The Camaras

The thoughts and lives of the camara family. Ross Camara Nicole Camara

Posts Tagged ‘car’

Car 1, My Arm 0

July 6th, 2009

So we recently decided that we would be keeping both cars even after we move into the city since nicole doesn’t yet know where her job is going to be at. Unfortunately this means that a lot of the car maintenance that i have been putting off for the past few months now needs to be done. One of the things that might be due to be done was a brake pad replacement. Having a mechanic inspect your breaks cost about $50 and I think is kind of expensive since all they need to do is put the car on a rack and take off a tire to look at the pads. When you’re having your tires rotated is another good time to do a brake inspection since the tires are coming off anyway but many places won’t tell you if you need the work done even if they’ve done 99% of the work as part of another job.

So this evening since i got home early for work I decided I would rotate my tires myself since they needed to be done and I could get a good look at my brakes. This isn’t a terribly difficult task and i’ve done it before and takes me about an hour. Things were going pretty well and i got the first three tires changed no problem and just needed to put the last tire back on in place of the spare that I had on. When it came time to pull the spare off it refused to come off. Now here is where I did something stupid. Instead of trying to figure out what was causing it to be stuck I started to pull really hard on it. Guess what happened? Yup you guessed it, I pulled too hard and managed to cause the car to fall off of the dinky little jack i had it on. When this happened the wheel well I was working on shifted about a foot down and the car crashed into my arm. This hurt like you wouldn’t believe. I got very lucky in that I managed not to break anything and am a proud owner of a very swollen forearm. On the upside I got really lucky in managing not to permanently damage my car and the stuck wheel came unstuck so i could put my tire back on and go back inside to lick my wounds.

It’s a good thing i’m a software developer cause clearly I make a piss poor car mechanic. I managed to screw up prob one of the simplest tasks that most people can do. My arm is nice and puff and by tomorrow morning i’m sure i’m going to have a nice bruise going on. Right now that $50 brake inspection plus $20 tire rotation is looking mighty cheap…..

On a side note this weekend while digitizing our files i found a maintenance receipt that listed my car millage as 43,000 miles. Since my car now has +140K miles it means i’ve driven my car over a hundred thousand miles which i found to be pretty impressive. Considering this is the first car I ever bought it’s lasted me for quite awhile and is still in pretty good shape.

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Posted in Family

Tags: car funny repair

Dad saves my car

March 11th, 2008

So on my drive home on thursday night I was rear ended. After pulling over and checking out the back of my car it looked like there hadn’t been any damage. I wasn’t really in the mood to spend the time collecting insurance information and since there didn’t seem to be damage to my car and I felt fine I told the woman who hit me not to bother and got back in my car. My car started up just fine and i didn’t feel anything different with my car. Honestly she hit me at a really low speed so figured there wasn’t a problem. Plus the woman was a postal worker (still in uniform) and you know you don’t mess with those people :-p.

Fast forward to friday afternoon when i went to take the trash to the dumpster. When I started my car it would start just fine but it wouldn’t idle. If i took my foot off the gas it would die. However once I ran the car for a bit with my foot on the gas it would then start to idle. I was a little concerned and was starting to regret not getting the contact and insurance info of the lady that hit me.

When my dad got here on Saturday for his conference (a later post) I mentioned we might have a bit of problem when I was supposed to drop him off on monday. After i described what was going on with my car he told me the carburetor’s butterfly valve was probably clogged. So on sunday after brunch we stopped at the auto store and bought this $1.88 can of gum remover stuff. After we got home we popped the hood of my car and he removed the hose covering the butterfly valve and sprayed it in there while he had me start my car up. Low and behold my car has been functioning fine ever since then. So dad managed to make my weekend because i didn’t have to send my car to the autoshop where i’m sure it would have been much more expensive to have the problem fixed.

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Posted in Family

Tags: car dad repair

118,000 – .5 miles

January 31st, 2008

So driving home today I noticed that I’m about to roll 118K miles on my camry. It made me realize that I’ve actually put the bulk of the miles on the car now and not the previous owner. With us purchasing the new civic in September for Nicole it means my car needs to make it for awhile longer. I’ve started to try to take better care of my car by making sure I get my oil changed at a reasonable interval considering I put on around 400 miles a week. This year I even managed to replace my door handle on the drives side so i don’t have to open the door with my little finger.

Thinking that I had been doing a good job I finally decided to go through all my maintenance receipts and put it in a spreadsheet so I can see when I did what and to give me an idea when I might need to do it again. Unfortunately when I did this I realized that I might be in for a rough couple of months as a lot of maintenance is coming due. It’s been about 30K miles since I’ve had the brakes pads changed. I need to look into maybe having that checked sooner rather than later since i need those to stop. Also it looks like its been a long time since I’ve had most of the fluids in my car changed and those should probably be done to. The big ugly thing is it’s been almost 60K miles since the timing belt has been changed and according to some guides I should look into changing that in the next few thousand miles.

It’s not the end of the world and I should get these things done since I want to keep my car going for at least a few more years. One of my concerns is with Brentwood Auto the place that we normally send our cars to get repaired. It bugged me the last time I had the car sent there in April of last year they told Nicole that I needed to get my timing belt replaced already. I refused to do this since I felt like I had just gotten it replaced recently and there was no way it should be up. Based on my records they were telling me I should have the timing belt replaced at least 10K miles before the minimum that any other place recommends. This seems kinda scamy to me in recommending that I get work done on the car that doesn’t need to be done. Overall I’ve felt when my car goes in they often suggest things that it doesn’t really need. On the other hand when nicole has taken her car in over the years we’ve been here they haven’t always charged her to fix stuff and they’ve also told her no it doesn’t need to be changed yet. I’ll have to think about it more. My car may end up going back there anyway even if it costs me more in the long term since at least I’ve always felt that the quality of their work has been good.