I'm a Handy Kinda Guy. Almost a mechanic. No really. Very handy


I was just beginning to plan my day about 8:30 Saturday morning when my brother
Phil (also a lawyer living in Calgary) appeared at the door.  He was on foot.  It
seems that his Jimmy had quit on the way up from our folk's house.  He had had to
jump start it to even get that far.  So we went hunting for a mechanic.  We
circled the city, so to speak, and couldn't find any mechanics on or off duty, so
we decided to look into the problem ourselves.  After all, just because a 1997
Jimmy won't run doesn't mean the problem needs rocket science applied to it, does
it?

So we analyzed it.  The outfit would start with a boost and it would run for a
minute or less and then stop dead.  And it was dead, the power door looks wouldn't
even work.  So there was no juice in the battery.  Phil and I decided that this
could be caused by a short in the electrical system (saying that and knowing what
it means are two different things), a defective battery, or by an alternator that
doesn't work anymore.  So we stopped at the NAPA autoparts store and asked for
some advice.  The guy there said it could be a short, or a bad battery or a
defective alternator. Already Phil and I were starting to feel like we had a firm
grasp of the problem.  He said he could probably sell us a new alternator and he
had lots of batteries.  He didn't say anything about is inventory of shorts.  But
he said that since the battery was taking a bit of a charge from the boost, after
all it did run for a minute or so after starting, that his first guess would be
that the alternator was defective.  He said he had a way to check that, but we
would have to remove the alternator and bring it down to his shop.  Phil and I
both looked up in surprise.  "We could do that?"  we asked.

"Sure," he said, "it's easy, just whip it off and bring in down."

Now that made it sound so simple.  We looked at each other.  "Sure" we thought.
"We could do that."  But just to be sure we asked him to find a new alternator.  I
told him it was because we didn't want to go to all that trouble and then find out
he didn't even have the part, but really I  wanted to know what one looked like so
we could have a better chance of "whipping off" the right part.

So we stopped at my house and picked up my tools, then we boosted the Jimmy one
more time and drove it into the folk's garage out of the cold.  Then we hunted
around under the hood until we found the alternator.  Right on top of the pile, it
looked like a piece of cake.  I grabbed a wrench and started twisting off the
first exposed nut.  Phil gently stopped me and reminded me that the first rule of
any good mechanic was to take the hardest nuts off first and he pointed out a nut
on the bottom of the alternator covered in five layers of wire housing and barely
visible, with only a millimeter or two exposed.  Even so, within an hour we had
twisted that nut, which turned out to actually be a bolt, off, and just as I was
removing it from it's compact little nest, holding it carefully between by third
and forth fingers while standing on my head, (this was the only position that
allowed any access) I made a fateful mistake and let it slip down into the bowels
of the Jimmy's motor.  Here I should explain that because a Jimmy is a Yuppy's
prayer come true it is a 4 wheel drive vehicle.  And it has a wonderful iron plate
covering the entire bottom of the engine cavity to protect the motor from land
mines or whatever else the gentlemen who drive these vehicles happen to run across
as they motor across the wilderness of beautiful downtown Calgary.  The advantages
of this iron plate must be legion.  But the disadvantage is that anything dropped
from the top of the motor does not come out the bottom.  And the vehicle, while
wonderfully compact and efficient is still too heavy to pick up and shake in order
to dislodge such a stray part.  In fact, before the day was over I had dropped a
wrench and another bolt into the depths.  This was bitterly disappointing to me
because Phil didn't drop anything.  In fact, he developed some unbelievable
contortions and a solid supply of true blind luck and was eventually able to
recover everything that I dropped.  This was the beauty of our partnership really.

Well, we eventually removed the alternator.  Once it was off we were pleased to
notice that the first buried bolt that we had taken off and then dropped wasn't
really part of the alternator housing and should not have been removed.  But
taking that bolt off only cost us about an hour so we didn't worry too much about
it.  It was the 3 hours of hunting for it after I dropped it that griped us the
most.

Back to NAPA to test the alternator.  Unfortunately the partsman couldn't find the
necessary electrical plug that fit into this alternator to properly test it.
Finally after searching among a tremendous inventory of plugs, each labeled with a
code, he got called to the telephone and he suggested that I look for a plug
labeled 313.  I looked through them all once, and then twice and finally a third
time.  There was no plug 313. So I carefully examined the hole that the plug had
to go into and decided to look on the ends of each of the plugs to see if any
looked like they might fit.  In less than an hour I found one that looked like a
perfect match.  So I shoved it into the alternator and picked up the other end to
plug it into the testing machine.  About that time Phil came over and asked what I
was doing.  "Looking for plug #313," I said.  "What's that in your hand," he
said.  I looked and sure enough the plug I had chosen was labeled 313. Apparently
each plug had two code labels, one on each side.  That's such a brilliant idea for
labeling things that I wished that I had thought of it myself.  If I had, I
probably would have looked on both sides of each of the plugs on the wall.

Anyway the alternator got tested and it was perfectly sound.  We weren't that
disappointed because, in the meantime, we had discovered that we had given the
partsman the wrong description of Phil's motor and he didn't actually have a
proper replacement in stock.  So we went back up to the garage and pulled the
battery out of the Jimmy.  That was easy, except that it turned out there was a
big crack in the side of the battery and the one terminal didn't screw off, it
just fell out of the side of the battery.  So did a lot of acid.  They say it
takes a few days to discover the full effects of battery acid on clothing.  I
wonder what those effects are?

So we put a new battery in place, and put the alternator back in place, and even
put the fan belt in place.  Phil did that while I wasn't looking so I can't say
how we did it.  While I was helping we worked on it for over an hour and couldn't
get it on at all.  When it was all buttoned up the Jimmy started on the first go
and was apparently fixed.  Dad swished the  the acid off the garage floor and then
it was time to winterize the boat.  We had to hurry to get to that before dark.