skraeling
Scientist Extraordinaire
- Joined
- Sep 26, 2013
- Messages
- 721
- Reaction score
- 285
Ill start this stupid thing off. I seem to work on my own cars a lot with a friend of mine lately. Usually because its 1. Cheaper and 2. its cheaper.
I cant **** several hundred dollars on a car repair on a car thats worth less than the price to have someone fix it.
So that leaves me and my friend attempting stuff. Typically a lot of what we do isn't that difficult. Brake jobs, endlinks, junk like that. Nothing too invasive or crazy, but stuff that would cost significantly more to have someone else do it.
Welp... enter my previous car. A cavalier. Im convinced this car was a hate child spawned by some engineer that was just mad at the world and wanted vehicles to punish humanity. Its a pain in the dick to work on and its overall reliability for things sucks a fat one. The only saving grace of this car is it has a timing chain.
Needless to say it blew its power steering rack completely out. Looked up the video on what the replacement procedure is and when a professional mechanic has to do two 30min edited videos... yeah.. thats not good. It involved dropping the subframe to actually slide it out. FFFFFF that. paying someone to do it was about 500.00 more than the car was worth (500 dollars meaning a north of 1000 repair). Nope. Sold the car to my neighbor bad rack and all who wanted it as a parts car for his girlfriend.
Enter.... Das Buick.
I like Mrs. Buick for what she is. Not my ideal car, but a good stopgap till I can afford to get an actual new one. Comfy, decent mileage, good enough for its era power (2000). Lots of power features. Decent. Now... remember how the cavalier was going to cost north of a grand for the rack? Well I bought this car for.. a grand and it had almost 100k miles LESS than the cavalier. Was too tempting to pass up. Was a friends mothers car.
Wait... why are you running a little hot and... why are there oil droplets in my coolant overflow.
To the googles! Oh **** you GM... plastic gaskets IN an engine? Great, thanks. Im really digging the confirmed 100% failure rate on this gasket. Sigh. Ok ordered the gaskets and was maybe 30 bucks in parts give or take. Its not super critical that I do it immediately so I put it off maybe two weeks. No big deal. Car running hottish, but isnt over heating and the leak isnt getting any worse.
Well we finally tackled this job on sunday. This is the farthest ive ever taken apart a car with my buddy. Also the farthest hes ever taken a car apart. He was excited...
This picture taken from the conversation when I told him what we needed to do to this car.
yikes.
I mean we were up to our elbows here. stress level was pretty high for me as... I need this thing to work so I can actually get to work on monday. We started at 930ish in the morning. Finished at 630ish at night. Took breaks for dinner (and lots of googling). This was quoted as a 3hr job for a professional and I could see that maybe being true especially for someone familiar with this engine.
This is the 3100 3.1L v6 that GM put in eeeeverryyyything for many years. So insanely common engine. Just not to us.
Fun notes from this deal. The gasket was actually the aftermarket felpro replacement... so metal. The rubber part had managed to fail and we are pretty sure it wasnt damaged when we were taking things off. It was a very tiny tear on the back left port of the intake manifold.
So got those replaced plus the upper intake gasket and valve cover gaskets just because we were in there already. Actually managed to put everything back together and the damn thing starts and runs just fine much to our surprise and relief.
This was in hindsight kind of fun, but I felt like I had done a marathon the next day. To you actual mechanics out there. I salute you gentlemen.
Only bad news is im sure there are other gaskets lower (looks like my headgasket is leaking) or my timing cover gasket that need to be done, but im not planning to keep the car long enough for those to matter with any luck. this we knew for sure was leaking so got those done.
To give you an idea... this 3hr quoted job (took us 10). The timing cover was quoted as 6. Yeah. No thanks. Ill just dump this thing before that is even an issue if it even is.
Cheers to reading this rambling. Im sure ill post the next time I do some stupid work on a car.
I cant **** several hundred dollars on a car repair on a car thats worth less than the price to have someone fix it.
So that leaves me and my friend attempting stuff. Typically a lot of what we do isn't that difficult. Brake jobs, endlinks, junk like that. Nothing too invasive or crazy, but stuff that would cost significantly more to have someone else do it.
Welp... enter my previous car. A cavalier. Im convinced this car was a hate child spawned by some engineer that was just mad at the world and wanted vehicles to punish humanity. Its a pain in the dick to work on and its overall reliability for things sucks a fat one. The only saving grace of this car is it has a timing chain.
Needless to say it blew its power steering rack completely out. Looked up the video on what the replacement procedure is and when a professional mechanic has to do two 30min edited videos... yeah.. thats not good. It involved dropping the subframe to actually slide it out. FFFFFF that. paying someone to do it was about 500.00 more than the car was worth (500 dollars meaning a north of 1000 repair). Nope. Sold the car to my neighbor bad rack and all who wanted it as a parts car for his girlfriend.
Enter.... Das Buick.
I like Mrs. Buick for what she is. Not my ideal car, but a good stopgap till I can afford to get an actual new one. Comfy, decent mileage, good enough for its era power (2000). Lots of power features. Decent. Now... remember how the cavalier was going to cost north of a grand for the rack? Well I bought this car for.. a grand and it had almost 100k miles LESS than the cavalier. Was too tempting to pass up. Was a friends mothers car.
Wait... why are you running a little hot and... why are there oil droplets in my coolant overflow.
To the googles! Oh **** you GM... plastic gaskets IN an engine? Great, thanks. Im really digging the confirmed 100% failure rate on this gasket. Sigh. Ok ordered the gaskets and was maybe 30 bucks in parts give or take. Its not super critical that I do it immediately so I put it off maybe two weeks. No big deal. Car running hottish, but isnt over heating and the leak isnt getting any worse.
Well we finally tackled this job on sunday. This is the farthest ive ever taken apart a car with my buddy. Also the farthest hes ever taken a car apart. He was excited...
This picture taken from the conversation when I told him what we needed to do to this car.
yikes.
I mean we were up to our elbows here. stress level was pretty high for me as... I need this thing to work so I can actually get to work on monday. We started at 930ish in the morning. Finished at 630ish at night. Took breaks for dinner (and lots of googling). This was quoted as a 3hr job for a professional and I could see that maybe being true especially for someone familiar with this engine.
This is the 3100 3.1L v6 that GM put in eeeeverryyyything for many years. So insanely common engine. Just not to us.
Fun notes from this deal. The gasket was actually the aftermarket felpro replacement... so metal. The rubber part had managed to fail and we are pretty sure it wasnt damaged when we were taking things off. It was a very tiny tear on the back left port of the intake manifold.
So got those replaced plus the upper intake gasket and valve cover gaskets just because we were in there already. Actually managed to put everything back together and the damn thing starts and runs just fine much to our surprise and relief.
This was in hindsight kind of fun, but I felt like I had done a marathon the next day. To you actual mechanics out there. I salute you gentlemen.
Only bad news is im sure there are other gaskets lower (looks like my headgasket is leaking) or my timing cover gasket that need to be done, but im not planning to keep the car long enough for those to matter with any luck. this we knew for sure was leaking so got those done.
To give you an idea... this 3hr quoted job (took us 10). The timing cover was quoted as 6. Yeah. No thanks. Ill just dump this thing before that is even an issue if it even is.
Cheers to reading this rambling. Im sure ill post the next time I do some stupid work on a car.