A mechanic is only as good as his tools. If your car happens to break down while you are out on the highway, you’re pretty helpless without a tool to attack the problem. Even if you know what is wrong, there is little you can do to prevent from being stranded.
That’s what happened to me when the coil pack failed and the check engine light came on in the middle of nowhere West Virginia. We were on our way back from seeing a lifelong friend in North Carolina. It was fall so we decided to cut though the country and take a gander at the fall foliage.
My wife was driving, and we were going up the side of a mountain around four o’clock in the afternoon on a nice day at the end of September. Suddenly the engine began to falter and misfire, like one of the cylinders had stopped firing. Then the check engine light started flashing.
Ever since the advent of OBD II in 1996, the check engine light was given more authority to warn of engine problems. And when the check engine light flashes, it is telling you that there is a very good likelihood that if you try to continue driving, you cause damage.
Specifically, the flashing check engine light meant the catalytic converter was being damaged by the misfire, and the converter would soon become so hot that it will go into a cataclysmic melt down. The floorboards will get hot, and if you park over dry grass, you can set it on fire.
Knowing the potential for ruining an expensive catalytic converter was imminent, I told my wife to pull onto the shoulder as fast as possible. Once parked, I told her to call our motoring club for a tow truck.
I started the engine, opened the hood, and took a look around. I tugged at each of the plug wires, just to make sure that one hadn’t somehow come loose. Everything was nice and neat, yet the V-6 was only running on five cylinders.
The plugs and wires had been replaced not too long ago, so I figured they were okay. I immediately suspected one of the coil packs had gone bad, which was pretty likely given the age and mileage of the car.
But what could I do without a replacement coil pack and a 5.5mm socket to unbolt the darn thing? I was like a rebel without a cause, fully knowing what was wrong yet helpless to do anything about it.
It took the tow truck over four hours to rescue us. During our wait, we had plenty of time to think about our course of action. There was a fairly large town about fifty miles away, certainly large enough to support a dealership. We would have the tow truck drop us off there, and then find a motel near the dealership where we would spend the night.
The tow truck driver was really friendly and we chatted once we were on our way. It turned out that his tow service was located in the large town where we expected to find a dealer, so I asked about the town and if there were any good independent repair shops.
I figured that if I could find an independent shop, the tech might be kind enough to lend me the necessary socket and ratchet, and I could replace the coil pack myself. Anything to save a buck, especially during these hard economic times! And, maybe I would get a break if I told the tech what was wrong and saved a diagnostic charge.
The driver told me that their tow service ran a repair shop, and the tech who worked there was top notch. To quote him, “He can fix just about anything with wheels on it.” And, he said that if we decided to have them do the work, they would knock fifty-percent off the tow bill.
He also went on to say that there was a brand-new motel just up the road from their shop, and they gave a discount on the motel room rate to their customers. Hey, it sounded like it was a good thing, getting a break on both the motel and the tow bill.
I asked my wife if she thought it was okay and she gave me the thumbs up. So we told the driver to forget the dealership and take us to their shop. He said that it was a good thing because there were no motels anywhere near the car dealership.
As the driver turned off the main road he pointed to the motel which shared the corner with an all night diner. “Oh boy! Dinner!” I said. We could just walk across the parking lot and catch a meal. How convenient. Everything seemed to be working out.
As we wound our way down that West Virginia road, it became narrower and narrower. We passed another motel, the “Well Spring,” and he said, “You don’t want to stay there!” There was a gun and fishing supply store next door, and a short distance further a huge wooden building on the right. The building was painted completely black and was all boarded up, giving it an eerie appearance.
I asked the driver what it was and why it had been shuttered. He said it was the local watering hole, but there was a shootout a few weeks back and they closed it. “Shootout? You mean like a holdup?” “No.” He said, “Some of the locals decided to pull out their guns and started shooting each other.”
As I looked around at the dinky houses – or should I say shacks – that lined the road, I felt like I was now witnessing a scene from the movie “Deliverance.” Some of the shacks were so run down, their roofs were caving in. “Nobody could be living in that shack, could they?” I asked.
That was like a cue for him to begin his discourse on the locals. “Yep, a drug dealer lives there. And another one lives there,” he said, pointing on the other side of the street at another hovel.
By now the road had disintegrated into mostly dirt, which covered a one lane...path. He went on. “That old hag keeps calling the cops on us for going through the neighborhood too fast. And from time to time that jerk comes out and screams at us to slow down,” he said pointing at a small wooden shack painted blue.
I expected to see someone sitting on one of the old disintegrating porches playing a banjo. It would be an understatement to say that we were off the beaten path. Just then, we rounded a slight curve and slipped through the gate of the tow lot where the dirt road ended. And that’s when my nightmare began.
I looked around the lot and saw two other tow trucks. That made sense, since the tow service operated 24-7. The lot, which was dirt, was littered with abandoned vehicles in various stages of decay. Not a good sign. The repair shop was nothing more than a large metal building that had no wall on the side facing the lot.
The office consisted of an old beat up run down trailer with a grungy old metal three-step staircase attached to the door—which was propped wide open. Inside sat a grossly overweight woman in her mid-forties who was talking to someone on a cell phone.
She sat behind an old wooden desk that was completely covered with papers, phone books, old magazines, and other trash. The floor looked like it had never been cleaned, and there was nowhere to sit down.
I asked her when they started work in the morning, and she said the shop opened at eight. I told her that I was a tech myself and wanted to talk with the tech about the car before he began working on it. She pulled a blank piece of paper out of somewhere in the pile in front of her and began jotting down the info about my car.
I shuddered at the thought of what the tech looked like, and at least hoped I could oversee the guy to keep him from damaging anything. And maybe my idea about borrowing a wrench and replacing the coil pack myself would pan out, and I wouldn’t have to worry about some stranger messing with my machine.
I told her that I diagnosed the problem as a bad coil pack and that all I wanted the tech to do was to “Check and advise.” She wrote down, “Check engine light flashing. One cylinder missing, possible coil pack, check and advise.” Cool.
I asked if I could get a ride from the motel in the morning, and she said it would be no problem. We got our luggage out of the car, and I left my Snap-On tote bag sitting conspicuously on the passenger seat so the tech wouldn’t miss it—just in case he arrived before I could get there.
Another tow truck driver was on his way out and we caught a lift back to the motel. At eight o’clock the next morning I caught a ride with the same driver—who had been working all night—back to the shop. On the way there, which was only a mile or so, I saw my car coming toward us with a stranger driving it!
“Hey, that’s my car! Who’s that driving it?” I exclaimed to the driver. He said it was the tech, and he was probably test driving it. It turns out the tech had gotten there ahead of me and had already installed the coil pack! And there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
When we arrived in the tow lot, there was a man standing in the middle shouting profanity at someone he was talking to on his cell phone. There was another driver standing there next to his rig and I asked him if that was the owner and why he was shouting. “He’s firing someone,” he said.
I climbed the stairs into the trailer and another huge woman was sitting behind the desk. I asked her if the tech was test driving my car and she told me it was fixed already. My heart sank. “Fixed already? What time had that tech gotten there? At dawn?” Apparently the tow truck driver tipped him off that I was a tech and would be there first thing in the morning. So he got there extra early so I couldn’t see what he did to my car. So I decided to ask him.
Just then the tech drove into the lot and slowly passed by the owner, who was still shouting profanity, waving his arms in the air, and was now threatening to kill the person on the phone. It was a scary scene!
The tech got out of my car and I got a good look at him. He wore grease stained jeans and a T-shirt that was so obliterated with grease stains that I could barely make out the “Snap-On” insignia.
“Hey, how’re ya doing?” I asked. He nodded. “Got it fixed already?” He nodded again. “Was it the coil pack?” “Yep.” “How’d you know which one was bad? Did you look at the Misfire Monitor?” He grunted, “Nope. Just pulled them plug wires.” I winced.
Pulling off the plug wires on a distributorless ignition system is a big no-no because it puts stress on the coil packs and ignition module. Only a back-woods mechanic like this guy would resort to it, not caring if it was okay or not.
I watched as he put down an hour labor on the ticket, even though it couldn’t have taken him more than 10 minutes tops and the flat rate for the job is only two-tenths of an hour. With the tow bill, parts and labor, the total ticket was close to two hundred dollars!
When I got home I pulled off the coil pack he installed and discovered it was a cheap one made in China. So I replaced it with a high quality Blue Streak one. I also replaced the other two coil packs just to be sure. After all, he had stressed them and they could fail at any moment.
In retrospect, I am grateful that we were able to hit the road while it was still early morning. If we had ended up at the dealer, the price of the repair would have been much more, and we would have probably had to wait until later in the day before they could work on it. But most of all, I’m grateful that rube mechanic didn’t damage my car.
