Peter Vieira
Wow, you're reading this? Thanks! If you're into RC cars and I seem vaguely familiar, it's because I spent over 25 years writing and editing RC car news, reviews, and tech articles in print and online. What else, what else ... I have a degree in Film Studies (useless), most of a degree in Graphic Design (useful), and I'm married to a wonderful woman with horrible taste in men. Thanks to her, we have a terrific daughter who just earned her Journalism degree and is way, waaay more together that I was at her age. Or right now.
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Replacing the belt on my Prius. It only runs the water pump, so there are just two pulleys and a tensioner. It’s fairly easy to access. Should take 15 minutes tops. I made two mistakes:
Once I got a breaker bar that actually fit and a replacement nut the whole process took the very short amount of time it should have.
Fuel pump on a Dodge Caravan (gen 2).
The filler neck wouldn’t allow the tank to drop down out of the body rails.
The body rails wouldn’t allow the tank to be removed from the filler neck.
So an hours long exercise of yanking the tank down 1/2 an inch, pulling the neck out 1/2 inch, yank, pull, similar to Austin Powers turning the golf cart around in the tunnel After that; the 10 minute pump swap then reversing the dance to get the tank back in.
All told the job took some 6-8 hours from start to finish.
This spring I was replacing a heater control valve linkage on my 1978 BMW 530i. The heater control valve is forward of the driver’s right knee, and it’s connected to the dash knob by a goofy arrangement of a sliding rod with plastic flex joints on either end. These flex joints break because they’re 45 years old and also just look at them. So I had a functioning heater control valve but no functioning heater control. The flex joints are NLA but I got a setup with two of them from someone local – score! Replacement should have been, literally, ten minutes. Remove lower dash kick panel, use screwdriver to push tab to release broken half of flex joint from control rod, ditto for the other broken half from the heater control valve. I was doing that, and couldn’t quite get a straight shot with the screwdriver and I pulled just a *little* too hard on the joint and it came out with part of the heater control valve attached to it. I now had a HCV that would constantly drip coolant onto the carpet, until you started the car, when it would become a coolant faucet. There is no way to repair this valve, and – oh – the valve is also NLA. I moved the car a few blocks back to my home garage at the cost of a couple of cups of coolant in the carpet and sighed, because the car was going to be off the road for a long time. I miraculously found a NOS HCV by calling LaJolla Independent on a hunch, but I still had to replace it. Standard procedure is remove upper and lower console, remove AC unit, remove heater core and blower – basically, pull everything – all so that you can get clearance to the four 8mm nuts on the back of the HCV. two of these can be easily seen if you remove the knee panel and stick your head on the floor by the gas pedal, and accessed by an open-end wrench; the other two are barely visible and completely inaccessible, and completely invisible. The alternate method involves removing none of this involves fabricating a special wrench, lying on your back with your head in the footwell and working blind. Then you have to *install* the new nuts completely blind. I went with the tear-shit-out method and found, to my surprise, that I could get wrench access to the hidden nuts once the AC was out, without removing the heater core/blower. It nonethelss required hours and hours of work, and the car was down for months. Do not recommend.
I was upgrading the head unit in a sibling’s 2014 Corolla to an identical aftermarket one to the one I installed in my Prius.
I did a lot of hooking the harnesses up to it the night before.
“45 minute job!” I told myself (and them). “90 at the worst!”
So, of course, between routing the various cables (microphone, GPS antenna) and struggling with connection that refused to latch without excessive force, it took 4 hours.
…and then that car was totaled 6 months later so I got to take it all out at the body shop in 90-degree weather, albeit it only took about 15 minutes that time.
I live in the northern part of Canada. Nothing is a 10 minute repair, doesn’t matter what time of year it is. Unless replacing the wiper blades counts as a repair.
Really if I’m being realistic I take the estimated time of repair and then multiply it by 5 or even 10. 🙁
yeah my 10 hour front brake job reminds me of this.
I was dealing with an electrical issue on my (then new-to-me) ’78 Beemer that I had isolated to the timing system: an aftermarket Hall effect sensor. The aftermarket system is highly thought of, but things go bad after years, so I wasn’t so fussed. Well I go to unbolt the timing advance unit and the little screw-cap bolt shears off. I can feel the metal going plastic and it’s a sickening feeling.
Wouldn’t you know that the bolt is on the front end of the camshaft, necessitating a bottom-end engine rebuild with a new camshaft. This is the one thing on the bike that I’ve taken to a mechanic because I simply didn’t have the time (or space) to do an engine rebuild. It’s a good thing I did, though, as there were a whole lot of other issues including a loose and damaged flywheel and a spun main journal bearing. How did I not know these were issues? Well, if you’ve ever ridden an old airhead you’ll know that they’re noisy AF and keep on ticking even if a tonne of things are wrong.
So yeah, that’s how an easy remove-and-replace job turned into a much more expensive months-long endeavour.
Once, many years I replaced the leaf spring bushings in my XJ. They had been squeaking and I had made the mistake of spraying them with WD40 to shut them up. Don’t do that, WD40 ruins rubber, use silicone spray instead.
Being naive I decided to replace rubber with poly which I was assured by the manufacturer up, down, left and sideways would be squeak free. As I was in doing the passengers shackle the captive nut that held the shackle and thus the spring broke free.Did I mention that damn nut was INSIDE the unibody? No? Well it was!
Now this was a California XJ, No rust. There was absolutely no reason for that nut to break free other than a really shitty weld. I ended up having to cut into the frame and jury rig a couple of wrenches because of course one was just a bit too big to fit. It was a complete clusterfuck. But finally, FINALLY I got the bolt out, the spring off, the old bushings removed and the new squeak free poly bushings in. I was so tired from the job I stopped at one side for the day. The correct way to fix the now loose nut would have been to tack weld it into p!ace but A) I needed a tack welded which I didn’t have and B) I’d have to drop the gas tank. Fuck that, I epoxied the shit out of that nut instead and used red locktite to make sure it wasn’t going anywhere.
BTW that nut weld was a very common thing to happen thanks to (according to the forums) Chrysler no longer giving a shit about the XJ and shifting their attention to the ZJ when my XJ was built.
The next day I drove the Jeep to work and what did I find? Poly bushings squeak WORSE than bad rubber! FUCK YOU poly bushings! No amount of tightening would help.. I really should have read the forums before going poly because of course afterwards I found lots of complaints. This is why now I read Amazon reviews.
The company had provided a tiny packet of silicone lube “in the unlikely situation some squeaking is heard”, well I went through that pretty quick and the remainder of my time with that Jeep I had to spray the bushings with silicone spray every week to get them to shut up…until I stopped giving a shit and got used to sounding like a jalopy. Rain was a godsend since the water shut the bushings up for a while.
UGH!
anything that requires a 10mm socket
But all joking aside, anything that requires some sort of specialty tool that I don’t have and didn’t know about before starting the job. Like an extra-deep thin-walled socket to take the bolts out of a front wheel hub assembly that has the bolt heads sunken into a recess in the back of the steering knuckle casting.