Shade Tree Mechanic: Horror Stories From The Driveway

Imagine there's a man who has owned his car since it was new. He took it to the same dealership and never had a problem(that he knows of). Then he moves and so has someone who will come to his house and change the oil come to do just that.
In the end he has to take it to a dealership in the new area to have the car fixed.

A horror most of you fear whenever you have someone work on your car, right?

That was my evening. And I was the guy who went to do the work. But there's something clients don't often understand or acknowledge, at least in the moment. Problems that arise today may have started weeks, months or years ago.

I have more than 20 years under the hood of cars. I've changed hundreds of oil filters, easily. I've had the canister type bend and rip apart and, as annoying as that is, it's just part of the job sometimes.

This was an internal filter. Don't know what that means? A metal casing is attached to the engine, a filter is placed in it and a cap is tightened on. TO change it, just remove the cap and change the filter. Easy. Not this time. The cap was plastic, the first sign of a bad time. These are high stress/pressure areas that shouldn't be trusted to molded plastic. But, usually, it doesn't create a problem for me.

So I put the wrench on it and turn. And out comes the oil. Awesome! I go to remove the cap and, somehow, it's too tight to turn and take off.

Turns out it had cracked and was now worthless. I panicked for a moment, asking myself what I had done. So I put the wrench back on knowing that it has to come off so I can replace it. It's only $30, it sucks but I can eat the cost. But I can't turn it!

What. The. Fuck?

I look for the crack and notice that I can't find it. It's at the top between the cap and the housing for the filter. Then it hits me. If I can't break this thing when I'm not worried about breaking it, I sure as hell didn't break it being careful.

There's this method of tightening bolts and other things called 'torquing'. It means to tighten the bolt, A LOT. Usually when you torque a bolt, it's supposed to be. Head bolts, lugnuts, things like that are 'torqued to spec'. Anywhere from 60 lbs to 200 lbs of foot-pounds. I personally can loosen a bolt tightened upwards of 150 pounds with a typical-sized ratchet and a little grunting.

This cap was torqued so tightly, that even with a 3 foot pipe on the end of the ratchet and all my weight and strength(220 pounds plus my strength), I could not loosen this cap. The crack worsened but the cap was stuck.

Had it been in my driveway, I could have chiseled it out and replaced it still, but I lived 30+ miles away and he couldn't afford the tow there.

So thanks to some jackass at a dealership he trusted torquing the cap on(which should NEVER be done), I get to feel all the blame for the damage, I lose out a few bucks, lose two hours of my life, lose a customer, ruin his day, commit myself to another couple gallons of gas and another hour of time to clean the driveway for him and he gets to pay $100/hour to have a nearby dealership fix it and tell him how I'm the idiot.

I understand why he might blame me. I was holding the 'smoking gun' as it were. The car was fine until I touched it. This had never happened before(to his knowledge*). So the only 'x' factor was me. But the truth is that, me, him, someone else, this was going to happen. I was just unlucky enough to be the guy to find the problem left by someone else.
This happens more than anyone cares to admit. And I urge you to bear this in mind when something breaks when you have someone work on your car. If they appear legitimately apologetic and, without even bringing up extra pay for extra work to fix the problem, chances are that they didn't break it, they simply found the latent problem that was waiting for someone to come along.

*Often, when things like this happen in a shop or dealership, they don't even tell you. They simply replace the part(if it's cheap enough or better for them to write the cost off) and don't say anything. I can't tell you how many drain plugs or other odds and ends parts I've had break on me that I replaced without telling the customer because it's better to just fix it and move on. For all this guy knows, this cap isn't the original cap on the car and the dealership just didn't say anything knowing that the damage to it is likely from them since they did all the work on the car previously.