This morning’s fun started out with a quick trip up the road to the garage to have the brakes mended after dropping Katie and Alex off at school.
I honestly can’t remember the last time the Traverse had a brake job. Seriously…I know she’s had one in the distant past, possibly two but the brakes have held up remarkably well thanks to primarily driving on the motorways and using the engine braking more often than not.
But we were definitely due to do the rotors and pads up front with the pulsing and the grinding on the right front brakes when downshifting from 2nd to 1st in the final phase of braking.
So yeah…ouch. But better that ouch than the bigger one if the brakes decided they weren’t interested in doing the job much longer.
Of course, you can never go to garage and just having the one thing you’re interested in having mended be the only thing you actually ought to be mending. Yeah, mending the engine mounts would be nice but if all I have to worry about is hearing a disagreeable noise when I start giving her the beans, I’ll live with it. Besides which, WFOX is usually what I’m hearing anyway… 🙂
So after leaving the garage with mended brakes…
…there’s a point when doing the test drive that you consider some of the other items that were mentioned as “it’d be nice to be mended” that the blithering idiocy sets in.
After all, “how hard can it be?”
Now that I’m fully committed to the idiocy, I’m off to the auto parts store and come out with two air filters…one for the engine and one for the cabin.
Seriously, how hard can it be?
I’ve been changing air filters in engines as long as I’ve had cars and generally it’s pretty painless. Unscrew a wing nut (a Duster sporting a Chrysler Super Six), unlatch some springs (Nissan Pulsar, Ford F-150, and Ford Escape), or undo some plastic latches and manhandle the air filter cover out of the way (Volkswagen Passat).
None of that experience could have prepared me for the nasty surprises I was going to encounter under the bonnet to replace the Traverse’s air filter. Even the YouTube video made it look fairly simple which should have been the first warning sign that a) the person in the video is actually a competent mechanic, b) of course the procedure will never be as easy as it looks, and c) I’m not that super competent and confident mechanic in the video.
It doesn’t mean that I’m hopeless…after all, I figured out how to mend the battery after a bit of poking about and that really wasn’t particularly straightforward as the battery is in the floor of the middle row rather than under the bonnet where it belongs.
And that’s probably the problem…I’m not so utterly hopeless at mechanical things to leave it to the purview of the mechanics as the practitioners of some dark magical arts but I’m hardly an expert in mending cars which puts me square in the space of just enough competence to be dangerous.
So here I am in the garage with two filters in hand thinking I should be done in half a hour.
George Carlin would have a field day with my self-admitted average skill at turning wrenches. In fact, he did several times… 😉
Anywho, here I am under the bonnet with tools at hand and the first thing you realise is that this vehicle was designed by someone who used to work at Lego.
You’ve got to pop these fasteners and remove a fair amount of plastic that protects the engine. Then there are six Torx screws (thank you *SO* much for *NOT* using standard crosspoint or flathead screws that would work for the tools available to 99% of the do-it-yourself community!) arrayed round the air filter housing.
Three of them mock you by being relatively easily accessible. What you don’t know is how miserable it’s going to be to get at the three located nearest the firewall at the rear of the engine compartment.
It isn’t enough that they’re in a very tight space. The screws round the air filter housing are located in an inclined section of the housing near the firewall where ratcheting is effectively impossible with standard tools.
A Torx extender would have been lovely.
A Torx extender is what I didn’t have. Thank goodness I invested in a set of Torx wrenches when I thought I could replace the cartridge in my shower faucet and needed my wonderfully handy neighbour to bail me out (thank you, Miguel!) or it’d have been game over.
After finally removing the screws, the filter swap itself was relatively painless. Undo a sensor, unclamp the hose, wrestle the filter cover off, replace filter (which only goes in one way, thank goodness!) and start putting everything back together!
Half hour job my pearlecent pale white alabaster heiney! More like a hour or so!
But the darned thing was properly replaced and the engine sensors aren’t bitching so I’m at least happy about that.
To add insult to injury, replacing the cabin air filter literally only took about ten minutes with half of that spent unloading the metric tonne of stuff in the glovebox.
Are you flipping kidding me?
All you had to do was unlock the main arm attached to one side and unscrew two plastic plugs which keep the glovebox attached to the side walls and allow it to travel up and down.
Old filter out, new filter in, put it back together taking ten minutes from start to finish.
Would it have been too much to have the gents who did the glovebox design work with the ones who decided how air filters and lightbulbs (another joyous procedure where you disassemble the wheel well and mend the bulbs in the blind by feel alone) and maybe figure out where the latter two sets of engineers went horribly wrong in terms of allowing reasonably intelligent consumers to mend the simple things themselves?
After all, how hard could it be…really? 😉