| jasonturbo | 01-26-2014 09:14 AM |
My brother bought a del sol with suspected tranny gremlines, turned out to be a wheel bearing :s
In my former life as a mechanic I have seen many occasions where someone thought there was a catastrophic failure and it was something simple.
Example 1: Honda B series with no compression, shop X says it needs rebuild @ roughly 3500$ and they direct the customer to me since I was a big honda guy. I get my hands on the car, takes 5 minutes to figure out it has broken timing belt, install new belt, everything was fine. 200$ fix.
Example 2: GM 6.5 diesel that wouldn't run, seemed to have an issue getting diesel into the cylinders and had "low" compression but had been sitting for a while. Mechanic at our shop tells owner they need to replace engine, so they order a used motors and it gets delivered. I am helping him swap all the sensors over the new "used" engine, and we see that under the crank angle sensor there is a shaft which is about 12" long and driven by the camshaft... the shaft was in two pieces, it was broken. So if we would have properly diagnosed the issue, there is a pretty good chance it would have been a <200$ to replace the shaft instead of a 5k fix swapping in a used engine.
I have many other "real world" examples of this, it's crazy how easy it can be to misdiagnose something if you approach it with the wrong mind set. Maybe this bimbo's car will be an easy fix, and even if it's not, K series so cheap. | 