Shots Across The Bow

Why I gave up ice cream.

The short version is it's just too darn expensive.

Now, if I stuck to the short version, what kind of blog post would this be? That's right; DULL.

Coming home from work Wednesday night, I noticed an odd noise coming from the engine, sort of a cross between a hiss and a click. The sound got worse as I got closer to the house, and the Tracker began to lose power. Fortunately, I was only a few hundred yards from my house, and I made it home.

By this time, the noise was definitely louder and nastier. It sounded like the engine was coughing, and the faster I revved the engine, the faster it coughed. I called my brother in law who's a mechanic, and asked what it sounded like to him.

"About $1500," was his reply.

Oh great!

He came on over to the house to check it out in person and found that the problem was actually much less serious. One of my spark plugs had come loose, and was allowing air to leak out past the seal. That caused that cylinder to lose compression, resulting in the cough, and the loss of power. Unlike the old days of the V-8, when losing a cylinder meant you couldn't accelerate as fast, and burned more gas, dropping a cylinder off a four banger pretty much ruins your day.

Well, I was pretty relieved, pulled the spark plug, replaced it, fired up the engine....

The noise was still there.

So I checked the next plug. A tracker doesn't have the familiar distributer with an octopus of wires leading to the spark plugs. Instead, a lead from the computer connects to a coil which sits on top of one of the plugs, and a wire leads to a second plug. So, I pulled the coil off the second plug and found a new problem. The coil came off in three pieces, instead of the standard one.

Not good.

To make matters worse, the spark plug came out with it, without having to be loosened. Apparently, when I changed the plugs, I didn't get this one tight enough, and it gradually backed out until it finally blew out., trashing the coil.

So, now I needed a new coil. $88.04
And new plugs $12.00
And new plug wires $44.74
And a thread chaser to re thread the spark plug socket. $9.00

What does this all have to do with ice cream? The car started messing up when I stopped at Baskin and Robbins for a double waffle cone. Like I said, that ice cream is just too darned expensive.

Posted by Rich at February 28, 2003 12:07 AM | TrackBack