SMILE do a little Happy Dance…and Motor on down the road with your NEW Engine…
Engines can suffer horrible fates at the hands of idiots…or sometimes they are defective…
Be glad they “Nipped the problem in the BUD” and not your “Butt”
Blackbird
Be thankful for powertrain warranty still left. 25k no engine should die even if really neglected.
25k no engine should die even if really neglected.
I can completely destroy ANY engine is less then 100 miles.
Me too.
Engines are routinely wiped out at less than 25k miles due to neglect. You should read the complaint from the lady who trashed her bought from new Nissan Altima at 15k miles.
She never changed the oil one time in that 15k miles and the engine died due to severe sludging.
She was absolutely livid that Nissan would not cover a new engine under warranty. She also stated (paraphrased) that Nissan builds junk engines and the engine should not fail even if she never changes the oil.
It didn’t matter what the posters told her about this being self-inflicted. She refused to believe that the problem was her fault in any way, shape, or form.
I’ve related the story of the guy who bought a brand new Subaru from us and it was towed in at 25k miles. The engine was frozen solid and the engine oil was essentially cold roofing tar.
When I removed the oil pan almost half of the crankshaft was purple in color; heat due to lack of oil caused by the oil pickup screen being completely coked over.
This is the one that as the service manager and I walked back through the shop to show him the damage I pointed out a 3 foot long screwdriver standing upright in the oil pan which was sitting on the floor. The oil was so thick a hurricane would not have blown that tool over…
With the SM standing there I grasped the screwdriver handle and picked the entire oil pan up off the floor. The oil was that thick and would not run out of the pan even when the pan was left upside down. The only surprise in all of this to me is how in the hxxx he made it to 25k miles.
@circuitsmith Ah yes - Earl Scheib - “I’ll paint any car for $9.95”.
A colleague got an earl scheib paint job for his car a few years ago
In all honesty, the car looked fine, and I don’t think it really needed a paint job
The “funny” thing . . . afterwards, I couldn’t even tell that anything had been done, at all
Funny for me, anyways
When I graduated high school in 1969 a girl I started dating had a car that her dad had sent in for an Earl Scheib paint job. They covered the wheels and bumpers, masked the glass off, and shot everything else. It actually looked pretty good other than the trim being painted in the maroon body color…
The car was a 1948 4-Door Plymouth with a manual transmission. She is 4’10" and her dad had fitted blocks on the pedals so she could reach them. It did make it awkward for me to drive though. Jumping into that car after hopping out of my '68 Plymouth Roadrunner provided a noticeable performance loss… 
Her dad was well off and could have purchased her a new car but he was of the belief that no teen needed a new or even a nearly new car.
I completely agree with her dad, and a 48 Plymouth would still be a easy car to learn to drive on. The torque came in at such a low rpm that they were hard to stall.
I think High Schools should implement a program called Basic Car Maintenance or something like it… We see the need for Sex Ed for obvious reasons. Dont you think knowing your way around a vehicle (That almost everyone drives) is just as important? I mean seriously…it easier to die in an automobile because of limited knowledge…than it is to die from a sexual encounter.
We should teach everyone about cars…and also Sex… Hahahahaa I think the world would be a slightly safer, better place.
Blackbird
If the interest or demand were there in high schools to teach car maintenance, the schools would be doing it already.
Not necessarily. Labs are expensive to maintain, and programs with labs are often the first to get cut when the budget gets tight.
Community colleges have been doing it too. In NH, the community colleges were originally called “Vocational-Technical Colleges” (VOC-TECs), and were funded by the state to provide productive skills to those students who were not college bound. They provided training an all the blue-collar skills, including electronic, electrical, plumbing. HVAC, welding, etc. Over the years, as the state lost its taste for having the colleges competing for the General Fund, these programs were replaced with liberal arts programs. You can put 40 students in a lecture hall each with their own supplies in a liberal arts course. You cannot do that in a lab. Just about the only lab-intensive programs left are Nursing, because the legislature demands it, and automotive, because the Chairman of the Board of Trustees is Paul Holloway, a major NE auto dealer. And Machine Tool, which was fading fast until a federal grant through the DOL became available. The DOT sent the colleges after the federal funds.
Colleges have the advantage of being able to charge “lab fees”. High schools don’t. A whole lot of HS programs have been eliminated in budget cuts.
Good explanation MB. Thank you.
You’re welcome. I personally consider the disappearance of HS technical programs a tragedy, but whatchagonnado?? Just before sitting down here this evening I watched a discussion on World News about the issue of college preparatory programs in HS vs. optional programs. I strongly believe that a HS diploma should be evidence that a graduate has proven skills in the basics of math, science, physics, geometry, algebra, knowledge of our country’s history and political systems, and some knowledge of the world as a whole. However, I also believe that students should be able to also choose a college path or a “trade” path. I saw a lot of students at the college whose basic knowledge and skills were way, way below readiness for even technical programs. A student who doesn’t know how to divide, multiply, work a basic linear equation, or find the hypotenuse of a right triangle should not in my mind have a diploma. Nor should a student who hasn’t studied the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Yet, with the focus on NCLB (No Child Left Behind) and its penalties for schools that don’t graduate to a minimum percentage, the train is IMHO going backwards. High Schools are graduating students now who have no basic foundational skills and no idea how our country works.
I recall clearly having lunch with our Chair of the Liberal Arts department and hearing him state that automotive technology students should take more liberal arts courses because it “teaches them to think”. Huh? Anybody who can diagnose and repair a modern vehicle has far more capability to “think” than any liberal arts course is going to give them. Besides, they need to pass minimum standards of mathematics, algebra, and reading comprehension to even get accepted to the program. Most of the liberal arts courses have no prerequisites.
Thanks for putting up with my rant.
I fully agree with you mountainbike.
Many years ago I worked at a multi-line dealer in a city with a major university. Some of the biggest pain in the necks we encountered was college professors. That’s not to denigrate all of them but a certain percentage seemed to have no analytical skills, no common sense, and “logic” is an unknown foreign word to them.
Many did not own one iota of automotive mechanical knowledge but would stand at the counter and argue a point about a car problem while believing they are 100% correct due to the “Dr.” in their title.
My youngest son oversees a section of a financial office at another major university and dealing with university professors is the one thing that drives him up a wall. The profs are always right no matter if they’re dead wrong, if what they’re wanting to do is illegal as hxxx, motor pool or travel shenanigans, etc.
He’s had them call on the phone cursing him and his standard answer is to hang up on them.
One professor didn’t get his way one day after coming into the office carping and sat outside on the hallway floor blocking foot traffic in an impromptu protest.
One assistant used a university charge card to buy a new PC, new flat screen, and other stuff for her home and forged other people’s signatures to get free use of motor pool vehicles with full tanks of gas. When caught (Wal Mart security cams…) she was simply relieved of her position and a professor gave her a job working for him in his department. The DA dropped all charges except for pleaing down the motor pool charges to a single misdemeanor “Joyriding” charge.
Another professor threatened to blow up the university… 
A kindergarten teacher doesn’t witness childishness this bad.
IMHO professors who teach mathematics, sciences, chemistry, and other technical courses generally have good heads on their shoulders, and their students learn valuable skills. But 99% of the liberal arts professors are nothing but bags of hot BS, too busy bloating their images to bother actually looking at really teaching anything. And administrators? (confession: I was one) are generally a pathetic bunch of politicians. No management skills, no marketing skills, no organizational skills, no problem solving skills, nothing. Just political skills.
Sorry. I’ll stop now.
Still agree with you… 
I guess two years of retirement hasn’t been enough for me to get over it.
Sincere apologies to anybody I may have offended.
A kindergarten teacher doesn’t witness childishness this bad.
But 99% of the liberal arts professors are nothing but bags of hot BS, too busy bloating their images to bother actually looking at really teaching anything. And administrators? (confession: I was one) are generally a pathetic bunch of politicians. No management skills, no marketing skills, no organizational skills, no problem solving skills, nothing.
My wife is in the Human Resources department at a local private liberal arts university. I often wonder if her title should be “Director of Sandbox Affairs.” Some of the stuff she has to deal with really is reminiscent of the first grade playground.
Though I will quibble with TSM on one point. The liberal arts prof you quoted is on the right track. The ability to think clearly and critically and parse away extraneous information to lead to a logical and verifiable conclusion will make one a good diagnostic technician. Too many mechanics make their way on pattern failures and repetition. I agree that many people need to be taught how to think.
IMHO professors who teach mathematics, sciences, chemistry, and other technical courses generally have good heads on their shoulders, and their students learn valuable skills.
They better have…you can’t teach/learn those subjects unless you have good analytical skills and logic. Mathematics IS logic in it’s purest form. If you’re good at math - your logical…it’s IMPOSSIBLE to solve higher math equations without it.