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| Another job, another search in the manual, only to find vagaries like “remove” or “disassemble” or one of my personal favorites “may require specialist tools”. |
I just want to take a minute to vent. As a car enthusiast
and hobbyist mechanic, there are occasions that I will run into a snafu when it
comes to fixing my car of the week. I am a huge believer in Google. I find that
when I Google the symptom, year, make and model of my car, I can usually find a
forum and an answer to my mechanical question. Now here is the venting part. To
those of you who like to be important and have an answer to every question, I
humbly request that you stop. There is nothing more frustrating to the home
mechanic than trying to find an answer to a car question and have some know it
all answer like this: Q: I am having trouble locating the battery on a 2006
Dodge Stratus. A: Look under the hood or my personal favorite, take it to the
shop. Well thanks for that genius. If I wanted to take the car to the shop and
pay $80 an hour to find it I would do just that. My purpose of posting the
question is to find the battery, not to take it to the shop. Now just so you know, a Dodge Stratus does not
have a battery under the hood like most vehicles and believe it or not it isn’t
in the trunk either. They have it nestled on the driver’s side under the fender
well shielding. You have to remove the wheel to get to it. I found it after a
Google search. Someone actually posted photos showing where it was. Those are
the kind of folks that I really appreciate!
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A length of gas pipe is not only a good tool of persuasion
for mafia juice men but in the garage it can also convince a stubborn bolt to
see things your way.
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Now you and
I know that working on cars is never a cut and dry procedure. There are always
little tricks and short cuts when you run into problems. I will give you an
example that I ran into when I was changing a timing belt on my brother in
law’s 1999 Subaru. I had never done one on a Subaru and I did have the shop
manual. As I have stated in a previous blog, shop manuals are a guide and never
100% fool proof. They do tell you to
remove the radiator fan shroud and radiator. Remove the covers and then you
remove the crankshaft pulley. That’s great. The problem is, when you put a
ratchet on the crank shaft pulley bolt; guess what, it turns the whole shaft.
Being that there is NO room to put an impact gun between the crank bolt and
front frame member there poses somewhat of a problem. Most do it yourselfers
don’t have the luxury of fancy shop tools so this is where the tricks and tips
come in. I spent a whole day trying to find the answer of how to remove that
bolt without turning the crankshaft. A lot of good meaning souls put their
answers on the web and pulled them right out of the Subaru shop manual. I did
however find the best answer ever and the cleverest way of doing that job.
Quote, “To get it off get a breaker bar with a 13/16 socket from memory
and rest the bar on the LH "chassis rail" and crank the car for a sec
BUT DONT START THE CAR IF YOU DO SHUT IT DOWN IMMEDIATLY!!! you should have to
do this 3 maybe 4 times depending, then undo it like a normal bolt. Hope that
helps. “
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Ginger back for more abuse perusing the shop manuals at the
start of another project.
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It is also a good idea to undo the sparkplugs and you won’t start
the car. Let me tell you it did work, like a champ!! These are the kind of
things we want to see on forums, helpful tips for the average Joe or Josephine.
Thanks for letting me rant.
Ginger
Harwell © 2012
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