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?
None of them. In almost 50 years, none of them.
I’m either terrible at estimating, overly optimistic, or the worst combination of both.
Everything always takes longer than I expect.
Crank Position Sensor on a 2003 Infiniti G35. $40 for the replacement part on Amazon, 15 mins to jack the car up and decide the best place to put the stands (for some reason I can never remember where I previously put the jack stands), a single 10mm bolt, unplug the old sensor, plug in the new and reverse the previous steps. Less than 1 hour total, with most of that time me double-checking that I was doing it right.
In contrast, the Cam Position Sensor was a freaking nightmare to replace. It is on the back of the head, and Nissan shoved the engine as close to the firewall as they could. Just getting the single 10mm bolt out took over an hour to find the right combination of socket extentions/u-joints that were long enough to reach, but short enough to fit between the engine and firewall. To top it off, once I got the stupid bolt free, I discovered that the wire-harness connector had melted to the sensor. Wound up just breaking the locking tab off to get the sensor free. Had to JB weld the replacement sensor to the harness (I was planning to sell the car in a year, so I figured I wouldn’t have to mess with it again, which was a correct assumption for once).
My 89 Toyota SR5 pickup started pulling hard to the left one day, and had a loss of even more power. I was scratching my brain for a while trying to figure it out.
The front tire was low. It was a low tire.
I went out to lunch with a coworker in his old F-150. We ate our pizza, and when we went to leave, the truck wouldn’t start. Twist the key, nothing. While he was on the phone with a tow truck, someone backed their truck into his, bumped it pretty hard. Hard enough to knock the starter free. Started right up and we drove back to work.
Repairing the door lock actuators on the power sliding doors of my Honda Odyssey. Both doors started failing to latch/unlatch a few weeks ago, so I followed the advice online to disassemble the doors and regrease the latch actuator mounted inside the door. The hardest part was getting the door trim off, mostly because the door has to be open to remove the trim, but the door slides backwards preventing removal of the trim except if you get the door position juuuuust right.
Second was replacing the leaf springs on my project car. The factory monoleafs had sagged so the rear end sat almost eight inches lower than it should. Rusty bolts made it seem like it would take an eternity to swap out for new springs, and that was sort of the case for one bolt on the driver’s side. In the end, the driver’s side took about four hours, most of it working that one bolt out, and the passenger side took about 25 minutes as the bolts came out like they were coated in butter.
First time I changed the oil in my Jeep Wrangler JKU. What’s this, an oil filter on top of the engine!? Why is this not a thing in all engines? After years of screwing off filters on the side of engines from under the car on jack stands (and having oil drip all over my hand and engine block) – this was a blessing.
It’s great! So much easier.
Both of my Volvo’s have top side cartridge Oil filters so they are easy to remove and I use an oil extractor to drain the old oil. Easy Peasy oil changes.
Changing a power window regulator.
For some reason, I got in my head that it was near impossible. On a past BMW e34, I swapped a door from a junkyard e34 just to avoid doing it. Front window wouldn’t go down on my BMW e46, so I decided to fix it.
Doing it took like 90 minutes.
2021, wife bought a 2017 turbo-4 Mustang. Ecoboost? Is that what it is called?.
Bought the MBRP cat-back exhaust.
Bought 4 jackstands.
Waited until 1PM on a Sunday to do her first vehicle modification ever, in the cold, in our cul-de-sac. I have the remains of my toolbox from my younger days (funny, in marriage, how something goes from “your snap-on wrench” to “our wrench” to “the wrench”, especially when it is missing), which was what she dug into for wrenches and what-not. It’s complete-ness with extensions, thin wall, short, tall, wobble, et al. helped a great deal.
No bolts broke.
No gaskets did ungasketly things.
No parts were missing.
No runs were made to Advance Auto.
No creepers were used.
I helped, but this was what she wanted as her learning experience.
Done in 4 hours.
She didn’t believe me when I told her that the learning experience wasn’t really complete.
Now, later, she did the short shifter and used words that would make a sailor blush, but the exhaust went well.
When I bought my 05 Acura RL, with 132k miles at the time, it would occasionally decide it didn’t want to shift out of first until you let off the throttle. The previous owner sold it because of that and a myriad of other small issues and neglected maintenance. I bought the car cheap, knowing it was probably a Honda transaxle doing Honda transaxle things, but I had read on the Acura forums that it was worth doing a 3×3 fluid exchange before assuming it needs solenoids or a rebuild, and that was a worthwhile gamble after all. It shifts like lightning now and enjoys VTEC fully even over 30k miles later, with just one 3qt fluid exchange in between. Now that’s one of my favorite cars ever. Even after the timing belt job, brakes, suspension, and driveline servicing I’m not even as much into it money wise as it would have cost to find a pristine version of the same car.
Spark plugs on my Focus’ 2.0 Duratec. They’re literally right there in front of you in a line when you pop the hood, no obstructions whatsoever.
All 4 could be replaced in 15 minutes total if you were ready to go.
A few years ago, I was on a rally in the mountains of West Virginia when my 911 SC blew the #6 plug out. The hole had probably been gently cross-threaded when the heads were rebuilt, I likely made it a little worse when I replaced the plugs just before leaving home, and boom. I unplugged the #6 injector, determined that FOD risk was minimal, and drove the rest of the weekend and hundreds of miles home sounding like a Harley-Davidson dealership. I was convinced that fixing this was going to require an engine drop, which, while not overly complicated, is certainly time-consuming, especially if you haven’t done one before. That was when I discovered there was a tool specifically for fixing my *exact* problem – rethreading a spark plug hole in an air-cooled 911 without removing the engine. $400 and about 2-3 hours of work later, I was done. Best $400 I ever spent on that car.
Spark plugs on a 2004 Impreza. Slid off the coolant (or washer, I can’t remember) reservoir and it was a snap. For all the flack they get most things are up front and easy to access. At worst you may have to use 2 shorter extensions on a spark plug in my experience.
Hardly a unique fix (and not even really a remedy), but my Autobianchi was developing a non-start issue where it’d just hard click at the turn of the key and nothing else. Given enough attempts and it would eventually start up just fine.
Got under the hood, gave the starter motor solenoid some love taps with something solid, and I’ve hardly had the starting issue come up again. Brand new starter for free!
Two mechanical repairs come to mind, both with my ’97 Ford Econoline.
The first was the one and only time it was ever dead and I revived it myself.
Key in –> turn to on –> lights on, everything normal –> turn to start –> all lights die. Everything dead.
Take key out, try again, same result.
I go do the Legal Male Requirement of “hmm yes, the engine is made out of engine” of looking under the hood to see if anything obvious jumped out at me, and surprisingly, it did!
The positive terminal on the battery was a little loose. Grabbed a pliers and wrench, tightened it down, and it started fine. It had just been loose enough that motion of turning over was causing it to disconnect altogether.
Maybe a simple problem, but I was proud of myself in the sense of “hey! I discovered a vehicle problem and fixed it myself without asking anyone for help!”
The second was replacing the entire passenger mirror assembly. The one the van had come with had a hole in the housing, which caused the mirror to vibrate at highway speeds.
Grabbed an entire power mirror replacement assembly for $35 on Amazon.
Did that with a friend since a second set of hands was helpful. Took the door apart, removed the original mirror assembly, put the new one in. Didn’t take terribly long and was pretty straightforward. Wish everything was that easy (and cheap! Replacing the cracked side mirror back cover on my Prius v was $65 for the part).
scribbles frantically before the knowledge is lost engine made of engine
It’s funny how electrical in cars is so tough. It literally and figuratively touches everything, but might be the absolute source of the issue or nothing to do with it at all.
(I was mainly referencing this image.)
Agreed. A different electrical problem had it dying sporadically on the road and took hours for a dealership to diagnose. Turned out to be some rusty connector attached to the alternator.
Haha, I’m poking fun at myself as much as anything. I definitely do that, or have done that the 2-3 times I’ve bought vehicles, to impart a sense of knowledge and solemnity that is completely undue and unearned. Meanwhile, my inner dialog is Zapp Brannigan wondering why this thing has so many damn parts. They can’t all be important!
I hadn’t seen that “engine is made of engine” meme before and now I can’t stop giggling.
It was definitely how I felt looking under the hood of my van when the serpentine belt snapped and I lost power. “Something is wrong, but I’ll be damned if I know what.”
Wow. You actually got to affect a Hollywood Car Repair!
As in, car stops working/won’t start; Nicholas Cage pops the hood/tells someone to pop the hood, fiddles around in there for a few seconds or an indeterminate amount of time with a purposeful look on his face, and then dramatically shuts the hood with “try it now.” Vrrrrrroooom! as he nods sternly.
It was almost exactly that, except the only audience was me. True sadness.
Hope you at least got to wipe your hands on a rag in a wistful, knowing fashion.
Oh I got one. Just last weekend.
Buddy has a GMT800 that’s been dead for years with 5v reference voltage codes. They took it to a few shops who did the usual loading of the parts cannon which didn’t fix anything. They hired a mobile mechanic who didn’t do anything but read is $20 scanner, see it said “cam sensor” and said that’s the problem. He snapped off the cam sensor in the block, said he was going to the store for tools and never came back. I got to extract the other half, which was not fun. I drilled into it, screwed a tapcon in, and used vise grips to yoink it out. This took hours. I replaced it, took it for a drive, and it went into limp mode a block from home. Other mechanics charged huge diagnostic fees and didn’t fix anything. After doing some research on common causes, it seemed likely it was just a bare wire somewhere. The car had an EVAP code so I started looking at wiring underneath near the fuel tank. It was nasty, and there were lots of wires with no conduit, but I didn’t see anything bare. I worked my way up and forward. Sure enough, right there on the top of the engine, drivers side, there was a blue wire chaffing on an aluminum bracket. There was the smallest amount of missing insulation. Like one strand of copper just barely rubbing on the engine, touching just enough to freak everything out, throw a code, and send it into limp mode. If nobody else touched that car, it could have been fixed in 30 minutes including finding the faulty wire.
Thousands of dollars spent and years parked for a problem that could have been fixed with 1″ of heatshrink and a ziptie to keep it from chaffing further. All I requested as payment was a few Corona’s and some homemade tacos. I guess none of those other “mechanics” bothered to read a multimeter while shaking shit around.
Super easy: side mirror on a chevy van
remote start on my jeep wrangler took less than 20 minutes from start to finish.
Honestly, spark plugs on my Sienna a couple weeks ago.
I had been prepared for the worst, but a couple hours of going slowly and carefully removing the intake components made it a cinch.
Considering the going rate is like $800, it seemed like time well spent to me.
A few Christmas Eves ago I was cooking dinner for 35 and realised I’d run out of some ingredient so critical that I can no longer remember what it was. So I raced to the shops so fast that I nudged a pillar reversing out of the carport and it peeled the front bumper off the car like a banana. It was left attached at one end and by the headlamp washer hoses. After my initial panic (house in the middle of nowhere, no other car to use, have to get somewhere on Christmas Day, 35 goddam people coming to dinner) I looked at YouTube and found a video on how to replace a Golf R bumper. After unscrewing about twenty broken clips and a bit of trial and error I managed to clip the bumper back on and reuse some of the broken attachments. I could still tell that it wasn’t completely true but it was good enough for the lease company not to notice on return. When I switched on the ignition there were a ton of fault warnings but that was just a matter of fixing the adaptive cruise radar cover. All in all dinner was just 90 minutes late!
On the way home one day, at the last stoplight before the road became limited access, my old Subaru started veering wildly according to whether I was braking or accelerating. I diverted, gingerly taking slow surface streets home. Once there & jacked, found a tie-rod castellated nut with stripped threads: only the cotter pin holding it to the spindle. “Well, that could have been bad!” I muttered, taking the backup shitbox to the parts store which honored the warranty and gave me a new tie-rod.
45 min total, and I had accurate steering again.
Had that happened the previous Saturday night on a mountain trail, it would have definitely been pretty maximum Jimmy Rustle
“On the way home one day, at the last stoplight before the road became limited access, my old Subaru started veering wildly according to whether I was braking or accelerating”
Username checks out.
Alternator on a ~2010 Outback for a friend, spark plugs and oil filters might be absurd, but the Alternator came out in 5 minutes with two wrenches
Not car related, but I love fixing things when they break and it looks like I’m in for an expensive repair or a new one. One time my clothes dryer was making a terrible racket and my wife was after me to buy a new one. I said, “Let me see if I can fix it. The worst that can happen is we end up needing a new one.” $20 of parts and Youtube appliance repair school later, it was as good as new. More recently, my vacuum cleaner switch wouldn’t stay on. No youtube needed. I took it apart, removed the switch, ordered a new one and now it’s just like new. Can’t figure out where these screws go though.
Same: ‘Well, it’s already broke’. A belt & drum seal later and no laundrymat visits for me. Pre yt—but, a human built it, so this monkey kin but try
as an aside, I am paying back karma for a lifetime of always having extra screws & bolts left over: I carry a bunch of salvaged screws with me while servicing rooftop HVAC units and install them where stripped or missing so doors don’t fly off in the wind and damage roof fabrics
As the guy who taught my last CPR class said, “Don’t be afraid you’ll hurt the victim. You can’t kill them more.”
Why would you do CPR if they’re already dead? Are you sure that guy is a real teacher?
I ended up fixing appliances for the same reason I started working on cars. When younger, I rapidly realized that I couldn’t really afford these things unless I could take care of them substantially myself. I’m 40 and my wife and I just bought our FIRST new appliance ever. A dishwasher. But I’ve repaired lots of appliances and still do. Even if the math isn’t always great compared to paying someone to do it, I would rather use my time and not bother waiting hours just to let a stranger in to my home.
Great perspective. I’ve always felt that repairing things oneself goes well beyond economy into something way more valuable – our sense of self in the world.
Materialism gets a bad rap, but the idea of engaging and really knowing our things by fixing them seems a good thing to me. You cease being a mere consumer and become a master of your stuff.
And how much can you really appreciate something if you don’t know it? This is the guidance we get about our human relationships, maybe it’s possible it works for ALL of our relationships.
I don’t think that’s materialism. Materialism would be the opposite, junking a perfectly good appliance for a shinier one.
Yeah, I’m struggled with how to express what I mean, but I guess for me, what we do here is materialism proper – we like the material things for themselves, whereas what the “oooh shiny” crowd really likes is the experience of owning a shiny new thing, not as much what that thing actually is. They like the idea of a car, whereas folks here tend to like very specific cars.
Conversely, I’ve warned my gf that I might need to use her dryer for a while if my absurd project of stuffing it with high r-value kaowool doesn’t pan out. I have a lot left over from a smelting furnace build, and I’ve got to do something with it.
Repairing appliances is pretty rewarding. I fixed my old washer a couple of times for very little money when it broke. Then the pump stopped working and it smelled like burning electrical. Even if was a simple fix that was the point I decided to buy a new one because there was no way I’d ever trust it again. I guess it is good to know when to give up too.
Definitely not discounting the achievement, but (as encouragement to others) electric clothes dryers are quite simple enough that even I would take a whack at it, and I am someone who took several hours—much of which was spent removing the door card—to replace a window regulator with a new aftermarket assembly only to fail to fix the problem (I think a clip or something had come off and put everything out of alignment, but I never quite managed to get back to it in the year and a half before I totaled the car.) And that wasn’t my worst effort, because it took me over four hours to replace a hose in the parking lot of Advance Auto. Right now I’ve been putting off taking my dryer apart to confirm I need to replace the control board because the shaft for the cycle selector won’t turn and the knob just spins (two knobs. as the washer and dryer use the same part. so I’ve verified with a known good part.) I did get back the entire price of the dryer from the extended warranty company because they said they didn’t have a local repair tech, though, and the most expensive board I’ve seen would still put me up $200 net of the price of the warranty for the pair. And the default “Normal” cycle it’s stuck on works fine, so hey.
Well, I’m about to take on rear wheel bearings on the cruiser, so I will let you know. I can do the fronts in less than an hour per side and the rears are supposed to be way easier so…We’ll see!
Timing belt and water pump on a Volvo 2.5T. No special tools needed and disassembly was easy and straight forward. Now that I have done it once I could probably finish it in 2-3 hours.
Not sure if it is a repair but I would say swapping my firebird’s trans from the 700r4 to a t56 magnum I have now. I thought I was going to run into a lot of issues with the swap but only issues I really had was I needed a convertor for the signal from the trans to the speedo and also figuring out what crossmember mount would work with my torque arm setup.
Attorney at Firelaw!
I didn’t do any wrenching for this, but I got quoted $7k by the dealer to replace my BMW’s leaking oil pan and gasket.
Took it to my independent shop, and they looked at it, said “the dealer left 6 nuts loose”. They tightened the nuts, charged me $10, and the car was fine for 3 more years until I sold it.
Holy stealership, Batman!
7 grand to replace an oil pan gasket?! How’s the procedure for that go?
Step 1: Replace engine
Step 2: Bill customer
Step 3: Buy next boat