplex, and have nary a too, I have to take my ride to the shop when I need something fairly serious done. Its fun to do some light work, but the major stuff (I include this) would just be a pain in the ass.
I can remember one horrible winter night in college when had to I repair the blown-apart muffler on my '72 Skylark outside in the parking lot of my dorm, in the middle of a snowstorm, with just the toolbox in my trunk. All I could afford was a universal glass-pack, so I hacksawed a couple of sections of the existing exhaust system and rigged up some couplers and strap hangers so it would exit to the driver's side, right in front of the rear wheel. It was a supremely crappy job, but I didn't care, I was so sick of messing with it. It was legal enough to keep me from being pulled over and didn't pump carbon monoxide into the cabin; that's all I cared about. When I went home for Thanksgiving, my folks took it to their mechanic and had a proper exhaust system put back on it.
That does sound like a pretty terrible time. Working in the elements is what really gets to me.
Most recently, I worked on my Ducati Monster during summer in Austin. By the time I would get home from work, prepared to work on it, it was 105, with some terrible humidity. It was pretty light stuff that I needed to do (spark plugs, new battery, adjust idle), but man, I swear I drank a gallon of water (and a gallon of beers) after I finished.
But I shouldn't complain about it. My dad once patched an oil pan on his AMX. He was in bumfuck nowhere Oklahoma, parked it up on a curb to get under it, and managed to get it done, MacGyver-style, with whatever he had.
I tried troubleshooting a starter problem on someone else's Regal last winter. In Rochester that's no small task, especially when you lack gloves. Eventually got it out and had it checked at Autozone and told it was functioning properly. Replaced the solenoid and i think that's as far as we got, I don't think we ever fixed my friend's car.
I was never so glad I'd chosen to major in Agricultural Engineering as one mid-December day when I desperately needed to put new spark plugs and wires in the T-bird. The department had a shop big enough to handle tractors and a good set of tools, and the professors would let us use the shop to work on our cars after-hours as long as we didn't make a mess and put the tools away when we were done.
When I had my '71 Cadillac Limo, I had to replace the starter every winter, under that bastard, on the street in Salt Lake. In the slush or ice or whatever. That sonofabitch would strand me like clockwork every winter that I had it, and I got to where I could pump it up enough with my bottle jack, slide underneath it with my 9/16 combination wrench, needlenose pliers and whatever ignition wrench I needed for the stupid little nut on the solenoid, detach the goddam starter, and slither out from under it and back underneath the thing with the new one in the arctic slimy street shit to reinstall that thing. I got to where I can do that in fifteen minutes, and can perform the same act on any old GM V8 in about the same time. I've done it in the desert by now, as well, but I still don't enjoy it.
See, you are so much better for it! Excellent use of obscenities, by the way. Anyone who has ever had to work on a ride in inhospitable climes surely will identify.
The airbags on my TC look worse than that… I knew there was a reason I put the car on the list of craigs last night
I'm impressed you will actually write about not doing the work yourself. Admitting you didn't want to deal with it and the possibility of issues cropping up.
It is all relative. It takes me a good stretch of time to do it to take on home improvement stuff. All day long I'll wrench but at home I'd rather just give the money to someone who will have it done and done right.
Soon after I drove the Crown Vic Wagon across country to the dream that is Detroit my trusty steed developed a fairly severe leak in a power steering line. Upon first inspection, the repair should be pretty darn straight forward: remove air filter housing, disconnect bad flex line at connections A and B, insert new line and reverse disconnection procedure. Simple.
At 1AM, in the rain, I was working on a nearly solid mass of what used to be a hex connector to the power steering box. Now it was a mangled hunk of metal that refused to budge. Out of desperation, I put some JB Weld on the wrench and stuck it on the hose connector and waited. I came out a half hour later and it finally worked! I keep that wrench, all JB Weldy and useless, as a reminder of my
ingenuitydesperation.That is awesome. I now have another technique at my disposal.
Wait, that wasn't the point, was it?
been there… welded a nut on…
A new technique! This is one that can be used on the side of the road.
I have used the die grinder to cut a slot for a big impact screw driver. I have cut the head of the bolt off (thus relieving the tension and making extraction fairly simple). Once, I swaged the bolt as hard as I could before drilling it out and tapping the hole for a slightly different sized replacement bolt. If that car is still rolling and ever needs a new water pump, the mechanic will curse me for using an SAE bolt instead of a metric one.
That's damn clever. Well done. JB Weld is indeed your friend.
One of my favourite solutions for the ugly nut or the one you don''t have a big enough socket for is the cold chisel and hammer. Like John Muir points out in the VW Idiot's guide, you can put the same nut on and off 6 times this way before you have to buy a new one. Not sure it would work quite as well on a rusty flare nut, but it's good when you don't have a 32mm socket.
Damn that's brilliant! Will have to remember that one.
LOL, as the owner of a HPP Mercury Grand Marquis, I knew exactly what those bags of doom were the minute they popped up on the screen. I replaced mine with base model coils and Air-lift helper bags. Made a huge difference in handling, and I still have the load leveling ability for trailers/cargo, without the hassle of the RAS. You won't miss those balloons one bit.
I've had to do plenty of weekend fixes on the CST10. Like the time a failed wheel bearing lead to an entire axle swap (fun story!)
I just handed off a strut-replacement job to the family's mechanic of choice, because no set of spring compressors I owned or could rent were capable of compressing the springs on my sister's Maxima far enough to safely remove the upper spring perch. It pains me to do it, but when proceeding with a job on my own has a non-trivial probability of causing death or dismemberment, I think it's probably best to let somebody else handle it.
In a similar vein, three days after I purchased my '82 MG Metro, its hydragas suspension collapsed in traffic. One of the rear displacer units had ruptured its diaphragm, bleeding hydrolastic fluid (essentially antifreeze) all over the road and abruptly dropping the body onto the rear tires. Displacers are sealed units; nobody rebuilds them. Nobody anywhere. For added fun, it turns out the early-'82 cars use a slightly different displacer than any of the later Metros, a fact which came to my attention several weeks later when I finally got a new set from England and installed them, only to discover they wouldn't fit snugly in their brackets. Further weeks of searching forced me to conclude that hey, what do you know, the old versions are no longer available! Also, there is no conversion kit for installing springs instead.
Fortunately, the main difference between old and new is that the newer units have a narrower waist (slightly different suspension characteristics, too, but nothing significant). I got a local machinist to make some adaptors, shown here on one displacer in primer, so that the new displacers now match the shape of the old ones where necessary:
<img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4058/4709260827_30baba4177.jpg" width="400">
Problem solved, with the car off the road for only about half a year by the time I figured everything out, had the parts made, and got it back together. I could then experience my fourth day of driving. Yay!
Bonus: A primer on the joys of hydragas, with emphasis on the MGF:
http://www.mgf.ultimatemg.com/group2/suspension/h…
These days I don't have much time to spend on jobs that require a diagnosis. Even if I like doing them, I just can't spend a whole Saturday troubleshooting it when I can just as easily have a shop do it for me on a weekday while I'm at work. However, if it is something I have done before, like brakes, or is well understood by the internets, the savings are worth it.
I can't blame you for taking it to a shop. I'll tear into my motorcycle till it's just an engine in a frame, but on a car I like to leave suspension, transmissions, major engine work and bodywork to the pros. Even then some routine scheduled jobs are troublesome in my fun-size double-car apartment garage. I have to leave the door open to work on the pickup (the garage is 8" longer than it… and this is an extended-cab Dodge Dakota, not some crew-cab long-box full-size behemoth) so once I start a job I have to have it buttoned back up before I go to bed that night, and then there are little details like where I get the water for a coolant system flush and what I do with all the wastewater.
My old man's 94 Towncar had the same problem. We also went with the conversion kit. However, I did some checking and found out the bags were okay, cracks and all. It was the lines that were the problem. I didn't look them up but they might have been hard to find. So, you could have done the work and replaced the wrong parts or started off with more than one problem. Even a wrencher knows when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.
I like doing my own repair jobs. However, I lack a garage and now that the weather in the Northeast has taken a turn from bearable to dayumm it's cold, I recently had an oil change done at a shop. This is something I do on a regular basis, but as I have become older I will gladly pay to have it done. Again,I like to wrench on my cars, but I do not like to do it on my back in 0 degree days.
There are some jobs I hate doing, but I usually wind up doing anyway. The truck needs a timing cover gasket because it leaks coolant (okay, it's been leaking on and off for four years), but the leak is only a problem in the winter. I guess while I'm in there I should replace the timing chain and sprockets, too, since it's coming up on 198,000 miles. It's just such an awful job, requiring an oil and coolant drain (because the front part of the oil pan gasket is part of it). Ugh. That, and struts and shocks on the wife's Previa, a transmission coolant change on the truck (pan *and* torque converter), a distributor o-ring and cam cover gasket on the Previa, a radius arm bushing on the truck, etc., etc, etc. Ugh.
Hey man, I know that fear.. Couple of years ago we were going through a… well, financially not a very happy time. My almost 20 year old brick was our only car. I would go to work in the morning and when I came home we'd switch drivers as my wife went off. This thing was old enough to vote and it was doing the work of two cars. I didn't even have a decent place to work on it. And every time I put a wrench on a damn nut I kept thinking "Is this the one that's going to round off and leave me stranded?". Horrible, horrible feeling, that made me really not like wrenching at times.
Well, none of them did round off or strip their threads. And I still even have the same car (and wife!), and I don't let anyone else put a wrench on it. I have yet to miss a day of work because of the car. It's doing it's 25 miles in the morning and afternoon and humming along just fine, but I think I should add a backup vehicle anyways.
That's sad, another TC ruined. For $200 you can get a set of replacement air bags that come with a seals for the solenoids. No bolts are involved. #1 remove the solenoid retainer rotate the solenoid 1/8 turn and pull out till it stops, once all the air has bleed out turn it another 1/8 and pull it the rest of the way out. #2 remove the retainer clip and pull the bag out.
I'm joining the non-wrenching club today. So far, all the work on my Comanche has been done in my carport. However, my muffler is toast, and I suspect my cat is bad. I can buy a decent muffler and cat for $150-180 and do it myself, or I can have the local muffler shop install both for ~$220. If $70 means I don't have to spend my entire day off swearing at my exhaust, it's $70 well spent.
I used to work on my cars back before they got so computery and complex–it was necessity, being a poor student, and a lot of people did change their own oil , do routine maintenance etc. and you learn a lot that way. I learned, for example, that some superglue will hold a brake line until you get home. Getting said brake line detached the next day is a different story. My first realization of not being dirt poor was the first time I realized I could take the car to a shop instead of having to crawl around under it myself. My next car will have a carb–though by then the arthritis in my fingers will make some stuff impossible. And I have mixed feelings about that.
I'm not a wrench, but it doesn't stop me from trying. Of course, it's a mentality like that which leaves me stranded on Christmas Eve, watching as freshly poured oil drips from the pan's drain.
But the Civic, it's got a warranty to keep intact, and might just go back to Honda (although not likely with the mileage I put on it). On the other hand, I intend to do just about every job possible on the YJ since it doesn't have to get me anywhere. Anything I can't do, my father-in-law's happy to show me.
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