I know of a sinking feeling that so many of you are almost certainly familiar with. You’re driving down the road and suddenly, a concerning warning light illuminates. It could be the battery light, the brake light, the coolant temperature light, or maybe a flashing check engine light. Or worse, maybe your car just won’t crank over at all. Any of these issues could snowball into an expensive catastrophe, but sometimes they don’t. I want to know about the times when something horrible happened, but fixing it wasn’t so bad.
I’ve had this happen a few times in recent memory. My wife’s beloved BMW E39 wagon used to roll coal like a diesel while my 2012 Smart Fortwo was dead for two years. Recently, I even bought a rotary Suzuki that was described as non-running. All of these came out of the other end of their horrible descriptions without much work.
Let’s start with the Smart. Back in late 2019, I took it on a Gambler 500 rally to Tennessee. The car performed spectacularly out on the trails in Tennessee, but I made the critical error of running the engine low on oil, which resulted in the oil pressure light flickering on. I then parked the car with the engine bay covered in mud, which led to the alternator completely seizing solid.
I didn’t have the resources to fix the vehicle at the time and didn’t have the money to tow it to a shop, either. No local shop wanted to touch it. So, my car sat as I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months. I put oil into the engine and occasionally started it in an attempt to keep it fresh. One day, the engine stopped turning over. I brushed it off as the starter dying from the still caked-on mud in the engine bay. With the car not running under its own power I just couldn’t get it to a wash bay.
Eventually, two years later I finally found a mechanic willing to work on my car. $250 of labor plus parts and the car had a new alternator, starter, engine mounts, serpentine belt tensioner, and serpentine belt. Sadly, the engine was stuck, but my mechanic freed it up. Still, it didn’t want to turn over when we flipped the key. Uh oh.
I began to fear the worst, but then I found the problem. There was a 200A fuse in the car’s battery box, and one end of it was bolted to a cable that led to the starter.
It passed a visual inspection, but I was desperate, so I tested it. Sure enough, the fuse was a goner. One cheap fuse from Amazon later and the car is now running and driving again. Reviving the dead Smart cost me less than $500 total!
Recently, I wrote about how my wife’s BMW E39 wagon burned a quart of oil every 50 miles, smoked like a locomotive, and ran on just four cylinders.
The car was expected to need a full engine rebuild. Yet, its smoking issues and horrifying oil consumption were resolved with the replacement of the vehicle’s crankcase ventilation system. We were given estimates into the thousands to fix the car’s smoking, yet $50 for a new CCV and $350 for the labor to replace it later and the car is back to health. We then tossed another $1,200 at it to replace the catalytic converters, which finally killed the check engine light.
Finally, we have that Suzuki RE-5 rotary motorcycle that I bought back in December. The seller told me that the motorcycle ran, but only on choke. It wouldn’t rev or ride. I got it home, tossed some carb cleaner in it, and the motorcycle is now running like a fine watch. It’ll not only idle without choke but ride, too. I got the bike working again without even lifting more than a can of carb cleaner.
Any of these issues could have been worse, but I lucked out when they barely cost me much time or money. How about you? Were you faced with what sounded like an expensive or time-consuming repair, but it turned out to be the exact opposite?
Just had to pull the transaxle from my Lotus Europa and put a ring and pinion in it…. literally everything was easier than I thought it was going to be. even sliding the gears on/off the pinion shaft. just mega easy!
I have an older Toyota Sienna that I use to camp in. A few months after I bought it, the blower motor was making noises, and then stopped working. I had to replace it and found the old one was totally seized. So, fast forward to a couple years later… stopped working again. I figured, “Aw crap, that aftermarket blower fan I put in must’ve died on me.” so I bought a new one, then proceeded to put of replacing it for a couple months because I wasn’t using it at the time. (Never mind that I was at least partially not using it because the blower wasn’t working.) Anyway, I finally got around to crawling under the dash to swap out the blower…. only to find that the plug was partially out. Plugged it all the way in, and it worked absolutely fine. *slaps forehead* Of course, by that time, the replacement I bought could no longer be returned……
I replaced the actuator arm in the driver’s window of my Matrix about five years ago. Pretty easy and straightforward. I did so well on it that I get to do it again soon.
I just replaced the front strut assemblies and sway bar end links on my ’19 Camry. Not a single expletive uttered the entire time, nary a tool thrown in frustration. Everything came apart and went back together easy as you please. It was nice.
I’m not an avid mechanic. I do some stuff here and there; Dad and I completely rebuilt an Opel GT CIH engine from individual parts including a complete teardown and rebuild of the carb – that solved a lot of issues. But I had been stressing over my Prius losing what little power it had and becoming more herky-jerky with each passing week. And the Prius is a lot techier than the garden tractors and carbureted pickup I usually work on.
Finally looked up the codes. “Multiple misfires.” Suggested fix: Plugs probably, coils maybe.
With over 300K on the clock I expected the plugs were probably indeed toast so I ordered a short handful and all the coils too. Not that expensive.
The Prius isn’t too bad for access but it’s not an unencumbered slam-dunk. But at my son’s place – because he has a garage and I don’t – it took us just an hour or so to do everything. A little more actually: I have a spark plug socket and he doesn’t, so there was a quick run to Ace in the middle of that.
Move some stuff out of the way: easy peasy. Despite all the stuff in the way, getting to the plugs was actually far less complicated than I had feared. Access is blocked, but the blockages aren’t bad. Couple more things – don’t even disconnect it, just lay it out of the way. First plug: “Well that’s gapped to about three-sixteenths of an inch.”
Him: “What’s the factory gap?”
“Less than that.”
They were all like that. One of the coils came out in more than one piece. Judging by the plugs, the car had been running on two cylinders – mostly two, sometimes one – for a while.
When it was all finally back together, the car fired up, went like hot buttered stink (for a Prius) and shut off with a smooth whisper at stoplights. Couple hundred bucks, an hour turning wrenches with my son who is not a car guy (but an avid tech guy), and the car has a new lease on life. Wins all around, and a jolt of confidence.
Next up: the PCV valve!
One of the first jobs I had to do on my 1992 Cherokee was to replace the O-ring for the oil filter mount. (Yeah, believe it.. an XJ that leaked oil.) I’d read all these horror stories of having to disassemble a hex socket and using a six-foot steel bar for leverage to remove the bolt holding the mount to the block because for some reason, they used red loctite on it.
Well, it turns out, I had the old mount design. No loctite… regular bolt… easy-peasy.
The 2020 Connect has been having issue with acceleration and hesitation. Turns out it’s multiple things.. So we replaced the EGR Valve, removed the air box, cleaned the intake accordion and removed and cleaned the throttle body. Plus last month we finally got confirmation from Ford that our 2.0L GDI van can handle e85 fuels.. but one has to do a mixed ratio. So the van has been running on $5.00 Reg 87 oct and 35.00 of e85 in that order. Although Instagram and youtube have suppressed my accounts, I did get some great news.. Seems I pointed out some discrepancies on the Motul oil site and because of this, Motul sent me a large gift box full of shirts, hats stickers and a large banner. I guess this means I’m unofficially sponsored by Motul now.. I’ve contacted QA1 in the hopes that they can create a coil over set up for our van..
So when are you guys going to have a microvan shoot out and include me..
What are those good surprises you speak of? Every mechanical repair I’ve done went “as planned” in the best case scenario. Never have I thought “oh that was easy”.
“Any of these issues could have been worse, but I lucked out when they barely cost me much time or money.”
$500 for the Smart, $1600 for the BMW? That doesn’t sound like barely much money.
“I got the bike working again without even lifting more than a can of carb cleaner.”
Ahhh, that’s better. You had me going there.
I hear you, but when you’re expecting a seized engine and it ends up being $500, that is a nice surprise. Not cheap, but still better than replacing the engine.
The other side when working on disk brakes. the first one takes a long time, but after that, the other side is a piece of cake.
Ignoring the problem! The speedometer in my ’92 f350 longbed dually stopped working, electronic of course. I spent some time investigating and since I don’t drive it much, ignored it for awhile. When I was actually ready to troublehoot, I went out, it was working, and it has worked ever since!
This dovetails well with yesterday’s big-guppy Grail selection. Last year when I was giving my F-250 easy-duty edition work-truck a good tune-up-plus, I thought I’d tackle the incredibly wobbly column-shift that wouldn’t show the correct gear nor stay in park anymore. I was expecting the worst – figured I’ve have to replace the column or some internal part that would be impossible to get to. Nope, 10 minutes of youtube, 2 dabs of loc-tite, and a few turns of a screwdriver later everything was back to good. It was sure nice not having to block a tire when parked with a chunk of wood anymore.
Clutch in my AWD V70r that lived in a salty environment, I planned the job in advance watched youtube and read the manufacturers procedure, then I dropped it off at my local Volvo place and gave them a credit card number.