“Billowing clouds of smoke.”
I’m not a grease monkey. I have fond, distinct memories of my childhood where in general my Dad was under one of our cars doing something almost every weekend. I knew the term “bleeding the brakes” before I knew anything about girls or computers. That’s not to say I knew what the term meant, but I was familiar with it and knew that when Dad was “bleeding the brakes” he’d let me sit in the car up on the ramps and I’d press the brake pedal when I was supposed to and let it up when I was supposed to.
But I didn’t learn anything. My Dad had no great desire to show me any of this, possibly due to a fear that I’d either get hurt or break something. That’s understandable but a bit sad now. There’s a lot of things I could have learned from him but didn’t get the opportunity. Now he doesn’t do these things on the cars — it’s a bit more difficult when you’re 70 and have an only marginally functional hip and walk only with the assistance of a walker — and, frankly, who can work on cars these days anyway?
So, when I went out yesterday to start my car and got nothing to show for it, I was a bit stuck. I ended up driving Cat’s car to work and contemplating calling Dodge to come get the damned car (Murphy’s Law Aside: guess when my 7-year, 100,000 mile extended warranty expired? If you said “February of this year” you’d be right on). At work I got to thinking about it: I’m a reasonably smart guy. I can read, I can investigate. When I turned the key I had plenty of juice. I pulled up my FSM that I found somewhere on the net in PDF format and got the general procedure for troubleshooting starting problems. Went home at lunch and started digging around. After a bit I decided that it was the starter. On a whim I tried to start the car. It started! This made me more certain it was the starter with a dead spot somewhere.
Today I started it to go to work and it was a bit flaky, and once the engine caught the starter sounded like something — gear teeth to my ears — was rattling around in the starter. I figured I’d go to AutoZone and grab me a new starter. As I was pulling into the parking lot, the engine and electrical started dying. Oh joy. As I pulled into the parking space, smoke began coming out from under the hood. Oh shit. As I got my stuff and got out of the car, our phrase of the day became relevant as smoke, quite literally and with great aplomb, billowed from beneath my engine block. I thought I’d lost the car to flames, personally.
It eventually died down. To make a long story merely long, I had it towed to the Dodge dealer. The starter was essentially gone. It took the battery and starter relay out with it. The car is now back in my possession and stinking to high heaven of electrical smoke.
I’m still no grease monkey.
[...] way, I still work on my own vehicles exclusively, but now that’s quite infrequent. Coldforged.org tells us a story of his recent car troubles, which in [...]
Why won’t a car start?
When ColdForged drove his/her car to the parts house, I suspect the starter gear was extended into the flywheel, this literally killed the starter, and likely caused all the smoke he saw and smelled.
Ah yes the joys of modern automobiles. I will agree with you cars these days can’t be worked on by the average joe. These days you need all kinds of fancy diagnostic computers and special plastic wrenches etc.
Electrical smoke stinks!