I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at something and said to myself “Oh that’s an easy one” – get started and it’s a five hour slog through grease and dirt and broken bolts….
Very recently somebody decided that I needed a new catalytic converter on my older black Lexus. I guess that’s what they decided, because they nicely sawed off the old one for me as it sat in the parking lot of my shop. This came as somewhat a surprise to me when I went to start the car and it sounded like I was qualifying for a Nascar race.
Being the prepared (or hoarder?) one, I realized that I had the parts for this precise eventuality sitting in the corner of my shop.
So I think to myself “this will be an easy job, I changed out that converter pipe a couple years ago, so I’ll be able to pop those right back on. Probably no more than an hour or two”.
I put the car on the rack and instantly come face to face with reality. First off they cut the pipe that is the most complex to get to on this car. I start to take it off, and proceed to start breaking bolts. Not breaking them loose, snapping them clean off. I don’t even bother trying to extract the first two because they are so rusty – I just cut them off with an angle grinder and drilled them out.
I reach the two hour mark about the time I get the second hole drilled. The third broken bolt is sticking out, but tucked under the engine in a spot that would be difficult to drill. I decide to weld a nut onto the broken part and see if I can turn it. I get my welder set up, put a nut on there, weld it in place, and snap the bolt off further up the stem. I do this twice more, each time it breaks off again – each time it takes 15 minutes.
At the three hour mark I start drilling on that hole and it is stubborn and takes an hour to drill the bolt out. I then proceed to break the tip of a drill bit out in the hole trying to make it bigger. Another 30 minutes to get the broken bit out. At this point my language takes a turn for the worse. Then I go to change the oxygen sensors and one is so tight I can’t get it out – I round it off – argggh!. I have to go find my spare that I have in a box somewhere (yes, I have a spare on hand!)
Anyway – this quick 2 hour job ended up taking 6-7 hours!
But once in awhile they go the other way.
A couple months ago I bought this Dodge truck. I’ve fixed no fewer than about 20 different things on it. Most took longer than I ever thought they would.
I left one job for the very end because I was dreading it – the fan clutch. It’s an electrically controlled fan that gives you not one, but two check engine codes when it doesn’t work right. Fixing it is really tight, and they sell an $80 toolkit just to change out that one part. I didn’t want to spend the $80 so I went at it with what I have – and lo and behold I had the entire job done in about an hour. The hardest part was getting it to thread back on by holding onto the fan blades. This is a 4 hour job that took 1 hour – so I made three of my lost hours on the catalytic converter back.
Another job that was much easier was on this scissor lift.
I bought this for almost nothing from a company here in town. The lady said it quit on them almost a year ago and the owner got tired of fixing it and bought a new one. The only challenge was getting it off the far back corner of their loading dock and onto a trailer. That’s the subject of another blog – retrieval stories.
I got it back to the shop, charged the batteries – they were good! – and started looking it over – It would go up to a certain point then stop. Strange, but that means the pump and the cylinders work – it had to be a safety cutoff or an electrical problem.
Literally about five minutes into looking at it, I found the problem – a wire that had previously been broken and repaired was pulling apart at the position where the lift would stop working. I stripped the wire off, added a little bit to the length so it didn’t pull and had it fixed and running perfectly in 10 minutes flat. It was so easy I felt guilty. I fixed a couple other minor things in the next 45 minutes and put it up for sale and sold it for literally 10X what I paid for it 3 days before.
That’s the way it goes. Many times it’s harder than you think, then once in awhile you get surprised and it is easy. It almost never goes as planned.