Customer Rebuilt Engine & Now It Won't Start

In this video I have a look at a customers Ford Escape that has recently had the engine rebuilt. The down side is after the job was finished the vehicle would not start!! Well, let's see what it needs to make it run. Remember, don't forget the basics. -Enjoy!

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Due to factors beyond the control of South Main Auto Repair, it cannot guarantee against unauthorized modifications of this information, or improper use of this information. South Main Auto Repair assumes no liability for property damage or injury incurred as a result of any of the information contained in this video. South Main Auto Repair recommends safe practices when working with power tools, automotive lifts, lifting tools, jack stands, electrical equipment, blunt instruments, chemicals, lubricants, or any other tools or equipment seen or implied in this video. Due to factors beyond the control of South Main Auto Repair, no information contained in this video shall create any express or implied warranty or guarantee of any particular result. Any injury, damage or loss that may result from improper use of these tools, equipment, or the information contained

[TheWaterman]

My first over haul was a 1966 Buick skylark. The car would studder, go blam blam pop pop. After three days pulling my hair out I called a moble mechanic and he came out to look it over. Did a double take when he saw me. Asked how old I was, told him I was thirteen and this was my first car. He thought my Dad helped me and nope he didn't, did it with a Chilton Manual in one hand and a wrench in the other. He looked over the engine and found out the timing was a 180 deg off. Reset and the car started and ran great. He didn't charge me and handed me a card and said if my parents said it was OK I can learn from him on weekends and Summer as long as I keep my grades up. Spent several weekend and Summer's riding and working with him. Learned a lot about gas and diesel car's and trucks. He was a great guy. Passed away a year after high school graduation.

[HomieHektor]

Mrs. O tooting your horn was hilarious, thanks for not editing that out 😁

[geebee]

I literally laughed out loud when Mrs. O. honked the horn to mess with you and made you jump!

[jamesstuart]

If that's all the DIYer forgot, he deserves a beer

[jrgolf]

He was 99.5% there. That guy is still lucky to have found you. This would be a dream rippoff for an dishonest shop. Blinkerfluid, lol!

[toolinhand]

Thumbs up just for the horn honk while you're in the engine compartment.

[bigclivedotcom]

Those fun little moments like at 6:00 are gold.

[chrislawson]

The horn honk was freaking perfect. Well done.

[apexkeeper]

That poor guy! My dumbest mistake like this was doing a fuel pump on an 89 ramcharger. The massive 36 gallon gas tank was completely full and I to siphon as much as I could, remove the skid plate, rip my hand apart disconnecting lines before I could drop the tank. Major pain in the ass job getting that damn tank out. Upon re-installing the tank I realized there was a fuel pump access hatch in the floor....

[kevinburns]

Customer.... Hey, I saved 800 bucks changing my own engine! How much do I owe you for putting those springs in?
😂😂😂😂😂

[WilliamPhillips-]

Back in the day I was an automotive machinist. Every so often I would have a proud father show up with an engine to rebuild for his kid's car. This time it was a customer with a 396 for his kid's Chevelle. He wanted the engine bored, balanced and blue printed, and ported heads. I was well into the build when the customer came into the shop and said he wanted to "save" money so he and his kid would have a memory of putting the engine together themselves. I told the customer that I was not happy with that request, mainly because my name was on that engine. The customer finally agreed to let me short block it, but he would do the rest with his kid.
A week later, I got a call at about 2:30 in the morning. The customer was yelling at me from the get-go. "This GD engine doesn't have any oil "What the hell did you do or not do!!!!"
I stopped at the shop and picked up my drill and pump priming rod and went to the gas station the customer was using to test run the engine in the kid's Chevelle.
I saw they had the valve covers off and the top of the heads were dry as a bone in the desert.
So I pulled the distributor and put light in the hole and I could see all the way to the top of the oil pump. I asked the customer where he assembled the engine and he told me his garage. I told him the oil pump shaft between the distributor and the oil pump was missing. He told me I must have forgotten to give it to him at my shop. I told him we were going to his garage. In the middle of the garage floor was the box I had given him at my shop. I walked over, looked in the box and there in all its singular glory was the shaft. I didn't say anything to him, just picked up the shaft and went back the the station.
I primed the engine oiling system, put the shaft in and put the distributor back and told him to start it.
I was younger then and a bit pissed-off, so I stepped back while the crowed gathered around the engine bay. The customer had a remote start and cranked the engine. The engine instantly fired, and all those gathered around the
, well let's just say they received a break in oil baptism. There was oil everywhere. I guess I should have told them to put the valve covers on, but hey, short block it was.
I walked out and went home to bed with the biggest smile of my lifetime.

[wesleychapelakathesith_zl]

You are what we need in America, honesty and integrity and I want to say Thank you! 👍👍

[johnaclark]

Mrs. O and the horn nearly knocked me off my chair laughing. That was GREAT! She's pretty quick thinking!

[boaterbil]

This is a bit long. I was working as a tech in a Cadilliac dealer and had a complaint that a/c did not cool with radio on. Went on a road test and sure enough if you turned on the radio the a/c stopped cooling. fan still worked but warm air.
Back in the stall, I had key on engine off and when I turned off the radio I heard the A/C chitch engage. Wow! After following all the wiring, I pulled the Wiring harness from the plug that went into the vehicle. Looking inside the male plug, I saw one of the spades missed it's mark into the plug and the spade bent to the side shorting against the neighbor spade. The bent one was compressor coil wire and the other one it was touching was "antenna down" so it only sent power to the a/c when calling the antenna to go down.
This was a "brand new" car built from the factory with this error.
Thought you would enjoy this.

[MAXTORRACER]

Honestly. If I had a dollar for every time I did a job, turned the key, and remembered oh yeah that battery thing is kinda important, I would be rich.

[georgeburke]

It is refreshing to see someone who is honest and displays integrity. I wish I lived closer to your shop as you would be my go to mechanic.

[thomasherring]

Many years ago I swapped a 350 out of a wrecked '78 Nova into a '79 Malibu. The Malibu came to me with a 267 V8 in it, wasn't running very well, knocking and overheating. My friend and I did the engine swap, got everything back together, and the engine fired up and ran great first go. However, it kept tearing apart the alternator belt.

I must have replaced that belt 5 times. I took the alternator off at least 4 times, tore it apart, examined the pulley in great detail looking for any bending, or sharp bits, or roughness in the surface. I examined the belt path looking for any kind of miss alignment. I spun the center shaft probably hundreds of times feeling for any king of binding. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out why the thing was eating belts.

I was probably 3 weeks into this fiasco, and pretty much at the end of my rope when my wife (then girlfriend) pointed at the front of the engine, and said "is that supposed to look like that." So, it turns out that while putting things together, we managed to use the crank pulley off one of the engines, with the water pump pulley off the other. One of them had a smaller diameter groove for the outer belt, which was the alternator, while the other pulley had all three grooves at the same diameter, so the two pulleys were trying to pull the alternator belt at two different speeds, literally tearing it apart. Not bad, it only took 6 belts, 3 weeks, and my wife to figure out what the heck the problem was.

[VWWRENCHIE]

In this episode, Eric O closes the gap (literally!) between customer and his vehicle.
and puts the spark back in another vehicle and sends another customer on his way WITH a spring in his step (and his plug wire boot).

[Anonymous-itjw]

About 45 years ago, when I was in school, I worked on cars in my front yard in the student apartments area (1 story GI-Bill surplus tarpaper shacks from the late 1940’s ). After working on foreign cars exclusively, I took on the tune-up of a US made V-8. I can’t remember exactly what make it was, but to do the job, I decided I had to remove the distributor from the rear of the engine, behind the air cleaner, and it was a long reach with very little working room. The tune-up was all routine, gapping and installing the plugs, checking the wires, checking the distributor cap for carbon tracking, and checking that whatever triggered the spark, either points or a primitive electronic system, etc. was working fine, replacing parts as needed, etc.

It was still daylight when I thought I had finished and first tried to crank it up. No spark! At midnight I was still out there in the yard fooling with it. Did I mention it was a dark winter night near the Virginia mountains and it was really cold? The car absolutely, positively had to be ready by 8:00 a.m., and I was sweating bullets, in spite of the freezing weather. Defeated, I finally went to bed. An hour later it hit me - the only major change I had made was to pull out the shaft that turned the distributor, check it out and put it back in. As I remember, back then most distributor shafts on foreign cars could only go back in one way - it either worked or it didn’t, but it only went in one way. Not so for my buddy’s American made V-8 - that night I learned that the distributor shaft would go in the correct way, or you could turn it half a turn (180 degrees) and it would also go in and seat properly, but the ignition timing would then be 180 degrees off, and the engine would never start. There may have been a way to know right away that you had installed the shaft incorrectly, such as marking the position of the distributor cap before you took it apart, but there was no glory in using common sense or caution, so this fool rushed in where a real mechanic would have feared to have gone. I fixed it at about 2:00 a.m., and made about 50 cents an hour for my labor.

Was there any valid reason to take out the distributor shaft? Of course not, but I didn’t know how ignorant I was. This was the Dunning-Kruger Effect making one of its early appearances in my life. Look it up - it has universal application, just like Murphy’s Law, the only law that has never been amended or repealed!

[tim]

Mrs. O gets an award! We learn many things by making mistakes. No harm no fowl. Thanks for the great videos.