Monday, February 27, 2006

Well that sucked

Over the weekend we noticed Melanie's Accord was leaking fluid. Since we had some work done on it about 3 week previous, we deduced that as the likely culprit. The plan was for Melanie to take my supra to school and I'd take the Honda to the dealership. So I pulled out and headed on my merry way to the shop. At the first stop sign is where I noticed the problem. The gears didn't seem to engage, so I was hitting high RPMs with little movement. After finding a balance that allowed the car to craw towards a steady acceleration I traveled onward. At the next stoplight, I started to have a large number of problems. The acceleration was still underperforming, I needed to turn through the light, which was not going quickly, and I had lost all momentum stopping at the light. There was a small hill that the road turned up, so small most of the time you wouldn't notice the incline as you drove over it. But this hill became the mountain the car couldn't surmount. As a result, on went the hazzard lights, and I slowly let the car coast down the hill to the side of the road. After around 40 minutes, the tow truck arrived to bring me the rest of the 2.5 miles to the dealership.
Once I arrived, I pointed out the work that had been done, and what were the problems I was now experiencing. They went to work, and later found that it had been a line from the transmition to the radiator that had broken off. Mel had hit some tire debrie around 10-11 months back and punctured the radiator. The work done on the radator when it was replaced was singled out as the root cause of the hose failure. To my suprise the dealership absored the cost and provided the work for free. That made me happy. I then set off to complete the rest of my chorse for the day. About 4 miles away, the low oil pressure light came on.
Thinking the resulting leak had drained my oil reserves, I stopped at Target to grab some auto oil. Dumping a quart into the car, I jumped in to head home and finish up my errands. As I pulled out of the parking lot, the flashing light of doom returned to mock me. "Where do you think you are going?" it silently asked. Sighing dejectly, I called the dealership to inform them of my new problem; "Oh, that's bad! You better come back to have them look at that." was the responce I got. I headed home to drop off the supplies for my previously planned yard work, knowing that it would be pushed off to another day. Once I arrived back at the dealership, the shop manager greated me and asked if everything was alright. Once again describing the issue, the manager had one of the mechanics run off to see what was wrong. 15-20 minutes later they returned to describe what caused the problem. As was the case before, the two issues were not related to the activity that proceeded them. This time it was the electronic switch that turns the low oil pressure light on and off that had gone bad. Having that replaced, I headed home for what I decided would be the final time. While I did make it home without incident, this better be the last time I need to head to any dealership for the next two months, at least!

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