A while back I made a post on The Cost of Doing Business in which I explained that my goal in Home-IN-Steading is to put a roof over my families heads and food on our table whilst simultaneously being home.
The alternative is what most of us chasing the American Dream have been living out: that is, working away from our homes in our industrial revolution driven world to provide for our loved ones via wage slavery.
It is in this striving that I found myself, once again, taking a job that was a good distance away from home. It was supposed to be a lucrative job, paying out over $3000 dollars for just a few days of work.
Key words "Supposed to be" is what I will focus on for the remainder of this post.
I knew that this easy money job was going to be difficult right after I picked up @mobilejoat from his house. My work truck started losing power, as if it wasn't getting enough diesel to the injectors. Being the knowledgeable mechanic that he is, he began to trouble shoot my ailing trucks symptoms.
MJ: When did you last change your fuel filters?
Me: Its been quite a while.
So, we limped the old truck along until we got to an O'Reilly's in Gainsville, MO. There, in the parking lot, MJ changed out my two fuel filters and the enormously large air filter. He also cleansed the Mass Air Flow sensor located within the air induction leading upto the turbo intake.
Bada-Bing, Bada-Boom!
We were up and running, the ol' girl purring like the day I bought her. We drove for about 136 miles before we stopped to fuel up. After fueling up, the truck decided to start losing power again. The automatic assumption was that somehow, adding fuel to the tank caused the filter in the tank to clog up again. The only solution was to limp our way to the nearest auto parts store in Poplar Bluff, MO and attempt to fix the in-tank filter. That's easier said than done.
In order to get to that filter, the tank must be dropped from the frame. Unfortunately for us, we had just filled up 40 gallons of diesel. So, we bought 8 five gallon buckets and a siphoning hose and began emptying the tank.
After a couple of hours, we had the tank off and were ready to fix whatever we would find in the tank.
Low and behold! We found a badly disintegrated fuel filter on the end of the tank's receiving unit. We thought for sure that this had to be the culprit. We blew air back through the line to clear it from any possibly trapped debris and reassembled the tank.
Unfortunately, no one in town had the right part that we needed to replace the filter end, so we had to engineer one out of the materials you see below.
After all that work, we found out that that wasn't the main problem after all.
We were able to limp the vehicle along until we got to our hotel in Marion, IL. After a very long, and unproductive day, we were ready to call it quits for the day.
One of my favorite sayings is:
Tomorrow's another day.
The problems of the day and the work to be done can wait until the next day. After all, they weren't going anywhere.
Here's the JOB we were hired to do. Tear down the old rotten, non-load bearing wall and rebuild it.
We got as far as you see before we were kicked off the job because of a miscommunication between the owner of the property and the maintainence company that hired us.
Unbeknownst to us or the Maintainance company, the owner of the building had grown tired of waiting for them to get someone to fix the wall and hired a contractor themselves. Meanwhile, we had already bid the job and were given the go ahead to get the job done. And so we did, at least until the other contractors showed up and saw that we were working on their job. After a rousing game of management pass-the-blame, we were told to pack up our tools and the other contractors would finish.
Oh, Well. Back to the mysterious truck ailments.
With the remaining daylight we made our way to another auto parts store and replaced the Mass Air Flow Sensor, hoping that would be the cause of the vehicles woes.
It wasn't.
While poking around under the hood @mobile-joat discovered that there were quite a few wires that had rubbed themselves raw and/or were chewed on by a mouse.
MJ deduced that the wires were shorting out as the vehicle bounced and ran down the road, causing electronic modules to either malfunction or go bad all together. So, we bought a OBDII scanner to give us a clue as to what sensors and or modules were giving us problems.
It turned out that the codes the vehicle was sending out pointed to the FICM (Fuel Injection Control Module).
So, we drove to yet another store, where they had the FICM (Fuel Injection Conrol Module) in stock.
That fancy looking motherboard is the guts of the FICM. You pretty much need to have a sterile lab to open it up and replace it. Neither of which we had as we worked to fix the truck there in the NAPA parking lot. We managed to get it in, and get it all put back together, except we ended up breaking the "Y" on the coolant reseviour and need to Jerry-Rig a solution for that as well, since the NAPA didn't have the correct part in stock to fix it right.
Jerry-Rigging and making do is what we did best on this work trip.
Bada-Bing, Bada-Boom!
The truck has been running just fine ever since. We found the real culprit as to the woes of the truck. Apparently, every time we jostled the wires around the Mass Air Flow sensor and the Air Filter, we were elievating the short and the truck would appear to run fine again for a while until the wires would short out again. A few too many shorts led to the failure of the FICM to operate properly. The fuel tank, the fuel filters and the Mass Air Flow Sensor were all needing to be replaced, but they weren't the real cause of the problem.
After it was all said and done, the COST OF DOING BUSINESS for this supposedly lucrative work trip ended up leaving me in the RED!
What lesson can be learned from this little misadventure?
For one, If you are going to take a friend with you on a job, make sure he/she is a good mechanic.
The truck's problems would have happened, regardless if I was heading to this ill-fated job or not.
Thankfully, I had a little help from muh frens to help me diagnose and fix the ailments of my usually dependable truck.
Thanks for Reading!
As Always,
