I got a call from my daughter last night. Her and her hubby decided to replace the front calipers on her Dodge minivan. Now panic has set in, because they could not get the calipers to work and they had no front brakes. I went through the normal questions trying to figure out what they had done and what might be wrong. They told me they had bled the brakes numerous times, but the calipers still would not move. Last thing I asked them was, “is the bleed screw on top of the calipers?”. The answer was no but they put them on the way they were marked, driver and passenger. I told them to swap them and bleed them again. Needless to say the problem is fixed. It gave me a good laugh. I thought it would be cool to hear other peoples kid stories.
A friend told his 16 year old son to “check” the oil at every fill up. Soon after car would not start. Pulled the dipstick and oil was to the top of the fill tube. His son said, “I did what you said, I added oil at every fill up”. He partially listened, I guess that’s good. Drained the oil to the correct level and all was well and lesson learned.
I was visiting family one time and my niece called me in a panic. She tried to bleed the brakes on her own, opened the bleeders and pumped the brakes. There was so much air in the system, we wound up gravity bleeding with all four bleeders wide open until they were all weeping before trying to pressure bleed them the proper way. Got Iit fixed, tho.
When my son was 16 he got his first car, a 9 year old Valiant, I showed him how to check his oil and change a tire, I figured I would show him other things as they arose. Some while later I asked him if he had been checking his oil, he checked it and came back in the house and said it was a quart low.
I showed him where the oil was and 20 min. later he came back in, I asked him if he had put the oil in and he said “Not all of it, I didn’ have time, I have a date tonight.”
It turned out he was trying to pour it down the dipstick tube, I hadn’t shown him where to put the oil. It just goes to show that something that seems self evident to you, may not be self evident to someone else.
My son and I still have this kind of problem only now it is reversed, nothing about a computer is self evident to me.
I drove past my brother in laws house one day and saw him working on his car and there was a large puddle of oil in the driveway.
I stopped in to see if I could help. Turns out he had overtightened the oil filter so much that the seal rolled over the edge of the mating surface.
It was so tight that I couldn’t budge the thing. I had him remove a few parts that would give me more room…power stearing pump, brackets etc etc… I finally had room but it was still impossible to budge it because the wrench would just slip on the filter.
As a last resort I had to drive a large screw driver thru the filter so that the blade would rest against the threaded reciever inside the filter. That worked to give the leverage to get it loose, and he had to put everything back together again.
I was deetermined to make this a learning experience for him throughtout. I’d tell him what bolts to remove and I’d go have a chat with my sister, then come back out and dictate what the next part to remove was.
I think he learned not to over tighten a filter.
Yosemite
i hate when i have to drive a screwdriver thru a filter…
sometimes that filter wrench just hides from me
I let my son take my 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass Salon to college for his freshmen year 1992-93. I had warned him to keep the gas tank at least half full in cold weather, but he didn’t do it. I got a call that he just barely got off campus and the car stopped and he couldn’t restart it. I had given him a motor club card and he had the car towed back to campus. The tow truck driver told him that the problem was the fuel pump. The weather had suddenly turned cold and I guessed that he didn’t have very much gas in the tank. I was right and figured that the problem was probably a frozen fuel line. I suggested he walk down to a grocery store and see if they had some gas line antifreeze. I suggested it would cost him about a dollar. Well, he found a can for about 50 cents. I told him to pour it in the gas tank and wait a day or so to see what would happen. He tried the car a couple of days later and with a little cranking, it did get enough fuel to the carburetor to start. He kept pumping the accelerator until it finally evened out. I suggested that he keep the tank half full and add gas line antifreeze while the weather was cold.
The funny part was that one if his classmates had the same problem. My son suggested the gas line antifreeze, but this fellow was too cheap to spend 50 cents. He went to the horse barn on campus and reasoned that the warm manure might warm the fuel line enough to start the car. I don’t know if that did the trick, but my son reported that the car always smelled like horse manure.
Hech…my truck smells like that inside!!!
That’s the smell of money!!!
Yosemite