One day I got a very terse call from the vice president of the company where I was responsible for fleet maintenance back in the late ‘70s. It seemed that an almost new (1978) Dodge one-ton we had was pointed at the gate with a gooseneck trailer behind it and that truck and trailer needed to arrive at our offshore diving and salvaging dock within the next 30 minutes – 25 miles away. I had no idea why that trip to that dock was so urgent, but someone had misplaced the key to the Dodge.
“Get that truck started and on the road within the next 10 minutes,” he told me with his gravelly voice, “and I don’t care what it takes. Just make it happen.”
I must admit that I was in my element under pressure in those days, so I hung up the phone and grabbed a jumper wire with a couple of ‘gator clips on each end out of my toolbox. I opened the hood on the Dodge and made a connection from the positive battery terminal to the ballast resistor to feed current to the ignition coil. Making sure the tranny was in neutral, I “pocket screwdrivered” the starter to fire the engine up. Ninety seconds had expired and the steering wheel was still locked, but I knew I could defeat the pewter collar around that silly spring-loaded steering wheel lock peg, and I slid into the seat and muscled the wheel hard to the right, and broke the lock. Mission accomplished in less than three minutes and the truck was headed out the gate.
Then there was the time at that same job where I had to drive down Highway 87 toward Galveston and take a steamy ride on one marsh buggy through a swarm of mosquitoes and dragonflies to another marsh buggy that had jumped time, stranding a different vice president and his passengers a couple of miles off the road. Putting a timing belt on while standing in snake and alligator-infested water and swatting away mosquitoes wasn’t my idea of a good time, but I was motivated enough that I got that job done in record time, too.
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| This is my 2007 F150 that was victim of a surgical strike by some toothy critter that was copper-hungry |
The point is that every job isn’t interesting, but in our line of work, challenges are the spice of life, and it feels good to be a problem-solver. It feels even better to be appreciated, and usually we are, but that isn’t always the case.
Critters
Dogs and squirrels chew wires, as do rats. Rats and squirrels build nests in engine compartments, and cats looking for a warm place to sleep can die under the hood and under the car in very gruesome ways sometimes. I’ve had to kill spiders and roaches, wasps, dirt daubers and all manner of other wildlife in my under-the-hood and under-the-vehicle odysseys. One morning I did a classroom presentation on critter damage, and a day or so later I walked out to where I park my own F-150, slid in behind the wheel, and thought I was going somewhere in my truck, but it wasn’t to be. The battery was good and hot, but I had no starter operation and no scan tool communication. The red theft light was blinking, which can point to a few different problems, but it usually means a module (usually the PCM) isn’t talking. With the key on, I checked for voltage at the EGR assembly and found 9 volts on the gray-red signal return wire – which should have been grounded through the PCM. What that meant to me was that the PCM had lost its own ground reference somehow.
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| Having Alldata available on the smartphone is pretty handy when you’re under the gun to find out what’s wrong and you’re somewhere else besides the shop |
Next it was time to bust out my smart phone and dig into ALLDATA, where I found that PCM G103 is located behind the battery on the bulkhead. With my flashlight, I peered down there and saw that about eight inches of that wire had been removed by some sharp little teeth and my much larger main power feed cable to the inside fuse panel had been just as viciously attacked, but it had survived without being severed. Some chew-happy squirrel must have a nice piece of wire lining its nest and a belly full of copper as I type these words.
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There was another ground wire in that same area that was compromised as well. While removing the battery and doing some solder and heat shrink work was almost enjoyable that Saturday morning, I found myself wondering if I was going to have this problem again. No other wires under the hood had been attacked. It was almost like the critter had pulled up a wiring schematic and did a surgical strike to prevent my truck from going anywhere. And it worked.
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| I suppose I should have been thankful that these wires were the only ones the critter chewed – he could have done a lot more damage than he did – fixing this took about thirty minutes. |
I prevailed in that fix and placed some rat poison in the general area. We’ll see how that works out.
The 2004 Suburban
In a previous article, I mentioned a 2004 Suburban with a 5.3L that was misfiring on cylinder 4 with low compression and, during the cylinder leakage test air was escaping into the exhaust, but the owner chose to drive it skipping for a while before having it fixed. Finally, the Suburban returned and we hashed out what needed doing.
This was one of those high-milers, and so I talked them into a reman engine because of the better warranty, which we managed to stuff in there in pretty good time.
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| We were going back into the Suburban with the reman engine and had just put it in place when this photo was taken. You can see the burned valve in this photo of the old engine’s head if you know what to look for. |
After the swap, I had Robbie jerk the head off so we could inspect the valves and the head of the piston on the offending cylinder and we found a valve that had become mis-matched with its seat and was leaking compression. With the new engine in place, the MIL was off, the monitors all cleared, O2 sensors were switching handily, and fuel trims were bouncing around the zero line, so we put that one back on the road. There was a strange caveat though. For some reason, the transmission wouldn’t go into park well enough to not roll away on a slope.
This was a deal-breaker, to be sure. The shift cable was adjusted as far as it could go. I could disconnect the cable and put the transmission fully in park, so there was nothing wrong inside the case. Eventually I decided to try the shift lever off another transmission I had on the shelf and with that lever installed, it would go completely into park just fine even though it looked the same. I have yet to figure that one out, but it was safe when it left.
The Silverado, the Fusion, and the MKZ
While all this was going on, another instructor who drives a 2003 Silverado 2500 Duramax asked if we could replace his master cylinder. He’s ordinarily pretty savvy, and since he brought us the master cylinder I had a guy pop it on there and begin the bleeding process. Well, the pedal felt like you were stepping on a plum, and there was fluid dripping from underneath the truck and we found that classic rusty brake line situation a lot of you guys have to fix every day. He didn’t look under the truck, I don’t guess. A careful exam of the whole system revealed that this line was a lot worse than any of the other lines, all of which looked pretty good, and so we got a roll of that dandy nickel-alloy rust-free stuff and built a replacement line from stem to stern (complete with new double flare fittings), and after the bleeding procedure, we got that one rolling again with a good firm pedal and a master cylinder he didn’t need. I gave him the rest of that $60 roll of brake line just in case something else would be needed later.
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| This rusty brake line syndrome is fairly common everywhere on trucks of all kinds, especially on trucks that do a lot of mudding, but salt did this one in. This Silverado had spent its early life in Panama City Florida, where the salt air took its toll. |
The 2010 Fusion that came in around this time was making a bump noise underneath on the left side during parking lot maneuvers, and it was one of those cranky situations where you can’t see anything but you know something is wrong. And every bolt was tightened to no avail. This one has that odd double-ball joint design with two lower control arms, and when we applied the Chassis Ear® we found that one of the control arms was the source of the bump, and when we got it out of there you could see the problem. The hidden rubber that is couched in the frame area had died, and that was allowing the sudden pressure of certain braking and steering maneuvers to give a metal-to-metal contact sound. The fix was easy enough.
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| This inner control arm bushing isn’t visible on the Fusion until you remove the control arm. This was the rear of two control arms that car is blessed with on each side. |
That Fusion reminded me of another vehicle, a 2012 MKZ that came in with an alternator you could hear whining from 100 feet away. She had been to a tire shop complaining about a noise, and the first guy who rode with her at that shop said he thought the noise was a hub bearing, but the more experienced mechanic said, “no, that’s the alternator,” because it was making the noise when the car was sitting still and the pitch of it matched engine speed. When I heard it, I agreed with the older guy’s prognosis. That alternator was making a LOT of noise that changed with throttle.
Getting the alternator off a 2012 MKZ isn’t for wimps — the refrigerant has to be recovered and the A/C compressor has to be removed, and the alternator comes out the bottom. There’s nothing easy about any of that job, but my guy got it done. I knew this 17-year-old could handle it — he had just finished replacing the heater core in a 2010 Wrangler, and after that extremely difficult job, this one was a cake walk.
The new alternator didn’t whine — the car sounded normal under the hood now, but it did have what sounded like a noisy hub bearing on the right front at road speed. It was one of those situations where the customer didn’t believe she had needed the alternator to begin with, because she was still hearing a noise on the road and one noise was masking the other. She chose to drive the car for a few days but came back and claimed the car had “put her down” and implied that it was our fault for replacing the alternator.
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| Here was another needful repair. The customer on this one was complaining of a vibration with the blower on high – easy to figure out and easy to fix, but needful all the same. |
“I left it running when I got here,” she told me, and then said, “I had to jump it off this morning and then I drove it here (15 miles). It wasn’t giving that problem before you replaced my alternator.”
I had her pull it into the shop. I carefully explained that if the alternator wasn’t charging, the engine would have died as soon as the jumper cables were removed. Then I switched the car off and tried to restart it, but the battery was too weak. When I jumped it off and connected the Snap-on tester I showed her that the alternator was indeed charging and suggested that she find a cool place to rest while I did some more troubleshooting to figure out what was going on, but I told her I’d need the rest of the morning to be sure of what was going on.
“There was nothing wrong with my battery,” she snipped. “We’ll get to the bottom of this,” I told her.
After she walked away, I put a good stiff charge on the battery with a heavy-duty charger, then I got out the $1,700 Midtronics unit I bought from Joey Henrichs and ran through the entire routine, which records everything, including battery health and alternator ripple, printing it out for the customer. The MKZ showed a clean bill of health all the way around except for the battery.
Taking it a step further, I did a parasitic drain test, connecting a meter in series with the battery and waiting until all the modules finished charging their stuff. End of story — there was no drain, only a weak battery.
When she came back I showed her the results and told her she’d need to get the hub bearing noise handled at the tire shop. Sometimes it’s best to send some customers down the road, so that’s what I did.
Another Silverado
This 2003 1500 5.3L came to us with an overheating complaint — the guy said another shop claimed it must be a blown head gasket, but I explained that we wanted to diagnose it ourselves before we did any unnecessary surgery. Sure enough, it was overheating, but it was happening slowly, and there was no quick pressure buildup in the cooling system when the engine was started. The fan kicked on at 228 but the engine kept getting hotter until the fans kicked on high, and all that took a while, but I noticed that the radiator was still cool.
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| Here’s the overheating Silverado. Even with the radiator removed and bypassed and the thermostat gutted there was no flow through the hose. Presumably this was a water pump problem? |
“Let’s try a thermostat,” I told my guy. Cheap and easy comes first. We put one of those in there and burped it out, but nothing changed. The radiator was cool, but the engine was getting hot. So I had him pull the water pump, and the borescope didn’t show anything wrong down in the pump, so we reinstalled it. With the radiator removed (no external clogging seen) I bypassed the radiator using the long hose, and we also looped out the transmission cooler lines and took the guts out of the old thermostat to allow free flow. With the engine running we had to squeeze the hose in the middle to neutralize the natural kink so as to facilitate flow but even with that hose in place of the radiator, there was still no flow through the hose, which was only warm on the ends — not in the middle. And the engine continued to try and run hot. What madness was this? If coolant had been flowing, the hose would have been hot its entire length.
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| Here’s the Silverado’s water pump with the rear cover removed, but I couldn’t see a problem, nor could I feel one manipulating the pulley and holding the impeller. |
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| This was one of those exhaust bolts that had rust-melted from a 15mm down to something just a little larger than a 9/16, and it wasn’t in an easy place to access. We air-hammered this wiggler onto the bolt to get it out. It was a needful thing, but getting the bolt separated from the socket was tough. |
To make a long story short, a radiator and a water pump fixed that one. Mission accomplished, but I couldn’t figure out what was at the root of this problem — I thought that plastic impeller might have been spinning on the shaft, but water pump forensics didn’t show that to be the case. One way or another, the truck never runs over 210 degrees now. Happy customer.