Got the pickup fixed, too

Trying to drive the pickup every day up and down the interstate, with it trying to buck and kick and die underneath me every time I hit the accelerator, was getting too hairy to live with, so I took it over to my mechanic Ron and asked him for a diagnosis of what-all was wrong and how much it was going to cost to fix it all.  He told me this:

1. The front wheel bearings are loose and making noise, and need to be replaced.  (That’s gonna have to happen about two weeks from now, when I can have the car and nobody else has to go to school, day care, and what-have-you.)  Ron doesn’t think they’re in imminent danger of failure, and are probably OK to keep driving until then.
2. The drive-shaft carrier bearing isn’t as bad as my brother thought, and probably doesn’t need replacing real soon.  The noise that brother thought was coming from the bearing is instead coming from the rear end.  Probably there is a bearing inside it which is gonna give up, but again, not at once.
3. The overdrive switch that wouldn’t work turned out to have a wire loose.  Ron reconnected it, and the overdrive now seems to work as well as it ever did—not that it ever worked all that well anyhow.
4. The “canary bird” screech under the hood is because the serpentine belt is old and stiff, and wants replacing.  I’ll have Ron take care of replacing it when it’s in for the wheel bearings, before the noise runs me completely batshit.

The best news of the whole thing turned out to be the one I was most puzzled by:  the non-acceleration problem.  My brother had decided this was a fuel-feed problem and replaced the pump, which didn’t fix anything.  Ron said he thought the problem was old spark plug wires that were starting to break down, instead.  I asked him if he thought I could replace the wires myself, and he said he didn’t see why not.

So I checked out a Chilton’s repair manual from the library, went to the auto parts house and bought a set of new plug wires, and after I got home from work Saturday afternoon, I opened up the hood and started to work.  I found plenty of evidence inside that the truck had just sat around for years without being driven:  thick dust all over everything, desiccated cockroaches in the air cleaner, an abandoned rat’s nest at the back of the block against the firewall, plastics so brittle they shattered at a touch.  There’s one tube under the air cleaner that’s now being held together with electrician’s tape until I can go buy a replacement.

However, I managed to unhook the cleaner from its various wires and hoses and wrestle it out, pull out the coil and set it aside, and snake out the old wires to give myself a clear field.  Getting the new wires in was a lot easier than pulling the old ones, and it all snapped back into place at the end.  (That reminds me—besides the tube I broke, I need to get some plug wire harness clips, to keep them from getting too close to the hot exhaust manifolds.  And I gotta get a PCV vent tube boot, because the old one crumbled to dust when I tried to remove it.)  After I put everything back as close to where I got it as I could, I crossed my fingers and turned on the ignition—and the engine cranked right up and ran without a sputter.

So fifteen bucks for the plug wires and a couple of hours’ labor, and I might not get killed commuting to Round Rock on the interstate when the car decides to quit.  And I think I’ll continue to let Ron do my auto diagnosing instead of listening to my brother.  Of course, that was why I started going to Ron in the first place.  He correctly diagnosed a problem I had with another car after I’d wasted several hundred bucks hauling it in to a dealer who kept trying to fix the wrong thing.  Ron’s fix was (1) the right one and (2) cheap.  I’ve used him ever since.

The terminal from the Phoenix Project will go to the Matrix.  Fnord.