Auto Diagnosis

What is step 1 in diagnosing a customer complaint on their car? Confirm the complaint. This sounds simple, but, in the real world, if you take your car to a shop and tell them "It does X when I drive Y" they can't really fix it if they drive it and after doing X the Y part doesn't happen. So, like it or not, the mechanic really is supposed to verify the complaint. 

I think the top spark plug might have burned up JUST A LITTLE! The 4th plug from this 4 cylinder engine didn't want to come out, it was cross-threaded. Since this is diagnosis class, I think that's about as far as we got on this one, and let the customer know. It was driving very rough to say the least. Yes, we replaced these old ones with new plugs. 

Also, we had an oil leak to address. Here's inside the valve cover, with a pretty new blue gasket. We also replaced the four grommets that help seal the spark plug tubes, where the coil packs go in. Those gaskets were not soft rubber that sealed the hole, they had aged-out and graduated to hard-as-a-rock plastic that leaked. 

Maybe this is a weight rack in the shop? Not quite, just a supply of rear axles and differentials ready for the next Suspension class to tear down, diagnose, and rebuild this fall. 

Ford F350 back in the shop for some trouble codes on the transmission we rebuilt. It is driving OK but slipping in 2nd gear. At first we thought it was 2nd and 3rd gear problems, and since those are the only ones that use the 2nd gear shift solenoid, that was our first culprit, but wait, there was more. 

 The 1st thing we found is this ground wire that was frayed. In this photo we've stripped the bad part off, and are about to put a new connector on it, so that it connects to the bolt in the upper red circle.  

The new connector was put on, shrink wrapped, and bolted back on to the housing. This eliminated the trouble codes! However, it is still slipping, only in 2nd gear, so, we have to remove the transmission and investigate further. 

Used Auto Parts

I imagine you have a "used auto parts" store near you. Some of them go by names like Pick-N-Pull or Pull-A-Part, or maybe just "you know, that place out east of town with 10 acres of cars." Most of these places will have a wide variety of makes and models of cars, trucks, SUVs and who knows what else. Sometimes you can find cars for sale that still run too! One advantage of being retired means you can hit the junk yard just about any time you don't have anything else to do!

Back beyond the parts cars was the "about to be crushed" pile of cars. 

At my local place they have several riding lawn mowers, and even some boats that are available for parts. The only vehicle I saw for sale this time was a Nissan Sentra for $3,100. While that might have been tempting, I was in search of some specific car parts that will become part of a special gift for a friend of mine. I can't reveal who, or what this gift might be, so let's just take a look around at the highlights. 

1990 Geo Metro with a big whopping 3 cylinder. From what I can find on line these were re-badged Suzukis from Japan, later made in Canada. Also badged as a Pontiac Firefly. Oh, and this BIG HONKING THREE CYLINDER has a 1.0 liter engine, but it got really good gas mileage. 

"Ready for Scrap." Oh really!

Question 1: How do you move cars around the scrap yard?
Answer: Forklift.
Qestion 2: Hey, what's this funky purple car in the foreground?

Porsche Cayenne
Trust me, I looked for anything cool to use off of this thing. 

FIAT 500, just a reminder of my 2013 FIAT 500 Abarth.

Mercedes 2 seater, you know, the supercharger one with Kompressor!

Audi TT

Another Audi TT, with a Volva station wagon. 
It's like the United Nations in here!

April Auto Tech Update

School keeps rolling, five days a week for 3 hours each morning at York Technical College. The Advanced Diagnosis Class is covering a lot of different systems on the cars in the shop, so here's a bit of what's been going on lately. I've got four more weeks of diagnosis until the summer break. 

Our instructor is working with one of my classmates, using a bore scope to look inside the cylinders on this Cadillac. The car had a small coolant leak, so we removed the upper intake to look around. Then we pressurized the coolant system to see where the leak was coming from. Looking inside the cylinders was just a good check "while you're in there" because this car had direct injection, which leads to carbon build up, so that's what they are checking. This 2009 or so Cadillac didn't have too much build up. If it did, one way to clean it out is by blasting it out with walnut shells. Really. The carbon builds up with direct injection because the gas is being sent straight into the combustion chamber, and not the air intake where the gas would be cleaning the valves as it is sprayed towards the chamber. 

This kit should have everything you need to do a coolant pressure test. The various sized caps fit all kinds of radiator caps and coolant tanks. Then you use a hand pump (not shown) to pressurize the system. From there you can check that the system is holding pressure. If it's not holding pressure, then you can look for the leak. 

A 2006 Honda Accord on the lift, let's get to work. Plus, I thought it was a cool photo with the legs sticking out under the car, and one student in the background. Yeah, we're pretty artsy in composing our photos in Auto Tech class!

Replace the serpentine belt. Just to do this one by the book, I looked it up in ProDemand, our on-line resource. The instructions were literally as simple as "move the belt tensioner, remove belt, and install new belt." Dang, I could have written that! I might have used the traditional "assembly is the opposite of disassembly" too!

Here is an older Chevrolet Tahoe that is having some transmission work done. The transmission fluid pan has been removed, so we're looking up at the transmission filter (red arrow.) The entire piece of darker metal with the cut-out oval for the filter paper just pops in and out of the valve body. All of this "stuff" is swimming in transmission fluid, including those wires on the right. The other cool thing in this shot is the little red dots of fluid that are hanging on. At least I hope it's transmission fluid and not the red ANTI-MATER that Mr. Spock had to deal with in that one Star Trek movie!

Still on the Tahoe, here's looking a little higher at the rear of the transmission. The rear shaft is up there in the empty part, and would connect to the rear drive shaft. 

One more shot from the Cadillac. Before we tracked down the coolant leak, we drained the coolant from the radiator. I'd like to say THANK YOU to the GM engineers that made our job easy for a change. The red arrow is pointing to an expertly placed drain hole where ALL the coolant dripped out from the radiator. The fluid did NOT go all over the place, did NOT drip onto the sub-frame, and did NOT turn into a big mess. Imagine that! 
Happy ending, once we found the leak we replaced a gasket and an O ring, put the coolant back in, and the owner reports no problems!

March Autocross Report

Hey, let's go drive!

Reporting from the Winston-Salem cigarette pack, I mean, the Winston-Salem Fairgrounds, NMS is happy to report that the #777 Cayman took 1st place (out of 3 competitors) in the S03 class, as well as 8th place out of 33 Porsche drivers last Sunday. This was the first event of the season for the Carolinas Porsche Club, so NMS driver Bob Nixon takes the early season lead for his class. 

As much as I like my red car, some of these blues are nice too. 

While there had been a chance of rain predicted, it turned out to be a nice dry day, with some clouds and tons of pollen in the air. This explains why all the cars looked a little green, because there is just no way to keep all that pine pollen off your car during this time of year in the Carolinas. Driver Nixon reported his 8 runs on course in an exclusive interview. 

Waiting in line with my run group. Half the drivers are working on course, and half of us are driving. Then we all swap places. 

Run 1: I just wanted to get a feel for the course, not going slow, but just to establish a reasonable time baseline and then figure out where to gain time from there. Time: 52.1 seconds. Some drivers take it really slow on the first run, just to make sure they know their way around course, get the car warmed up, etc. Others go hard all the time. Put me down for the middle ground, or the Goldilocks "Just Right" method. I think you've got to go at least 80% up to speed to get a more realistic feel for the course and know where to keep pushing faster. If you walk the course ahead of time, you should not be concerned with getting lost out there.

Autocross events are generally open to all makes of cars. 
Here's one of the few Nissan 350Zs that NMS doesn't own. 
Ha ha! Just kidding. 

Run 2: Time 50.5, so a good gain in time. The twisty track and my first two runs reminded me that there really weren't any super hard braking spots, so I reminded myself to just tap the brakes to help the car rotate and maneuver through the sharp corners. I was running with pretty standard tire pressures around 30psi, the car stability management turned off, and the rear wing up. 

Just in case you don't read the language of license plates: 
NO FOREIGN JUNK

Run 3: With a time of 49.8, happy to get under 50, but still working on dropping time. 

Run 4: Before this run I lowered the tire pressures back down to 30 since they had started climbing after the 2nd run. It was also about 12:30pm and I was hungry, so I ate a PBJ for more energy. This extra weight kind of worked because my time dropped to 49.2 seconds but I also hit a cone in a tricky Chicago Box cone formation, so a penalty of 2 seconds means this run was really 51.2. This time told me that I could get into the 48 second range, so that was my goal for the day. 

NMS red Cayman and a silver one. 

Run 5: For the final run of the 1st session, my driving felt like it was a faster run but the clock had a different opinion of 50.0 seconds. Time to take a break and come back stronger in the 2nd driving session. 

Run 6: After working on course for the second time today, my half of the field started our final 3 runs. It was about 10 degrees warmer now, so I kept the tire pressures down to 30psi and hit the course. This run lowered my best to a 49.6. That was encouraging, and we had two more attempts to go and go for the 48s.

Not my favorite color for a car. If you have a brown car, no problem, just use a different color than black for your numbers. 

Run 7: After lowering my tire pressures even more to 28 for this run, it paid off with my best time of the day at 48.9. Another statistic I was monitoring was my speed at the finish line, trying to maximize a short all out sprint to the end. This finishing speed was also my best of the day, at 54.9mph. That's not world record fast, but on a tight autocross circuit it feels mighty quick in the drivers seat. 

Run 8: I kept the tire pressures low, had a good run, but it was 49.0 so just a tenth off my previous best. If nothing else it's kind of good to be consistent, and just maybe that was the fastest I could manage that day. 

All in all I enjoy autocrossing and spending the day trying to improve your time, figuring out where to go faster, and driving the car as close to the limit as you can, even if you're just gaining a tenth of a second at 47mph! OK, it's fun to go faster than some of the other drivers, but there's almost always people faster than me too!

York Technical College Car Show

Custom 1937 Ford woody wagon

One cool thing about being a student at York Tech is the annual car show. This year's event was a pretty big deal, a big open house, with all the departments of the school having instructors available, games and activities going on, displays of school equipment, and plenty more. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the school, and while I haven't been a student for ALL those 60 years, I've been around! Other than the car show I stopped by the auto shop and talked to the instructors a little bit, because you can always learn from their experience. 

CDL training at York Tech too!
I'm sticking with the Cayman. 

Let's take a look at the car show. 

You can't have a car show without a Camaro!

You can't have a car show without a classic Mustang!

You can't have a car show without a classic Corvette!

Way back in 1957-1959, Ford built the hard top convertible Skyliner! The roof folded into the trunk like a lot of modern cars!

1977 Pinto Cruising Wagon, complete with graphics and port window. The basic Pinto lasted from 1970-1980, and 77 marked the first year of these options on the wagon. I'm thinking these stripes inspired the new 2025 Bronco with stripes all over it too. 

There were 2 of these VW Karmann Ghias, you can have this color...

or a green one. 

Nash Metropolitan. Here's something you don't see every day! The owner said he bought two of them and restored a lot of rusted parts. 

This 1960 Corvette was very cool!

1949 Ford, finally a car older than me!

Car Dealerships

A couple of FIAT 500 electric cars spotted at the dealer in Fort Mill. 

Sometimes you have to go to a dealer for a real reason, and sometimes it's fun to go just for the heck of it. Let's put this pair of dealership visits under the just for the heck of it category. 

Electric FIAT 500 lease only $199 a month. Italian electricity not required!

I knew that our closest FIAT dealership had some of the new FIAT 500 E electric models, so I headed up to Fort Mill SC to check them out. This is the place where I bought a 500 Abarth back in 2013, so it was kind of fun to go back. Also, it's just a small part of a big Chrysler-Jeep-Dodge-Ram etc, and now includes the Vietnamese built Vinfast cars too! While I didn't check out the Vinfast models, they had a couple of the electric FIATS on the lot, a good number of the Dodge Hornets, and a lot of Maseratis and Alfa Romeos too. 

Dodge Hornet SUVs. They list from $30K-$50K plus. 

Down here in Rock Hill, I was at our local Ford dealer for a Maverick recall, and took the time to walk around and see what was new there. One thing that still seems odd to me is that their indoor showroom doesn't have any cars, it's just more cubicles. I really don't know if they have that many sales people working, but it just seems odd to me. At a Honda recall not long ago, the Honda dealer had two or three new vehicles indoors, so I'm giving Honda a little gold star for that small achievement. Maybe someone at the Ford place lost the key to the doors for driving cars in, who knows?

A shiny new Ford Mustang GT. I'd say yes to this one. 

I saw two Broncos with whatever this is. The stripes are also on the seats. To me it was a throwback to the 70s Pinto wagon or something like that with these colors. Pass. 

Even a Ford SUV with the ST badging earns you a free track day! I believe they do this program at a track in Utah, so if you can get out there, have fun!

F150 Tremor I believe, but wait...

Extra LED lighting! For when you're doing serious off roading and looking for Sasquatch.