I’m not going to name names here, but you know what I’m talking about. Schedule was busy and I needed an oil change before heading out of town for a week.
I opted for convenience.
I knew better. You know better. We’ve all been burned, but I went back for twelfths and begged for another branding. Some part of my brain justified it: their whole business is oil changes. They’ve done it before. They can do it again.
It makes sense, but only if you go back like 5-10 years when service was perhaps more reliable. Don’t care what changed, just that I knew I was rolling the dice by not scheduling it with my regular mechanic. Or, hell, going to the dealership.
But I went anyway. “One oil change please. Cheapest oil. Nothing else.”
Annnnnnnd … they snapped the head off the dipstick trying to check the oil.
Burned!
Look, you can’t be mad when the dog bites you. And a part breaking on a 12-year-old car isn’t their fault. What pissed me off is they lied about it. “Uhh sir, it’s stuck. Can you come look?” Moment I touch it, the thing falls out because someone already broke it. But that’s fine, I opted to touch it and assumed liability. My rage and dispute with the company isn’t what this post is about.
It’s about sometimes the job is fucking easy (btw, if you didn’t know, all my stuff reserves the right to be rated R for profanity).
Back up. Replacing a dipstick should be easy, right? Cheap part, remove and replace.
Right?
Ha.
First, half the dipstick head was stuck in the sampling tube. No way to grab it with pliers and a lot of ways to break the seal and have oil splashing up everywhere. I read some horror stories online about drilling a fine hole and putting in a drywall screw to get some traction. If you punch through and destroy the thing, you’re fucked.
Next, you have to find a replacement dipstick or fabricate a new one from a universal type. It just means cutting it to the proper length.
BUT THEN (third), this particular car has an online debate about what length of dipstick is appropriate: stock or a longer one because stock was too short and engines are being over filled. Choose wisely non-mechanical Will!
Eighth but not least, mega genius over here decided to drop some glue in there and reattach the original head. Right? Remember those commercials where they’d glue the guy’s helmet to the ceiling and he’d be hanging? It made sense. Why drill when you can glue? And what could possibly go wrong with dumping glue down a tube?
That toxic mix of uninformed decisions, happenstance, and parts came together an hour ago. After letting the car sit for a week, I walked out and gave the original dipstick a tug.
LOOSE! As the archers say in the fantasy books.
Motherfucker came out.
THEN, I slid the new one in.
PERFECT!
5 minutes. Done. Sometimes, that shit happens. Yay.
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