“Design for serviceability” was the name of the class Chrysler encouraged its engineers to take. A long-haired union technician who has clearly dealt with far, far too much bullshit with engineers like us kindly, but firmly, described how to design cars so they can be easily repaired. This is important not just to customers, who want their vehicles fixed quickly and cheaply, but to Chrysler’s own technicians, who are tired of going through hell just to change a damn spark plug. With this concept in mind, and with me having recently described having gone through wrenching hell to unsuccessfully replace subframe bolts, I’d like to know: What’s the most painfully annoying repair job you’ve attempted?
Last night was just awful. Trying to remove the rear lower control bolts from my HHR has been awful, as I described yesterday. Here’s a diagram describing the problem:
Today my right elbow is absolutely killing me from all the vibrations of that sawzall, which — despite wielding the most expensive saw blade one can buy a Home Depot — was unable to slice through the subframe bolt quickly. It was able to slice off the two aluminum control arms quite nicely:
This exposed the aforementioned subframe bolt:
Unfortunately, this sent aluminum all over my face.
Since the sawzall couldn’t handle that big subframe bolt, I did what any desperate man does: I broke out the Death Wheel — a six-inch cutoff wheel that was able to reach past the control arm brackets in the subframe, and cut the bushing sleeve and the bolt seized inside it. Here’s the big-ass cutoff wheel and the angle grinder that literally stopped working after about seven or eight minutes of cutting:
The sawzall was able to handle the tiny amount of cutting still needed to get through the bolt and sleeve, leaving me with this:
The sleeve is still stuck to the bolt, and though I tried using a dremel to slice the sleeve off (see the diagonal cut in the sleeve above), it started raining last night, and I was uninterested in being electrocuted using power tools in a downpour. So I gave up, and had to cancel my trip to New York. I still have no answer to removing these bolts, but will likely end up buying a pancake-style air compressor and air chisel; hopefully that will solve my issue. I’m tired of screwing around with cutting tools that don’t really fit into the limited space I have.
Anyway, my trip to New York to see Andrew Collins, my friend Bobby’s mom, and Matt Hardigree is officially postponed due to this awful bit of serviceability. [Ed note: Nah, gonna make him come anyway! You’re not getting out of this trip that easily – MH] But this isn’t the only example of an automaker’s poor engineering for serviceability (and to be clear, I consider GM the company with the greatest automotive engineering capability of any company ever, for reasons that I don’t have time to explain. Also, I’ll note that the design here is not specific to GM: Subarus have similar subframe bolt issues. Also worth mentioning is that calling this an engineering flaw is a bit of a stretch, given that it’s only a problem for older cars with over 100,000 miles on them; yes, an engineer should have known that corrosion would cause issues here, but it wasn’t her/his priority when developing the car, and that’s fair enough).
The union tech teaching “Design for Serviceability” at Chrysler mentioned that third-generation (?) Dodge Rams didn’t have crush cans at the front of their frames, meaning a small fender bender would cause catastrophic damage to the frame. Can you imagine that? You bump into a car at a few miles per hour, and your frame is all messed up, requiring a fairly involved (and expensive) repair? I’ve been receiving messages overnight from people who followed my plight on Instagram last night, many consoling me for my struggles, and even more talking about how they had to remove an engine mount to replace an alternator (for example) or how they basically had to bathe in gasoline because their fuel pump removal procedure is such a pain in the arse (and because the pump went out twice within a short span).
Now I’d like to hear from you: What was the worst wrenching experience you ever had to deal with that was a result of poor engineering design for serviceability? Write it up in the comments, and send us diagrams/photos/videos at tips@autopian.com describing the shitshow in detail. We’ll write a follow-up post so the rest of our readers can enjoy learning about your perils.
I once spent a whole weekend replacing ball joints in my 2006 Grand Cherokee. Admittedly, it was due to not having the right tool for the job. The loaner universal ball joint press from O’Reilly did not fit my car, and I needed it for work the next week, so I got creative. I resorted to cutting into one of them with a saw at one point (don’t remember all the details, but it was desperate). I kept the mangled part which still sits on a shelf in my garage to remind me that whatever I am currently struggling with could always be worse.
On the flip side, changing out the ball joints on my ’94 F-150 is a cinch. Good thing, as front ends need frequent attention with the Twin I-beam suspension.
Every car I own is mentioned in the comments….
BMW dealerships will not work on my early BMW/Chrysler/Mini Coopers. Only time I’ve ever been turned away at a dealership and given the name of a private shop that specializes in masochism.
Confession: I’ve been an automotive design engineer.
Because the pay sucks I’ve mostly had a loads of ratty old heaps I have to keep on the road, so I have good experience of how annoying it can be to work on cars. However, everything is a compromise in engineering. You have loads of conflicting specifications, most of the big ones have dedicated departments full of guys willing to scream in your face because you specified a surface coating a few microns too thick, or thin, or whatever the thing their bonus is based on controlling.
Try to convincing new car buyers to pay more (or have worse mpg, or a smaller boot) so that the guy who buys the car off it’s sixth owner fifteen years later doesn’t have to spend a weekend on his back on gravel trying to to get a spinning threaded insert on top of a diff to undo (fuck you Mazda). Or having to make a giant bearing puller just to get a wheel off a corroded 20 year-old aluminum wheel spigot (fuck you again Mazda, still, nice light hub assembly and I’d have kept one on my desk as a trophy if I’d designed it).
We get it, I’ll stick a pry point or a blind threaded hole or whatever I can in to a design, but you’ve got limited time to design something to beat cost, timing, weight, manufacturability, assembly and durability targets, and all of those are more important than making it easy to fix after it’s past it’s design life.
There are some engineers in the industry who keep moving every couple of years, and they can’t learn from their mistakes if they’re not there their designs hit production. For me the joy of it is being there to see them driving off the line, three years later, but then I love cars.
It’s never actually deliberate. It just feels that way when you’ve punched yourself in the teeth with the handle of a ratchet.
I’m calling foul on this play.
First, the vehicle is a cheap 15 year old crapwagon. How long do you expect it to last?
Second, this vehicle has been abused. Yes, driving it in salt and not cleaning it properly is abuse.
Third, stop buying (or supporting) rusty heaps. There are lots of rust-free cars out there. Spend a little time, money, and effort up-front to get good vehicles. Expect the same from your friends.
Water pump on a 2015 Toyota Sienna. Not only is it a weirdly exotic shape (necessitating about 400 bolts), but there is one weirdly long bolt that hits the ABS module when you try to remove it. The solution is to unbolt the passenger side engine mount and jack the engine up about 6″ so the bolt will clear the module for removal. The first time I did this job, it took me four hours.
I have two W8 Passats and a V10 Touareg. This all feels like a personal attack.
Replacing the headlight bulb on my 2010 Chevy Malibu. First time I went to do it i searched for 15 minutes on how to get to the back of the headlight housing from in the engine bay, then I looked up the steps on the GM service website.
Step1: jack up the car and remove both wheels… WTF
Step2: remove the fender liner from both wheel wells
Step3: remove the screws from the front of the air dam
Step 4: remove the entire front bumper cover.
Step 5: remove the entire headlight housing (and brake off at least 1 of the plastic aligning studs)
Step 6: replace the bulb.
reverse, rinse, repeat.
pays about 1.25 hours in the shop. 2-3 hours for someone that has never done it before, in their driveway.
I will sell my car the next time a bulb burns out.
Er.
What the hell?
I was all ready to moan and complain that the in-built oil ramp on my VQ40 Pathfinder sometimes still causes splatter when I remove the filter….
I. Uh…. I have to squeeze my hand really hard to get to my headlight bulbs….
But.
Dang.
You guys have had it rough. I’ll see myself out.
2001 Mercury Sable alternator replacement. 24v DOHC “upgrade” engine.
I was on the way home from a friend’s house one Sunday night. About 20 minutes into the 2 1/2 hour drive, the battery indicator lit up. I turned everything off that I could, but with headlights being a necessity, the anxiety increased with every mile. I got it back to the house, which was well stocked with everything we would need, or so we thought. A couple quick tests later, and we knew it was the alternator.
Popped the hood and looked for the alternator in the “usual” spot at the top of the engine. Not there. Followed the serpentine belt, and found the alternator at the bottom of the engine in the back nearest the firewall. This was going to be fun.
We had far too many pieces and parts strewn across the garage in an attempt to get the bolts out. The front passenger wheel came off. Part of the fender liner came off. None of it mattered, we were mostly doing this by feel.
In the middle of all this, I had driven with my buddy’s dad to the closest Auto Zone (30 minutes one way) to get the new alternator. By the time we got back, the alternator was freed from the engine, but was stuck in the bay. At some point as we were testing our spatial awareness by figuring out how the alternator was to be liberated from the engine bay, we noticed the new alternator was wrong. A frantic call to AZ to convince them they gave me the wrong one, and they needed to wait for us to drive 30 minutes back starting about 25 minutes before they closed. They begrudgingly agreed, and off we went. 5 minutes down the road, I got a frantic call from my buddy telling me they got the old one out, so pull over and they would bring it to me for the core charge.
An hour after that, we were back in the garage. I gave my buddy a look and asked if he remembered how he got the old one out. He was not amused. I don’t remember at this point how long it took to get back in, but we were able to finagle the new alternator into place, reconnect it all, and get the car started. Everything checked out, and I got to start my drive home about 5 hours late. Work the next day wasn’t enjoyable.
Epilogue: Just a couple weeks later, I was driving into work and heard a sudden, alarming squealing coming from the engine, followed quickly by a smell that can best be described as someone trying to smoke a wet cigar. I knew instantly that the AC compressor was toast. I called around to a few shops to get an estimate to fix the damn thing. Because I had the “upgraded engine instead of the plain Jane one,” it was going to be expensive.
See, the AC compressor sat just in front of the alternator at the bottom of the engine. For them to service the compressor meant the engine had to be dropped out of the car. And now you know, the REST of the story…
Changing the oil in my Sunfire. To remove the oil filter, I had to take off the front wheel and bend my arm in three places to get to it. After suffering through it a couple of times, I decided to let the fine folks at Valvoline take care of it for me instead. One time, their technician who had better equipment and training than I do got his arm stuck for about 15 minutes.
I remember my dad replacing the spark plugs on our Chevy Astro. He was able to get to four of the six easily, but to get the other two, he had to take out a couple of motor mounts.
I’m that guy over here selling cars that are a PITA to work on. Namely any car that has “pressed on” rotors. I’ve legit replaced a hub assembly just to get out of it. I’ve also used a slide hammer to get bad rotors off and that seemed to work as well. Next would def be any Audi/VW. Finally I currently have a 6.0 Powerstroke and I don’t know if it being a diesel just scares me mechanically because I’ve never worked on a diesel but it looks like a PITA to fix most things.
I’ll echo the 6.0 as being “interesting” to work on. The farmer I helped during harvest a few years back had an ‘06 I fixed for him. Replacing the serpentine belt took 2 hours or more, including the removal of the fan shroud and one or two other things.
But the real fun began when replacing the FICM (Fuel Injector Control Module). For one thing, a good replacement FICM isn’t easy to come by. Assuming you find one, putting it in is a full day job. Its behind the engine which requires removing the intake tube and several hoses and such. Then there are 24 (or more, I might be foggy on the number) individual wires that have to be removed from the old one and placed on the new one. Fun times. At least I fixed his old dually.
An irritating one: Peugeot 208 1.2 of a friend of mine, I believe it was on the right side, never mind, on one of the sides the headlight assembly almost touches another fixed engine component and I never could get in between properly to change the bulb. It took me almost 20 minutes to get the new one lined up correctly, lit by nothing else but a smartphone light. A small job that was too frustrating because of poor packaging design.
BMW R50-R69S; adjusting the timing. One of the most basic things out there, right? And I love these motorcycles, but the timing cannot be adjusted with the motorcycle running. The only way to do it is to stop the motorcycle, remove the bolt that holds the advance and cam for the points, remove it, and then move the points plate, and then slap it all back together to see if you’ve made and improvement or made it worse.
And what’s even worse is that the ponts and points plate, along with the coil, is on an assembly that can be rotated, and there are many books out there that will tell you to adjust the timing by rotating the assembly. The problem is that the assembly is for adjusting the magneto; if you move that assembly, then you screw up the timing for the magneto, and you can’t get your bike started!
Fellow airhead enthusiast, here. That sounds miserable. Right up there with having to use a dial indicator to time my old Yamaha dirt bike with the head off. On the later bikes (mine is an ’80 R100), the oil filter is a pain to change with the frame partially covering the hole where it resides, and the early “snowflake” alloy wheels are damn-near impossible to mount tires on yourself. I tossed those in favor of some spoke wheels. My ’09 K1300GT required special tools for EVERYTHING. I couldn’t even get the brake master cylinder off without special pliers. I ended up making my own. That all said, they are GREAT bikes! Nothing could touch BMW reliability/longevity through the 70’s, and they still make great stuff today.
I did the upper oil pan gasket on my BMW 850 with the V12. BMW put 4 of the 10MM bolts that hold on the oil pan behind a section of the pan that is only accessable with the transmission removed.
So two options, Pull the engine and transmission and separate them to get access 10 hours shop rate
or
Cut two access holes in the Upper Oil pan to get access to the two side bolts and get the other two thru an access holes that is already there.
My 1982 Buick Skylard (yes, the misspelling is intentional) with 2.8-litre V6 engine broke a long bolt that connected the subframe to the body on the driver’s side in the rear. Easy-peasy to replace the entire bolt, yes?
For some inexplicably reasons, the engineers chose to hide the upper part of bolt between two sheetmetal welded together in the firewall. To access the bolt and extract it requires the precise location in the firewall to cut. There’s no X to mark the exact site of the bolt anchor. My father and I ended up drilling a several pilot holes to peek inside before cutting out the sheetmetal. The anchor is tight fit so it took lot of work to peel away more sheetmetal before we could successfully extract the upper part. Putting in the new bolt and tightening it were worse due to the tighter space inside the anchor. My father welded the sheetmetal back on and holes shut. What would be 15-minute fix took two days due to our low tolerance for frustration.
Whilst at the same car, the carburettor took a leak, and it caused an engine bay fire, which was quickly extinguished by the fellow petrolhead. The damage was very minor. However, GM engineers took a spite at the EPA emission control regulations by making its emission control equipment the most complicated next to Honda’s. Many of vacuum tubes and plastic components were melted. None of the Haynes and other repair manuals showed the diagram of emission control tubes. I scouted for the same car with V6 engine at the sales centres and asked them to let me see where the tubes were connected. It took me a few weeks to get it working. The result was devastatingly high fuel consumption: about 5 to 6 mpg instead of 18 to 22 in the city. I sold the car to a guy unsuspected of its dark side. One day, I received a very curious letter from US Customs and Immigrations, asking me whether I owned this car. The guy was busted for shuttling the illegals and drugs across the border. No wonder he got caught, running out of petrol so fast at wrong time…
Oh, I’ve got another one. Massey Ferguson 35 steering box. By 1960, when my old MF came out, the box design was about 20 years old, and was never engineered for power steering. Having a PS-equipped tractor was almost a guarantee that the worm gears (Yep, 2) would crack. Mine had power steering, which was marginal even on the best day. It also had a broken steering box. Removal of the box required removal of the dash, the entire wiring harness, the fuel tank, and the steering column but guess what, the steering column is fused onto the box by age and hubris, so you have to remove the whole unit as one piece. And it weighs over a hundred pounds. Oh, and since the tractor has power steering, the new steering box will just break again. Repair parts are NLA, too, so don’t bother trying to fix the steering box.
Some folks have instead opted to cut the steering column off and weld on a hydrostatic steering unit from a backhoe, which bypasses the steering box altogether and make the power steering work flawlessly. That’s great, if you have the Perkins engine and can get a new power steering pump. I had the Continental engine which had straight cut gears on the PS pump…guess what, NLA.
So yeah. I sold the tractor.
Kudos to everybody bitching about ugly repair jobs! Doesn’t it feel great to fix your own broken cars? I respect all of you for either fixing your shit out of broke desperation or because you’re a cheap fuck like myself! Long live the driveway wrenchers!
Worst for me was a clutch in a 05 Mazda 6 3.0 v6 no lift and in my old man’s driveway.
I’ve done lots of clutches and made a decent money buying fwd cars with bad clutches that owners would get $1500-2k quotes for clutch jobs I could to in a day for $150 bucks.
The Mazda was so nasty I could only pull the tranny back about 4 inches and wiggle the new clutch through that opening. Hoping to do rear seal but no chance!
Just did my 93 Chevy 4×4 and it was unpleasant and the clutch slave is fucked to reinstall I pissed around with it and blew the master so I bought a new assembly from rock auto.
I don’t do liquid cooled German cars so I think that keeps me out of the really ugly jobs!
Fiat 500, if you want to replace the ball joint on a lower control arm you can’t just replace the ball joint as I am used to do on my SAAB’s but you need to replace the whole lower control arm.
To be able to replace the lower control arm you need to take the front fascia off and crash bars and quite a few of the subframe parts.
A small job made ridiculously big by just designing with a bolt going lengthwise the car instead of straight up. Or just make it so I can replace the ball joint.
Luckily it’s a cute car.
Mini Coopers and newer BMWs are the same way with non-replacable ball joints. It’s a $14 part that I need to spend $250 for an entire control arm if it were to go bad. I was used to VWs with a replacable ball joint that’s just the nut that holds the knuckle on, and 3x 10mm bolts that hold it to the control arm.
I have a 2007 Nissan Elgrand sitting in my backyard because the power steering pump needs replacing. Because it’s a JDM van with a VQ35 in it, there is no room in the engine bay for any activities….and there are no new parts available anywhere unless you can find something in Japan.
To do the power steering pump you need to remove the battery, intake, fan shroud, radiator and alternator, then hope the unknown mileage second hand replacement works. And it has to be done from underneath, no room up top.
GMT800 trucks: To change a light bulb you reached behind the light assembly and twisted it out. To change the whole assembly you twisted a pair of metal pins and pull them out, and both assemblies just fell out into your hand.
GMT900 trucks: To change a light bulb you jam your hand behind it and cut it up and hope you have enough room to get to it and get it out, or you jack it up and take the wheel off and the fender liner off and get it from behind. To take the assembly out you remove the front bumper.
GM made this sort of changeover with a lot of cars around 2005-ish but that most of them had easily serviceable light bulbs *and* assemblies in the early 2000s cars to obtuse and time consuming ones in the mid/late 2000s cars, even cars that were fundamentally the same car underneath (C5 – > C6 is at least a bit understandable, but Seville/Deville -> DTS is absurd) seems to have been only done to pad the wallets of dealership service departments.
I replaced my GMT800 headlight housings because they were so cheap it was worth the hour of polishing and buffing it would have been to fix the old yellowed ones. Dead simple
Replacing the headlight in my G6 requires removing the headlight assembly, which is just a few screws. But, the headlight assembly is behind the bumper cover, which requires either removing the entire cover, or removing screws on one side of the cover, pulling on the cover, and trying to get the headlight assembly out, which results in bending the little strip of sheet metal that goes over the headlight assembly. And then trying to reverse the whole process after changing the bulb.
Easy answer for me: water pump on a 2008 Toyota RAV4 V6.
Google it if you dare…
Had an ’07 can confirm (like clockwork ours started to weep at ~97k). I was surprised by the ~$700 charge by Burnsville Toyota to replace as it felt like a great deal compared to the $1100 avg cost I was seeing for the repair. Outside of the water pump issues 3rd gen v6s are fantastic, typically problem free vehicles. Only normal consumables in my ~80k ownership (my ex got this car in our split, at ~120k).
Honestly, they’re all pretty good compared to the idiot who had to have a Ford V8 in his 240Z. That idiot got to replace a starter every six months because it was tightly embraced by the headers. Which had to be removed and dropped 3″ on wires to get enough clearance to move the starter back far enough to drop the header another few inches so the starter could be worried out. I got to where I could do it in an hour with a jack, two stands, a small toolbox, a two foot length of wire, the starter and the exhaust gasket. Practice.
The 2005 Legacy cabin air filter replacement procedure (when new) started with removing screws in the center console. It was supposed to have been designed to slide out in a drawer with the glovebox door dropped fully open, but the HVAC team and the dash team didn’t coordinate. Drawer missed the opening. Eventually everyone got as frustrated as I did and broke enough plastic to mangle the filter and drawer into a parallelogram, shove it the fuck in, and then square it back up enough to close up. I’ve bled more, but only for much better reasons.
1969 Mercedes 250. The last straw causing dad to trade in the car. The dealer wanted $125 (in 1975, which is about $690 today) to replace the license plate light bulb. Why that much? Because the entire bumper had to be removed to access the light bulb.
I’m not an expert on the W114, but I am fairly confidant just like the W116 and W123 the license plate bulbs are in the bottom side of the trunk latch area and this does not necessitate removing the bumper to remove a couple of screw to replace the festoon bulbs. There had to be something else going on.