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[quote=”meleemaker” post=84918]So I have found the usual searching for lug keys….living where I do its not at all uncommon to find fire arms and ammo. We usually just shuffle around it and dont give it a second thought. Truck beds are usually covered in blood during last few months of the year…vehicles come in like that all the time no one bats an eye. Even at the school when people pull in vehicles with guns, no one even says anything.
But condoms, magazines, toys, KKK gear. Literally white robes and that pointy hat and a the whole get up in the back of a bus….
My top favorite was a new toyota tacoma…like 600 miles. Car went to the dealership twice for a noise during accel and decel. They had no idea what the problem was. Car came to the school as a last ditch attempt. Made a zip noise when you gassed it…zipped when you slowed down and stopped….All speeds….Finally our toyota master tech too the torch and cut the back end of the frame…toyota tacoma pickup rolls out. Not even joking. It was put in at the factory….[/quote]
Are you talking about a little toy car inside the frame?
Glad to hear everything went well! It’s posts like these that make me glad to be here, and proud of what I do for a living as well.
Glad to hear everything went well! It’s posts like these that make me glad to be here, and proud of what I do for a living as well.
I’ve had many in the 2-5k range but nothing extravagant. A lot of R&R engines, Interior dissassembly (oh Ford Blend door actuators with plastic teeth, how i hate you..), head gaskets, many 3.1/3.4/3.8 lower intake gaskets all in the thousands, transmission R&R, clutches.. etc. Ive also had quite a few front-end jobs that have been pricy (removing engine subframes, frame bolts and a cab-off on an F150 once) I dont think any of those tickets were over 5k though.
That Mercedes job is incredulous! But i definitely believe it. Any high-end car has horribly high maintenance. Look at ferrari and lamborghini.. Timing chains & clutch discs that are replaced at something like 15-20k miles.. It takes a certain kind of tech that could wake up everyday and do work like that. Im curious to know what their labor rate must be..
I’ve had many in the 2-5k range but nothing extravagant. A lot of R&R engines, Interior dissassembly (oh Ford Blend door actuators with plastic teeth, how i hate you..), head gaskets, many 3.1/3.4/3.8 lower intake gaskets all in the thousands, transmission R&R, clutches.. etc. Ive also had quite a few front-end jobs that have been pricy (removing engine subframes, frame bolts and a cab-off on an F150 once) I dont think any of those tickets were over 5k though.
That Mercedes job is incredulous! But i definitely believe it. Any high-end car has horribly high maintenance. Look at ferrari and lamborghini.. Timing chains & clutch discs that are replaced at something like 15-20k miles.. It takes a certain kind of tech that could wake up everyday and do work like that. Im curious to know what their labor rate must be..
I use mine to double check wheels after using torque sticks, *everything* engine related, driveline related, and some suspension components. Anything else like interior fasteners, body work, brackets that hold things under the hood/under the car.. etc, you can gauge exactly whats needed.
You do tend to learn what a torque setting feels like after wrenching for awhile with a torque wrench. But things like head/intake/timing cover, cv axles, flywheel bolts, pressure plate bolts are very important! (I’ve saw far too many stripped out flywheel threads due to people overtorquing pressure plates to flywheels.. dunno about you, but i dont want a clutch assembly coming through the floorboard of a car!). It really does only take a few extra minutes in a job to do things properly, and plenty of other ‘safe shortcuts’ (experience being the best one!) to cut time on your job.
Story time again: Worked with a kid that had just started 2 weeks earlier, who was doing a waterpump on a 3.8 ford and a few bolts broke off in the timing cover as it was being removed. He extracted them successfully and had to helicoil a few of them.
When it came time to reinstall, the torque spec was 21 ft/lbs, and i came back to see him putting them on with his cordless 3/8s impact driver. I asked him what he was doing and he said “i dont have a torque wrench, and i dont want it to leak!” He though torque specs existed to make sure it was ‘tight enough’ and not because there is a certain amount of pressure each bolt needs to seal the gasket evenly. SO anyway when he did this, all the OE bolts went in fine, but he pulled the helicoil out of every single one he had repaired.
So off came the water pump again, except this time when he took out the OE bolts, every single one of them snapped the heads off… (thank ford for putting steel bolts into an aluminum housing that expands and retracts as coolant flows through) and he had to extract/repair the other 7 threads as well. It turned a 2 hour job into a 3.5 hour job with no additional pay for him (as he was on hourly training pay).
So basically, he lost 1.5 hours of what would have been flagged time for himself if he had been paid flat-rate because he didnt spend another 5-10 mins to ask another tech for a torque wrench that he didnt have to properly tighten the water pump bolts. He would have had the whole job done in 45 minutes too if not for that.
I use mine to double check wheels after using torque sticks, *everything* engine related, driveline related, and some suspension components. Anything else like interior fasteners, body work, brackets that hold things under the hood/under the car.. etc, you can gauge exactly whats needed.
You do tend to learn what a torque setting feels like after wrenching for awhile with a torque wrench. But things like head/intake/timing cover, cv axles, flywheel bolts, pressure plate bolts are very important! (I’ve saw far too many stripped out flywheel threads due to people overtorquing pressure plates to flywheels.. dunno about you, but i dont want a clutch assembly coming through the floorboard of a car!). It really does only take a few extra minutes in a job to do things properly, and plenty of other ‘safe shortcuts’ (experience being the best one!) to cut time on your job.
Story time again: Worked with a kid that had just started 2 weeks earlier, who was doing a waterpump on a 3.8 ford and a few bolts broke off in the timing cover as it was being removed. He extracted them successfully and had to helicoil a few of them.
When it came time to reinstall, the torque spec was 21 ft/lbs, and i came back to see him putting them on with his cordless 3/8s impact driver. I asked him what he was doing and he said “i dont have a torque wrench, and i dont want it to leak!” He though torque specs existed to make sure it was ‘tight enough’ and not because there is a certain amount of pressure each bolt needs to seal the gasket evenly. SO anyway when he did this, all the OE bolts went in fine, but he pulled the helicoil out of every single one he had repaired.
So off came the water pump again, except this time when he took out the OE bolts, every single one of them snapped the heads off… (thank ford for putting steel bolts into an aluminum housing that expands and retracts as coolant flows through) and he had to extract/repair the other 7 threads as well. It turned a 2 hour job into a 3.5 hour job with no additional pay for him (as he was on hourly training pay).
So basically, he lost 1.5 hours of what would have been flagged time for himself if he had been paid flat-rate because he didnt spend another 5-10 mins to ask another tech for a torque wrench that he didnt have to properly tighten the water pump bolts. He would have had the whole job done in 45 minutes too if not for that.
There are two times that come to mind quickly:
One was when i dropped my Streamlight Stinger DS Flashlight out of my pocket on to the passenger seat of a Jaguar I had been working on. I didnt realize it for about 30 minutes and i checked my pocket and it was gone! I was thinking ‘oh man, there is no way that customer is bringing it back.’ And pretty upset i lost a $109 flashlight (as any tech knows, a good flashlight is a godsend when doing any kind of underhood/underdash work).
30 minutes later my service manager comes to me and said the customer (who was Jamaican) just came back with the jaguar, and said the the customer said”Yo mochanic be leavin his torch behind in ma car. Be lookin like a bright one too, make sure he be gettin it back and thank him again for the good workin on my jag!”
The second time was much worse, and i still kick myself for it.
I was working on an older 90s chevy 1500 pickup that a customer had brought in for torsion bar bushings, tie-rods, balljoints, control arms, and alignment, This guy had done what looked like a lot of off-road time as everything was covered in caked-on mud/grass.
Anyway, i was fighting every last bolt on the thing as it was already 20 years old and what looked like OE parts and covered in dirt. Long story short, i got the job done and i was finishing the toe/camber adjustment on the alignment rack and had apparently forgotten a small pair of channel locks between the motor mount/frame underneath. (i had put them there to hold while i was pushing on the control arm to adjust with a pry bar) I didnt realize for a few days that they were missing, and had attributed it to either me misplacing it, or loaning it out and someone didnt return it.
Fast-forward a few months: This same customer comes back and said that he had been having a fluttering noise when he revved the engine and sometimes going over bumps. He ended up taking it to another shop and they had diagnosed the sound as the cats being broken down inside (apparently he said he was getting poor gas mileage to them as well). So they replaced the cats for ~$1200, yet he noticed the sound was still there… This time he came back to our shop thinking it was something to do with the suspension work he had done. Of course he said he had the cats replaced and a few other repairs i cannot remember, as I ended up being off this day. Obviously the guy was a bit upset because he couldn’t find the source of this sound, and apparently no one else did either.. So another of our techs checked it out and found my channel locks wedged between the front right motor mount and the control arm. Apparently it had caused a squeak when going over large bumps, which is what the customer heard.. and the locking mechanism was rattling when he would rev the engine.. which the other shop misdiagnosed as a bad catalytic converter. Also the rubber covering that was on the handles was completely worn away.
So anyway, the other tech said he did find a pair of channel locks left under there, and he knew they were mine, but of course he didnt tell the customer or anyone else that. Thankfully the customer wasnt too upset about it. He was of the opinion that his cats were bad anyway due to bad gas mileage/low power and said that they helped out with that.. but not so happy that the other shop sold him $1200 in cats for the rattling noise that ended up being my channel locks that i had forgotten and left there. When I came back to work the next day.. the tech came up to me and said “hey, do these look familiar?” and i wondered where he found them.. he said ‘remember that chevy truck you did the front-end work on a few months back..’ .. and he proceeded to tell me the story.. Man, i felt bad after that.. and it just goes to prove that anyone can make a mistake like that. Im just glad it wasnt anything more serious.
Im actually more careful with shop rags than i am my own tools.. ive heard horror stories of gas/oil soaked rags being left under hoods, finding their way down to a hot exhaust manifold.. and catching fire. I’d rather lose a tool anyday than be responsible for that. So be careful out there guys! I’ve gotten into the habit of keeping tools im using in my roll-around with me the second im done using them. i’d rather have a messy toolbox after a job, then missing tools. I still have those channel locks to this day to remind me of that incident and this was probably 5 years ago.
There are two times that come to mind quickly:
One was when i dropped my Streamlight Stinger DS Flashlight out of my pocket on to the passenger seat of a Jaguar I had been working on. I didnt realize it for about 30 minutes and i checked my pocket and it was gone! I was thinking ‘oh man, there is no way that customer is bringing it back.’ And pretty upset i lost a $109 flashlight (as any tech knows, a good flashlight is a godsend when doing any kind of underhood/underdash work).
30 minutes later my service manager comes to me and said the customer (who was Jamaican) just came back with the jaguar, and said the the customer said”Yo mochanic be leavin his torch behind in ma car. Be lookin like a bright one too, make sure he be gettin it back and thank him again for the good workin on my jag!”
The second time was much worse, and i still kick myself for it.
I was working on an older 90s chevy 1500 pickup that a customer had brought in for torsion bar bushings, tie-rods, balljoints, control arms, and alignment, This guy had done what looked like a lot of off-road time as everything was covered in caked-on mud/grass.
Anyway, i was fighting every last bolt on the thing as it was already 20 years old and what looked like OE parts and covered in dirt. Long story short, i got the job done and i was finishing the toe/camber adjustment on the alignment rack and had apparently forgotten a small pair of channel locks between the motor mount/frame underneath. (i had put them there to hold while i was pushing on the control arm to adjust with a pry bar) I didnt realize for a few days that they were missing, and had attributed it to either me misplacing it, or loaning it out and someone didnt return it.
Fast-forward a few months: This same customer comes back and said that he had been having a fluttering noise when he revved the engine and sometimes going over bumps. He ended up taking it to another shop and they had diagnosed the sound as the cats being broken down inside (apparently he said he was getting poor gas mileage to them as well). So they replaced the cats for ~$1200, yet he noticed the sound was still there… This time he came back to our shop thinking it was something to do with the suspension work he had done. Of course he said he had the cats replaced and a few other repairs i cannot remember, as I ended up being off this day. Obviously the guy was a bit upset because he couldn’t find the source of this sound, and apparently no one else did either.. So another of our techs checked it out and found my channel locks wedged between the front right motor mount and the control arm. Apparently it had caused a squeak when going over large bumps, which is what the customer heard.. and the locking mechanism was rattling when he would rev the engine.. which the other shop misdiagnosed as a bad catalytic converter. Also the rubber covering that was on the handles was completely worn away.
So anyway, the other tech said he did find a pair of channel locks left under there, and he knew they were mine, but of course he didnt tell the customer or anyone else that. Thankfully the customer wasnt too upset about it. He was of the opinion that his cats were bad anyway due to bad gas mileage/low power and said that they helped out with that.. but not so happy that the other shop sold him $1200 in cats for the rattling noise that ended up being my channel locks that i had forgotten and left there. When I came back to work the next day.. the tech came up to me and said “hey, do these look familiar?” and i wondered where he found them.. he said ‘remember that chevy truck you did the front-end work on a few months back..’ .. and he proceeded to tell me the story.. Man, i felt bad after that.. and it just goes to prove that anyone can make a mistake like that. Im just glad it wasnt anything more serious.
Im actually more careful with shop rags than i am my own tools.. ive heard horror stories of gas/oil soaked rags being left under hoods, finding their way down to a hot exhaust manifold.. and catching fire. I’d rather lose a tool anyday than be responsible for that. So be careful out there guys! I’ve gotten into the habit of keeping tools im using in my roll-around with me the second im done using them. i’d rather have a messy toolbox after a job, then missing tools. I still have those channel locks to this day to remind me of that incident and this was probably 5 years ago.
Check the main fuse for sure. It most likely popped first before doing damage to anything else, although it’s possible it could have spiked to the ECU as well. I’ve run across multiple people in my old shop who have tried charging or jumping batteries and crossing + and -. Everytime i saw it, it blew the main relay/fuse (100a+) every single time.
Also to share some stories… I had a person try to change their own alternator and said they changed it and it blew sparks everywhere… He had to have it towed in because nothing had any power after that. When I popped the hood, there was a 3/8s ratchet still on the battery + line on the back of the alternator and it had started to ‘weld’ itself to the firewall. It ended up blowing the main fuse as well.
Also had an older gentleman who had tried to help his stranded daughter with a dead battery. He ended up hooking up the battery cable correctly to his car, but incorrectly at her car. He ended up melting the ground cable in his car, and a few fuses in his daughter’s car. I felt bad for the guy just trying to help and having to have both cars towed to us as well as needing a taxi ride home and a rental for the day for both of them while we fixed their cars.
Let us know what you find. It bothers me that the shop you went to wants to charge you $1,000 without even giving you a valid reason behind what needs to be changed. Sounds like they spun the ‘diagnostic wheel’ and say you need an ECM without even doing any quality diagnostic work.
Check the main fuse for sure. It most likely popped first before doing damage to anything else, although it’s possible it could have spiked to the ECU as well. I’ve run across multiple people in my old shop who have tried charging or jumping batteries and crossing + and -. Everytime i saw it, it blew the main relay/fuse (100a+) every single time.
Also to share some stories… I had a person try to change their own alternator and said they changed it and it blew sparks everywhere… He had to have it towed in because nothing had any power after that. When I popped the hood, there was a 3/8s ratchet still on the battery + line on the back of the alternator and it had started to ‘weld’ itself to the firewall. It ended up blowing the main fuse as well.
Also had an older gentleman who had tried to help his stranded daughter with a dead battery. He ended up hooking up the battery cable correctly to his car, but incorrectly at her car. He ended up melting the ground cable in his car, and a few fuses in his daughter’s car. I felt bad for the guy just trying to help and having to have both cars towed to us as well as needing a taxi ride home and a rental for the day for both of them while we fixed their cars.
Let us know what you find. It bothers me that the shop you went to wants to charge you $1,000 without even giving you a valid reason behind what needs to be changed. Sounds like they spun the ‘diagnostic wheel’ and say you need an ECM without even doing any quality diagnostic work.
Glad to hear you were able to isolate more of your idle vibration. There is indeed one under there. I wish I would have posted this picture earlier.
‘Checking’ injectors on this engine is not a fun process considering where the intake plenum is located in between them. Not really much to check either, other than if they are clean/dirty. Some people say you can clean them with a decent fuel injector cleaner, and it may help. It cant hurt either, but dont be surprised if you don’t see a difference.
As far as checking the timing belt.. it is quite difficult to pull the plastic timing cover with the motor mount in the way. My suggestion to you, is that if your going to go through the trouble of pulling it off the frame, pulling off the harmonic balancer to access the timing belt.. your already 50% of the way through doing a timing belt/water pump job. So if you wanted to do that.. the mount, the balancer, the timing belt, and the water pump are all right there. Be sure to get the timing belt component kit too (bearing & spring) as you dont want to do a timing belt job with an old timing belt tensioner pulley in there.
Of course these are just my opinions, as you are already going through this much work already simply just to look at things.. Also im not sure how mechanically inclinded you are either, and i dont want to get you in over your head. Just trying to point out what i see vs. what you are wanting to do. I’ve had this particular engine model apart 3 times before, so if you have any questions, i’d be more than happy to help.
Glad to hear you were able to isolate more of your idle vibration. There is indeed one under there. I wish I would have posted this picture earlier.
‘Checking’ injectors on this engine is not a fun process considering where the intake plenum is located in between them. Not really much to check either, other than if they are clean/dirty. Some people say you can clean them with a decent fuel injector cleaner, and it may help. It cant hurt either, but dont be surprised if you don’t see a difference.
As far as checking the timing belt.. it is quite difficult to pull the plastic timing cover with the motor mount in the way. My suggestion to you, is that if your going to go through the trouble of pulling it off the frame, pulling off the harmonic balancer to access the timing belt.. your already 50% of the way through doing a timing belt/water pump job. So if you wanted to do that.. the mount, the balancer, the timing belt, and the water pump are all right there. Be sure to get the timing belt component kit too (bearing & spring) as you dont want to do a timing belt job with an old timing belt tensioner pulley in there.
Of course these are just my opinions, as you are already going through this much work already simply just to look at things.. Also im not sure how mechanically inclinded you are either, and i dont want to get you in over your head. Just trying to point out what i see vs. what you are wanting to do. I’ve had this particular engine model apart 3 times before, so if you have any questions, i’d be more than happy to help.
I can speak from experience (I have a 96 Escort that i use as a daily driver) that the Ford 1.9/2.0 Engines have a bad tendency to vibrate like crazy at idle. Add in an automatic transmission that is in drive at idle, and a cycling a/c compressor to put load on the engine and it gets even worse. I chased this problem down myself and could find very little i could do. All of my mounts are in good shape, and i even went as far as replacing the harmonic balancer, yet i still get a constant buzz at times at idle. it’s just something i’ve learned to live with.
We used to have a lot of these complaints in the shop for these engines. The engines are called “Ford CVH engine” and its CVH is supposed to stand for Compound Valve angle Hemispherical combustion chamber, but we had a joked that said it stood for Constant Vibration & Harshness. Even Wikipedia has an entry that says ‘Despite its considerable shortcomings in terms of Noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) and its intolerance of poor or neglected servicing, the CVH was regarded as being a very easy engine to tune, with many of its key components being considerably over-engineered.’
But still, this car has a passenger side engine mount, a front and rear transaxle cradle mount, and a transmission mount under the battery tray that could be worn and exacerbate the issue. They are worthwhile checking. But you also have to remember this is a very old engine design. The first ones were engineered in the mid 70’s before balance shafts and other advanced engine balancing techniques were available.
I can speak from experience (I have a 96 Escort that i use as a daily driver) that the Ford 1.9/2.0 Engines have a bad tendency to vibrate like crazy at idle. Add in an automatic transmission that is in drive at idle, and a cycling a/c compressor to put load on the engine and it gets even worse. I chased this problem down myself and could find very little i could do. All of my mounts are in good shape, and i even went as far as replacing the harmonic balancer, yet i still get a constant buzz at times at idle. it’s just something i’ve learned to live with.
We used to have a lot of these complaints in the shop for these engines. The engines are called “Ford CVH engine” and its CVH is supposed to stand for Compound Valve angle Hemispherical combustion chamber, but we had a joked that said it stood for Constant Vibration & Harshness. Even Wikipedia has an entry that says ‘Despite its considerable shortcomings in terms of Noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) and its intolerance of poor or neglected servicing, the CVH was regarded as being a very easy engine to tune, with many of its key components being considerably over-engineered.’
But still, this car has a passenger side engine mount, a front and rear transaxle cradle mount, and a transmission mount under the battery tray that could be worn and exacerbate the issue. They are worthwhile checking. But you also have to remember this is a very old engine design. The first ones were engineered in the mid 70’s before balance shafts and other advanced engine balancing techniques were available.
