Guages

Well this week at lawson's we were actually quite busy, my grandpa decided that it was time to replace the heads on his 1970 gs. So we went ahead and decided to do that the other night. Which overall that took us most of the night, taking us about 3 hours. But it wasn't that bad of a job, just time consuming. But then once we had that done, we went ahead and started working on my truck. This week we went ahead and hooked up my pod guages that are in the custom holder for the ;pillar on the driver side of the door. And to be completely honest, it wasn't very fun at all. First we had to hook up the water temp guage, which i had to pull out the whole dash face just to get to the hole in the firewall to run the cord, to the rear end of the block to plug the core plug in for it to work.
Then we had to work on the fuel guage which also runs all the way through the dash from left to right, but instead of running through the firewall, we had to drill a hole in the floor board just to get it to the position to hook it up the the reeling pod. Then once we had it hooked up to the reeling pod, we could then reroute it through the firewall to run to the oem fuel plate plug. which that is when it got hard, we had to try to splice, and burn, and twist, and turn just to try to get it to finally go in to where its suppose to, but it never worked. So we finally just tied it, i know its not the best way to deal with it, but after dealing with it for the long i was sick and tired of it.
Lastly, i had my oil pressure guage, which was the worst one of all. It was this guage, that made me never ever want to hook these dumb things up ever again. Like the other three, it ran through the dash all the way out the back of the firewall through a little hole down by the gas pedals, which is where i decided to ground the guages in the first place. Then once i made it through the fire wall i ran the pump and cord down the rear left side of the block all the way around the bottom, and up the other side. Once i had gotten it there i had drained all the oil out of the block and removed the oem plug. Then i spliced to to wires together, oem and the aftermarket guage ones and regrounded them and ran them to the battery again.
After that all i had to do was put the guage pod right back up on the pillar, to the left of the driver side seat, then i had to put my dash all back to gether, and we could call it a good night. But i had forgot to ground and wire all of the lights for the guages so i went ahead and did that really quick and go them working and called it a night.

A/C problems.

Well this week at lawsons Jerry niece Stephanie went into an auto repair shop with a common complaint of the car ac not blowing cold air. They took their Chevy cavalier into a franchise type shop and asked for an estimate to repair the air conditioning.
The facility provided a whopper of an estimate for replacing almost every component in the ac system. The shop wanted to replace the ac compressor and almost all of the parts that attached to the compressor. Stephanie got us involved before any repairs were approved.
After making some notes on what the Stephanie was told we called the auto repair shop. The service adviser notified me that the ac compressor had internal damage and spread metal through the system. This was believable and we've had to fix this before have seen this happen before.
But Jerremy decided to ask a few questions before he recommended that stephanie approve the auto repairs. He asked the service adviser what the pressure readings were on the high and low side. The adviser stated he would find out and call me back. Two hours latter he called back and notified us that the system was empty and the freon had leaked out. The red flag went up. When an a/c system is empty the compressor will not come on and testing is not possible. The standard procedure would be to test charge the system and with the compressor running to properly diagnose the failure.
Jerry asked the auto repair shop how they determined the compressor was bad and spread metal through the system without having run the compressor. He said that his technician was familiar with this make and model vehicle and that ac compressor failures are common on this type of vehicle.

At this point Jerry called his niece and recommended to move the vehicle. He informed Stephanie that this shop did no diagnosis and was planning on replacing all the parts and hoping the vehicle would be fixed. she agreed and moved the vehicle to an a/c specialty shop. This is what made me laugh about this whole thing. The ac shop test charged the system and found a leaking evaporator.
This was the one part that the first shop left out of the estimate. The first shop would have replaced all of those good parts and left the one bad part remaining. Why did they leave the evaporator out of the estimate?

The reason is that the evaporator is hard to replace. The first shop was only interested in doing the easier repairs and hoping it would fix the problem. Now  that we've fixed the car which allowed stephanie to avoid replacing $1500.00 of ac components that were not needed.

Now steph. is back on the road with cold A/C, and that's just one less thing we have to worry about. Hopefully here soon we'll be able to figure out why all my lights and electronics in the truck are being backfed, but we'll save that for another day. But mostly because we still have 3 more vehicles to fix first.