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.