Guess Who’s Back, Back Again: Cold Start

Cs Paoback
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Remember about a month ago, when I was driving my Pao, which I had finally gotten back after more than a year since I smacked it into a full-grown deer, and the control arm just failed, with the press-fit ball joint somehow becoming, well, un-fit. It was an alarming failure, but thankfully happened when I was going slowly, so damage was relatively minimal. Anyway, a new control arm has been fitted, and I have the Pao back! All is looking right in the world once again. Well, for now.

Here was the failed control arm:

Cs Pao Controlarm2

Oof.

Despite my anger when it happened, I really can’t blame the mechanic, so I apologize for any misplaced wrath. The culprit was a bad part, and the new one seems to be not just higher quality, but, since these seem to lack any sort of clip or failsafe to keep that ball joint in, I had the mechanic add a series of tack welds around the ball joint, just to be safe:

Cs Paocontrolarm Tackwelds

Here’s hoping I never have to deal with that particular flavor of bullshit again. The Pao and I will be taking a nice road trip together this Thursday night, when I’ll be driving from North Carolina down into Garbage Carolina to be a judge at the 24 Hours of Lemons race at Carolina Motorsports Park in Kershaw, South Carolina. If you’re around, come by and say hello, why not?

Is “Garbage Carolina” too harsh? I’m just playing around, engaging in some honest fun Inter-Carolina rivalry. There’s lovely parts of SC, too. We’re good, right?

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Mercedes Streeter

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46 thoughts on “Guess Who’s Back, Back Again: Cold Start”

  1. For some reason calling it “garbage Carolina” made me envision Lindsey Graham waiting for you at the border with a pipe wrench, ready to dish out some “palmetto Justice”

  2. “Garbage Carolina” is properly used for any part of a Carolina that is within 50 miles of I-95. Can’t make Lemons, but come back for the ChumpChampCar race this summer! You can try out the RX-7 with a V6…

  4. Just want to point out that you posted the shop’s information when you originally accused them. I immediately jumped in with “are you sure it was the mechanic’s fault?”, which was me really trying to subtly hint that it wasn’t.

    Even DT dragged the shop in the comments! Anyway, I understand being upset about your car almost killing you, I get the disappointment in the radiator hoses, but man, if you had just posted better photos in the original post, people would have seen the issue and you probably would have done better by the shop. I found their info very easily from links in your post.

    Again, they could be assholes for a number of other reasons but it was a pretty big leap to put the blame for this on the shop

    1. FOR SURE! I didn’t like the direction that original article was going at all and wanted to say something then (but pain in the rear log-in I’m still going to complain about, but I’ll make the best of it now…). I mean, it almost felt like a villagers getting ready with pitchforks scene, and now it’s “my bad, but moving on”

  6. There’s lovely parts of SC, too.

    Paging David Tracy. Another of Torch’s subject-verb agreement errors got through editing. 😉

    Especially since it would be even funnier if the sentence were “There’s a lovely part of SC, too.” implying that there’s only one.

      1. Lesser Carolina! Mustard has no place in barbecue. (I grew up with Eastern NC vinegar-based, but I’ve developed a fondness for properly smoked Western NC style.)

  8. Moved from Charlotte to Garbage SC in the 80s. Got no problem with the name as long as it helps keep the Hillbillies, swine and tobacco farms from NC at bay. Ya’ll got NASCAR and the Panthers. We got BMW and the low country.

  11. Did you have the left (passenger) side welded as well?
    (It will indeed be ironic if heat from the welding leads to a different sort of failure!)

    1. I was looking at the picture and thinking: Boy, I hope those welds penetrated both parts, because otherwise they are just warts on the outside and the heating probably didn’t help. You make an excellent point about the other side.

  12. I’m confused… if this was pressed in from the bottom, how did the control arm go down and leave the ball joint in place? Surely they didn’t press in from the top???

    1. Yes, it is pressed in, but apparently without any mechanical retention. I think this one just wasn’t pressed all the way and the so all it took was the good jolt of those train tracks to pop out.

        1. It didn’t go past. Think of it as two stacked cups (the ball joint being the top cup and the control arm being the bottom) that were just pulled apart. It’s not a great analogy, but that’s essentially what happened. The cups weren’t jammed together with enough force to hold them together.

          Dammit! Now you made me think of Two Girls, One Cup. Gross!

    1. As opposed to the garbage vinegar bbq in North Carolina? That was a crushing disappointment when we went out for so-called “bbq” on a work trip. 😛

  16. “Despite my anger when it happened, I really can’t blame the mechanic, so I apologize for any misplaced wrath.”

    I’ll be honest, I was bothered right away with the tone of the article and the anger directed at the mechanic, in the article and the in the original comments. I had a feeling and was 99% certain it was just a part failure, and out of the mechanics control. Maybe because I’ve been on both sides of the wrench, but it just didn’t sit right with me. I sure hope your tech didn’t hear about it.

    Another side note, this log-in process is a pain due to being on a work computer, but I felt it was worth it just to put my 2 cents out there.

    1. It would be different if Torch brought his own part. When a mechanic sells not just labor, but parts at a markup, they are the warranting the part as a service with that cost. So, the mechanic is not entirely off the hook. They have to balance the price and markup to offset the possibility of a comeback, which would encourage them to get a better quality part, unless they don’t value their shop time.

      1. I agree with that, but that doesn’t really address my comment or the original article/comments. I saw it as a “bad part” situation, where as the article and comments implied “bad tech”, without the tech given the change to warranty their work and parts and make it right in the end, which it looks like they did. Torch even said now he couldn’t blame the mechanic, when that’s where the blame was heading in the original article/comments.

        1. I was one of those who jumped hard on the mechanic and I was wrong. However, I’m not sure I was 100% wrong either. I guess without getting into what parts are available and the differences in construction thereof, we just won’t know.

      2. I mean you also have to keep in mind that parts for this Nissan Pao are probably not super readily available from a dozen brands… sometimes with older cars you just go with whatever part actually exists. I know this all too well from wrenching on older BMW’s.

  21. Excellent! I’ve been hoping to see you around town in the Pao or Changli since I’ve moved back. Now there’s a chance it might happen. And garbage Carolina isn’t too strong, imho, but Baja Carolina works too.

    2. Hmmm, not a fan of “Baja Carolina” maybe because I think Baja California is an interesting, fun and relatively safe part of Mexico. And this is from someone who was robbed by Federales of $250 at a Baja checkpoint 10 years or so ago.

      1. “I think Baja California is an interesting, fun and relatively safe part of Mexico. And this is from someone who was robbed by Federales of $250 at a Baja checkpoint 10 years or so ago.”

        It’s been 20 years since my last trip there. The “interesting and fun” I saw at that time was a complete vacuum of building codes, road laws, and animal neutering.

        On the plus side it was perfectly acceptable to dump your RV’s black water tank in any convenient parking lot.

        (Basically it was a libertarian paradise).

        1. Well, you’re not wrong about the building codes, and I thought the rules of the road tended to be more third-world the farther one traveled south. You gotta agree the weather, food and scenery are spectacular. Despite the negatives, Mrs. OverlandingSprinter and I have a soft spot for the place, perhaps because two of our boys were chased by sharks while swimming in the Pacific. They deserved it.

          1. Maybe the weather, food and scenery were spectacular to you. I was living in Pacific Beach, aka Baja La Jolla at the time so to me it was literally just a crappier twist on the same old same old.

            Could have been worse though, it could have been LA. THAT place is a dump!

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