Servicing Myself
So my oil ran out on Thursday. I got one hundred gallons on Friday for a little over five hundred dollars (including a payment for money I owed them for earlier repairs). Problem - I can’t purge the air. I tried looking for a bleed valve at a hardware store and found something to close the line. Problem is that I didn’t know what a bleed valve looked like. Found some pictures on the internet and got the concept down.
I went back and couldn’t find one that allows you to choose both passages to be open or just one. I ended up buying a T-shaped pipe and figured I could hook the earlier valve to it. Unfortunately, the pipe doesn’t connect to a three-eighths inch thread. Most that I read about on the internet said that three-eighths inch is standard. This one appears to be a half inch or perhaps larger. I gave up and called the oil company for a technician to come out and purge the air out of our system. I only got a message service that told me that they would notify the office.
There is some good news in my life. I replaced the air filter in my car but that still didn’t fix my engine trouble. I stopped by an auto-parts store on Friday and picked up some spark plug wires. I replaced them rite there in the parking lot after I did some shopping next door to it. The engine light remained on, but I didn’t have any misfired pistons. The car even ran smoother. Later that night, the engine light went off.
I’ve had times when the car is idling in park and it sounds like it is in a loop of strong and not so strong work. Oil changes wouldn’t help it and I figured the car was just getting old or something. It appears that spark plug wires can have a significant impact on your car. They were my last option before going to a mechanic. I think they came to about thirty-five dollars. There were about seven varieties to choose from, so I chose the second best.
I’ve been trying to do a lot of things myself lately to avoid the cost of service. I’ve been learning a few things too. It is amazing to find myself able to talk shop about a things, even if my knowledge is shallow. Maybe it is another level in my life that I am advancing to. Maybe I’m just frugal or broke. Maybe I’ll even do my taxes on my own this year.
March 28th, 2006 at 8:46 pm
[…] I told my coworker about it and he asked if I had any major problems with it. The only major problem I had was a recent one of replacing my sparkplug wires. Other then that, getting new tires usually hits me pretty hard every year. Half the time no one has tires that will fit my car so I usually end up calling ahead of time. He was talking about the engine light and I told him that you could get a gadget at wal-mart for $100 to tell you the code that is triggering the engine light and turn it off. He popped his head over the cube and presented me a wire with an LED display on the end. Apparently, he got his ODB II Check Engine Scanner & Error Code Reader for just $30. I decided against buying one before because $100 was just a little too high. I’m having to rationalize if I should buy into one of these or not. It would have been a bit helpful in the past. […]