Many years ago an older Subaru was towed in and I was handed a “Check battery. Repair headlights to operate”. The owner stated the headlight fuse had blown repeatedly so he put larger and larger fuses in it to the point where it was blowing the largest rated fuses available.
This car was an old one with a fender mounted fuse block and still using the old glass fuses.
When I raised the hood I discovered that he had taken a broken blade from a No. 2 Phillips screwdriver and inserted that in place of the now blown 30 amp fuse while leaving the fuse cover off due to clearance issues.
The minute he flipped on the headlights the entire wiring harness in the engine compartment had gone up in smoke and luckily for him, no flames.
I once had an Explorer towed in because the customer attempted a front brake job and now had no brake pedal. Just needed to be bled he said. Somehow the yo-yo at the auto parts store sold him pads, calipers and rotors for the rear of his car which he then attempted to install on the front. The rotors were less than half the thickness of the originals (solid vs. vented), somehow he used some combo of old brackets and new calipers but mounted the calipers upside down, but the kicker was the copper crush washers for the fluid line were now being used as caliper mount spacers. Utter stupidity.
But I had one WTH just today that had nothing to do with cars…
Had a customer sitting in the office waiting for a flat repair. Someone else comes in and starts talking to him and pointing. I figure he needs directions. I go to the front counter and say “Hi, may I help you?”
“What kind of tree is that?”
“What are you talking about”
“That tree, on the other side of the propane tank, what kind is it?”
“Uh, looks like a flowering cherry tree.”
“Can I climb up in it and eat cherries?”
“No, I don’t think so, I think it just makes flowers.”
“Then it’s not a cherry tree. I’m talking about a tree that grows cherries. You can’t call that one a cherry tree. What kind is that?”
“I’m not a landscaper, I’m a mechanic. Do you need help with your car?”
“No, but I want to know what kind of tree that is.”
“I can’t help you. Good luck.”
Mine isn’t car related, but I guess it was during the bombing of Hanoi in December '72. I was in the fully loaded Bombay fixing a problem on a B52 ready to take off… on the end of the runway with the engines running… in the wee hours of the morning with BUFFs lined up behind it. The ground crew got their signals mixed up and the BUFF started its takeoff roll. My own colleague (one never climbs into the Bombay on a plane ready to take off without a partner on the ground) terrifyingly notified the crewchief to stop the rollout. It sounds unimaginable, but when you’re launching endless BUFFs in the wee hours of the morning one after the other, just waiting long enough between takeoffs for the turbulence to clear, the activity level and the noise are beyond anything you can possibly imagine. It’s a beehive of activity multiplied by a million times. Stuff happens. I almost went “in-country” the hard way.
When I was still at the dealer, one of my colleagues installed the incorrect rotors. They bolted on, but the diameter was too small by an inch or so.
About 30K later, the customer came in complaining about bad brakes and a grating noise when stepping on the brake pedal. Yet the brake pad wear indicator light was NOT on.
The mechanic who got the job racked the car and removed the tires to inspect the brakes. He peeked through the caliper “inspection window” and the pads looked okay. They still had some life before hitting the electronic wear sensor.
Then he removed a front caliper and said “WTF . . . ???!!!” The pads were worn down to the backing plate for the most part, but not the part where the sensor was located . . . because of the incorrect rotor, whose diameter was too small by about an inch or so.
He looked up who did the last brake job. As “luck” would have it, that guy still worked there. He proceeded to inform the shop foreman of his findings. The service manager and shop foreman walked over to the guy who had done the incorrect brake job, and tore him a new one
Time is money, but it’s important to compare old and new parts, to ensure the correct part is being installed
When I was the shop foreman at this one multi-line dealership a guy brought in an older Subaru one day. It was a manually selectable 4WD version with both a Hi and Lo range. His complaint was that it was bucking a bit and would randomly quit moving. How much to fix he asked.
Well, that depends. The car will have to come into the shop and it will have to be determined if the problem is related to linkage adjustment for the Hi-Lo or if it’s an internal problem.
He left because he did not want to even pay for an adjustment check.
Three weeks later the Service Manager calls me up front and wants me to go help a transmission shop that is having trouble with a Subaru transmission. My response was why should we help competition for free? That led to some back and forth with the SM saying it would create “good will” and they “may send us work later on”. BS.
So I jump in a demo while stewed (I’m on salary with incentives, so…) and what’s at the address I was given?
A Cottman’s transmission shop.
Inside the shop they have a manual Subaru transaxle split apart on the bench with a complaint of not moving. They pointed out the car it came out of and you guessed it; the same guy who had been into the dealership 3 weeks before.
I looked the trans over and found absolutely nothing wrong with it other than the Hi-Lo adjustment being off. With a bit of contempt, I told them good luck and left them on their own. Whether they charged the guy for a trans overhaul I have no idea but odds are he got ripped as I don’t see Cottman’s telling him they yanked his trans and split it by mistake.
That’ll learn him…
(For what it’s worth, those Dual-Range gearboxes had a split mainshaft internal to the trans and that’s why the adjustment being off could cause the business end of the mainshaft to fail to rotate.)
@thesamemountainbike, sounds like you were in a situation similar to Captain Kong in Dr. Strangelove…
This is not car related, but a friend moved into a new (to her) house. She noticed that when she turned on her computer monitor (CRT type) that the circuit breaker for the outlet would instantly trip. The monitor worked fine plugged into another outlet and anything else plugged into the problem outlet also seemed to work just fine.
I pulled the plate and the outlet out of the box and examined it. It was a grounded 3-prong duplex outlet, but the house was originally wired for 2-prong outlets and lacked a ground wire. So the previous owner thought he’d “ground” it by wiring the ground to the common wire with a jumper. Which would have sort of worked except he got his hot and common wires mixed up. So the outlet had the hot and common reversed, and a ground that was always hot too, a very bad combination. Apparently her monitor had some previously unknown internal fault that caused a direct short when plugged into this outlet. I explained what happened, removed the jumper, and corrected the polarity. The monitor worked fine now, albeit lacking an actual ground–which on a lot of computer equipment isn’t there for safety, but for electromagnetic interference abatement.
It would have been a really fun time if someone had plugged something like an old power drill with a metal case that is wired to the ground pin into this outlet. Pretty much a recipe for electrocution as all you’d have to do is touch something like a faucet when using the death outlet to get zapped.
@asemaster, I think the person who owned that Explorer is the one that has worked on my Neon.
My favorite one on the Neon requires just a little bit of the backstory. I was looking for a cheap car - preferably something that was in reasonable shape but was being dumped pretty cheaply because it needed some work. This one had 132K on it and was listed on craigslist at $750 as needing a new wheel cylinder.
So I went to look at it. I saw too many disturbing things and decided not to buy it. (e.g. the top end was very loud - valve noise; the top of the plastic radiator tank had been damaged and had a big ugly glob of JB Weld on it. There was a stray wire coming out of the PDC with a corroded 30A fuse in it…) So I thanked the kid and told him good luck. He mentioned he needed the luck and might just end up selling it for scrap or parts. He’d already checked and could get $250 for it.
Later that day, it occurred to me that I probably would give him $250 for it. It still ran. So I dropped him an email and said to let me know if he ended up getting to the point of selling for scrap or parts. I didn’t want to annoy him or sound like a “predator” so I told him I’d be willing to go up to $400. (With some margin for error I had priced out a bunch of things and figured I could have it on the road for about $1000-1200). He came back and said he’d need at least $450. So I bought it.
I got the brakes fixed up first so that I could safely take it out for a drive and see how deep I really was. It turned out the thing was a total dog - couldn’t get out of its way on any kind of grade. Sigh. I hate it when I lose at gambling. Anyway - checked of fuel pressure, vacuum gauge etc. I figured it was time I got a look under the valve cover since it was so noisy on the top end (apparently well known among the neon owners). This is a SOHC, 16 valve with hydraulic lash adjusters. The really short story is - someone apparently had the rocker arms off at some point. The shafts can only go on one way for oil hole alignment, and the exhaust rocker had been installed upside down - oil holes 180 degrees off. The exhaust adjusters had no oil feed.
So that was 2 WTH for me? The first was the realization that the thing was installed that way. The second was basically - why does the car run at all? Anyway, I went ahead and put things back in order - luckily there was no obvious damage (visual) and the adjusters pumped up pretty well in a vat of oil. Once it was all back together the car ran just fine, almost no top end noise, and - well, it’s not a dog anymore. Long term damage? Who knows. If I ever pull the head off I’ll tell you.
This isn’t a car WTH, but when my parents moved into a house they had just purchased in 1948, there was an outlet in the bedroom where I slept that would work sometimes but not other times. After about six months, we found out that the outlet in the bedroom was wired to the switched circuit for the bathroom light. This was an old farmhouse that was built before there was electricity in the area. When it was wired, the whole house ran off one fuse that was located in a box on the front porch.
About 25 years ago, my father-in-law had a garage built beside his house. He complained that the two lights in the garage didn’t give enough light. He had jumped the bulbs from 60 watts to 100 watts, but still didn’t have enough light. He wanted me to change the bulbs to 150 watt bulbs. He turned the lights on and I went up the ladder and unscrewed a light bulb. The other bulb immediately went out. The builder had wired the two garage lights in series.
Oblivion, I sincerely hope your friend upon learning this hired an electrician to go over the houses’ wiring. Who knows what other disaster-in-waiting could be lurking behind her walls.
@the_same_mountainbike–back in the early 1970s, my wife and I had purchased some land and were looking for a builder. We decided to tour new homes that the local builders had on display. In one of the new homes, the electrical outlets were of the old two prong style–no ground. The refrigerator, which had a ground prong, was plugged in through an adapter. I remarked to my wife that the wiring didn’t meet code (three prong outlets were required by code in 1972). The salesperson overheard me and became irate. He told me that “blank” was a good builder and the reason that he knew "blank was a good builder was that “I work for him”. I told the salesperson that his logic was impeccable and left.
When you buy a fridge or freezer it normally says somewhere that it needs its own outlet. We bought a new house and the best location for the TV in the living room was against a wall with no outlet.
Conveniently, there was one in the kitchen located in that exact spot, but it was the fridge outlet. I simply cut a hole for the new plug in the living room and wired the outlet into the fridge circuit.
My wife thought it was neat until the fridge (a big original Frigidaire) started up and the TV vertical picture collapsed due to the inrush current. I never got around to fixing it since the company soon afterwards transferred me.
My trade school instructor told me the following true story:
In the mid 60’s he was the shop foreman at a Chrysler dealership. One day a customer brought in an early 60’s Imperial whose temp gauge had, over the previous ear or so, slowly read more & more hot so that now the needle was 3/4 of the way over. Several times the guy brought the car in. No one could figure out why the car was overheating. Cooling system always checked out fine. Customer was extremely frustrated though and wouldn’t accept the foreman’s reassurance that it wasn’t the end of the world for the engine to run “a little hot”.
Customer demanded, “I wanna see that gauge in the middle where it belongs!” So the foreman achieved exactly that: he went to an electronics store and got a selection of resistors and unknown to the customer, wired the one with the correct value into the feed for the temp gauge, causing the needle to only move half way over.
Maybe a year or so went by. Customer comes in one day; walks over to the foreman. Foreman’s thinking, “Oh my God, what now?!” Customer assures him his car’s not overheating; he just wants a routine major tuneup. Foreman thinks, Whew!
Now, the customer had waited way past the service interval for this major tuneup but no problem; the tech dove into the job, which involved testing the distributor on an old Sun machine like this one:
This was when distributors were easy to remove. This Sun machine could test the bearing play and the amount of centrifugal and vacuum advance, among other things. Well, the tech discovered the vacuum advance up to snuff but no centrifugal advance at all! The centrifugal weights had rusted together. When the tech told the foreman it all came together: The (for the most part) retarded timing had caused the overheating since, when the spark fires retarded–too late-- the piston is already too far down on the combustion stroke for the burning fuel to create maximum mechanical energy and minimum heat energy; it creates too much heat in the combustion chamber which transfers to the water jackets.
They repaired distributor but whether they then removed the resistor in the temp gauge feed I’ll never know!
@Docnick-- When I was a graduate student, I rented a room in a house. The landlord and his wife and another graduate student lived in the house as well. The house was wired like the house was where I grew up. It was all powered by one fuse on the front porch and just had 120 volt service. The range in the kitchen was gas and originally the furnace was a gravity, coal furnace. The second year I lived in the house, the company that maintained the furnace found a crack in the firebox and convinced the landlord to put in a gas furnace. The problem was that when the furnace and refrigerator tried to start at the same time, the fuse would blow. The landlord then replaced the 20 amp fuse with a 30 amp fuse. Since he did rent rooms to students, the housing inspector from the university came around and said that the fuse was tobe no bigger than 20 amperes. The landlord told us that he would put a penny behind the fuse before he would go without lights. I bought a slow-blow 20 amp fuse for the fuse box and it didn’t blow. Once a week, however, either I or the other graduate students would do our fuse box check when the landlord wasn’t around to be certain that there was no penny in the fuse box.
I also remember that the landlord’s wringer washing machine croaked when I was a student and he had to replace it. His wife insisted that an automatic washing machine would not get the clothes clean, so it was replaced with a new Maytag square tub wringer washer. This was in 1963 and even then, most people had automatic washing machines.
One great thing about these good old days 50 years ago was that my room cost me $8 a week. A meal ticket at the student union was $14 a week which gave me three meals a day Monday through Saturday, and on Sunday included breakfast and a smorgasboard for dinner. The $200 a month a received as a graduate assistant paid for room, board, and left me with $100 a month.
Thanks for the link to the Sun distributor machine. A technician could check both the centrifugal advance and vacuum advance using the timing light. However, one would have to set the timing with the vacuum hose to the advance disconnected and plugged, then speed the engine up to make sure the centrifugal was working and note how much the spark advanced. Then, after reconnecting the vacuum advance, the mechanic would speed up the engine and make certain that there was more advance. The Sun distributor machine does all of this.
I’ll bet the owner of the Imperial in your story got much better mileage after the tune-up where the centrifugal advance weights were freed up. I guess this shows that the shop should have checked the engine temperature and not assumed the gauge was wrong.
Triedq: True, you could check the vacuum & centrifugal advance w/o using the Sun tester. Moreover, a top tech would have considered checking for spark retard, knowing that that condition could cause overheating. By the time the foreman had become my instructor, he was such a “by the book” type of guy, I almost couldn’t believe him when he told us about rigging up the temp gauge!
Not everybody had automatic washers. I remember my Mom bought a new Matag wringer washer about 1966. When she was downstairs washing though, every once in a while I’d hear some yelling when the pants would wrap around wringer instead of exiting the wringer.
When I was growing up, some of the newer faculty members including my dad bought houses out in the country where prices and taxes were lower, but a person could get more space. One older faculty member who knew how to make deals bought a farm about a quarter mile down the road with a house that needed to be torn down. Instead of paying to have it torn down, he sold the house to another faculty member. This second faculty member bought a lot right down the street from us. He borrowed a trailer from a faculty member who lived across the road from the lot and as he tore down the house, he would load the wood (mostly rotted) into the trailer, bring it up the road and dump it in his vacant lot. Not only did he make a total mess, but he broke the tongue on the trailer that he borrowed. He returned the trailer with a short 4 x 4 piece of lumber and told the person from whom he borrowed the trailer that the lender could carve a new tongue from the 4x4.
As long as we are telling wiring stories, here is mine. A young couple at the church I attrnded 25 years ago wanted to buy a house out in the country and bought a house about 60 miles south of Buffalo. They had looked at it with a real estate agent on a nice sunny day but when they tried the lights, they didn’t come on. The agent told them the electricity had been shut off.
After closing they called the electric company who told them they had on record of that house. When the couple insisted that the address was right the electric company would send someone out to look. The electric co,pany finally called them and asked if they had noticed that there were no wires running to the house from the road.
They wound up in court to get their money back from the previous owners who had bought the house from the Amish farmer who had built it.
The ones who had sold the house to my friends had planned to rehab the house, realised they bit off more than they could chew and installed outlets and switches and a ceiling fixture in the kitchen. There was no wiring, electrical panel or breakers and no electric lines to the house.
Their defence in court was that they were going to add that later but decided to sell the house instead and had made no representation that the house had electricity.
The judge told them they would have the chance to add it now because they owned the house again and had to pay all my friends expences.
