Up to Standards
- Author: Mike Weinberg, Contributing Editor
- Subject Matter: Manual transmission
- Issue: Unusual service events
(Believe me, you can’t make this stuff up)
I have written an awful lot of technical articles over the years, and I thought it might be fun to go over some of the strange events that every transmission-repair shop experiences with customer relations, strange technical issues and the feeling at times that you are in the Twilight Zone. The important issue in handling weird events is to realize you are not alone, that everyone in our business has some similar experiences. It starts with ordinary everyday activity that soon descends into strangeness. Some of these tales are created by the human behavior that we need to deal with every day, whether it involves customers or others who hold themselves out to be professionals.
On the professional side, we sold a remanufactured transfer case to a major tire-company franchise store. The transfer case, a computer-controlled unit with internal clutch pack, was an active transfer case in the “automatic” 4WD position. The transfer-case computer measures the speed of all four wheels and applies 4WD when it sees a difference in wheel speeds without any input from the driver. Several days later, I received a call from the service manager, who was unhappy, as our dyno-tested reman unit “was doing the same thing as the unit he had just sent back as a core return.”
I explained that it would be really abnormal for two separate units to be doing the same thing and went about a diagnostic routine that could help him determine whether the problem was external to the transfer case. I got to a discussion of tire sizes and pressures and how critical is for them to be within 1/4 inch of each other in circumference with equal tire pressures at all four wheels. When I asked him whether he had measured the tires, he got nasty: “All of them have the same labels on the sidewall; why would they have to be measured?”
In more than 50 years of racing, I know that even though the tires come out of the same mold, they all grow to different sizes when inflated. On any given race weekend our crew’s tire guy will air up 10 sets of slicks and two sets of rain tires, for a total of 48 tires. He then gets out the stagger gauge and tries to match the sets to be as close as possible for circumference, and he is using nitrogen to fill the tires because it is dry with no water vapor to make the pressures consistent.
At this point the manager told me that I was a moron, that he had been in the business “forever” and that I didn’t have a clue as to what I was talking about. I have to admit, this pissed me off, but I kept my cool and explained again how critical the tire size was to proper operation of a computer-controlled transfer case. He hung up on me.
That afternoon, UPS dropped off his core exchange and we immediately tore it down. There was absolutely nothing wrong inside, and the tire store had sold the customer a unit on a missed diagnosis. I called the store back and got the manager again, informing him that the unit was perfect and the problem was external. At this point he made some remarks about my parents not being married at the time of my birth and hung up.
I now was out for revenge and to protect our professional reputation, so I called the head of racing for the tire brand, with whom I had been friends for 40 or so years. I told him my sad tale and asked what we could do to get this guy back to reality. He took the store information and said he would handle it. The following morning I got a call from the store owner, who apologized profusely for the bad manners of the service manager, who he said no longer worked for him, and asked me to help one of his technicians solve the problem. I ran him through the proper diagnostics and they swapped some tires, and everything worked as it should.
Another tale of professional misconduct involves an M5R2 transmission sold to a major transmission franchise store about 30 miles away that was repairing a Ford pickup for a Ford dealer, one of his wholesale customers. He called the next day and said the transmission was as noisy as the one he took out. I asked whether the noise could be coming from elsewhere in the vehicle, and he replied that the dealer was sure it was in the trans and that his own man had driven it and was of the same opinion.
We sent another unit, with the same results after it was installed. The franchise shop owner was now furious with me and could not understand that three transmissions (including the original) could not be noisy. In the meantime the Ford dealer took the truck in trade and sold his customer a new vehicle. In my experience everyone in our industry hates a problem that they can’t solve, so I was disappointed not to be able to find the cause of the problem.
About a month later, as we were closing for the day a young guy walked in and said he had bought a pickup truck at auction and it had a noisy trans and that the trans had our brand label on it. He had the truck with him, and I went out to test-drive it. It was immediately apparent that the differential bearings were bad and that was where the noise came from. I explained what was wrong and he bought a bearing and seal kit from us and went home to redo the rear end. Three days later he came back with the worst set of pitted carrier and pinion bearings I had ever seen, thanking me for making the right call. I asked for the bad bearings, which he gave me, and I sent them with a letter to the franchise shop and the Ford dealer to educate them in their lack of technical expertise.
Weirder yet is the brand-new midsize Buick that came into our trans shop from a Buick dealer that was a wholesale customer. The dealer also brought a brand-new GM torque converter and asked us to swap it for them. I test-drove the car with the service writer and told him that the converter was not the problem. I believed the problem was a miss in the V-6 engine in the car. He said that the GM service rep wanted the converter replaced and that in his vast experience the problem would be solved.
I said I would be glad to R&R the part as requested but that it wasn’t going to solve the problem, but they insisted. We swapped the converter and the problem was still present. At this point all he wanted was answers and asked me to see whether I could provide them. Long story short: After a pretty thorough engine diagnosis, we found that the timing was so out of whack I couldn’t understand how this vehicle could run.
I called a guy at Buick engineering whom I knew and he began to laugh, explaining that he knew what the problem was. Believe it or not, Buick had a foul-up in which a bunch of even-firing cams were installed in odd-firing engines, and they made it into the dealer’s showrooms. Buick took the car back and swapped in a new, correctly firing engine, and there was once more peace in the valley.
Now we get to the really far-out stuff, which comes from the retail customer. On a busy Monday morning a customer came in and parked a midsize station wagon in the lot. He entered the office and said he thought he had a transmission problem and asked us to take his car for a ride. I went out with him and walked up to the vehicle, about to get into the driver’s seat. It appeared that he had a rolled-up carpet in the back of this wagon and the rear seat was folded down. As I pulled on the door handle to open it, the carpet came to life, and I immediately slammed the door shut and made a strategic retreat. In the back of this vehicle was a 250-pound bull mastiff dog.
“Don’t worry; he doesn’t bite,” the customer informed me.
I trust in God, but not dogs that could eat a black bear, so I asked him to take the dog out so I could test-drive the vehicle and come back with all my body parts in the same shape. After the dog came out of the car, which caused the vehicle to sway remarkably on the suspension, I went for the test drive. Once on the road I realized that there were 10-inch-long icicles of dog drool that had solidified and were hanging from the headliner, making the view in the mirror look as if I were in an ice cave.
I returned to inform that he did not have a trans problem and that the car was running on seven cylinders and needed a tune-up. He put the beast back in the car as I watched the rear springs settle about three inches, and he left for parts unknown.
On a lovely spring day a young, attractive blonde woman came into the trans shop with her father. She explained that her car was broken down a few miles away and she believed it was the transmission. I got all her information and sent a rollback out to get her Acura. The truck came back with a nice, clean Acura onboard and the bed of the rollback covered in trans fluid. We unloaded the vehicle, got it into one of the bays and set it up on the lift. It was immediate that she had hit something big on the road and had cleaned off the bottom of both case halves of the transmission.
After we used half a bag of Speedy Dry to clean up the mess, she came back with her father to find out the results. It was also apparent that she had been waiting in an establishment that sold adult beverages and that she was feeling little or no pain. We informed her of what had happened and that her insurance carrier would pay for a new or reman transmission. She went ballistic, screaming at the top of her lungs that she had never hit anything. After about 20 minutes of insanity, I took her father aside and asked why she was so mad, when the insurance would cover a very expensive repair, and he shrugged and said, “She hates to admit blame for anything.”
I said that is why they call them accidents, something that occurs by chance. It took an hour longer with the father and daughter outside before she calmed down enough to give us authorization to get on with the repairs. Remember, all that glitters is not gold.
We had just rebuilt the trans on a Nissan Maxima, and I finished road-testing the unit. All was well, and the customer came down the next day to pick up the car and pay us. She was a very nice lady who left a $20 bill for the guys who worked on the car and drove off. About a week later she called and said the car was not working properly.
Rather than having her drive it in we sent a flatbed to pick it up. When it got in I drove it and the vehicle was in limp mode. The fluid level was correct, so we went into the diagnostic mode. Battery voltage was good and all electronic connections were correct, so on to the computer. The ohmmeter immediately showed no power to the trans computer. Now on to the fuse box, where I went to check resistance on the fuses only to find that the 10-amp fuse supplying the computer was among the missing. Now these are “little fuses” that do not fall out and usually require a fuse tool or a set of needle-nose pliers to remove or install. I replaced the fuse and the trans was perfect. I called the lady and agreed to drive the car to her and she would drive me back.
On the ride back to the shop she inquired as to what had gone wrong. I explained the missing fuse and had to admit that I didn’t have a clue as to how this could happen. She thanked me for the quick service and went home. The next day she called me back, and I answered the phone with some fear that all was not well. She said that she had solved the mystery and explained that “the 18-year-old moron I live with and support (her saintly son)” had blown a fuse for his trillion-watt stereo system in his car and had taken one from hers so he could go on a date. You can’t go broke underestimating the intelligence of a teenager.
I saved the best for last. We had a call from a customer one county away from us who had an Olds Cutlass with a 200C transmission. He had the trans worked on by five different dealers, and it was never correct. He came on a recommendation from another of our customers. He brought the car in and gave us authorization to inspect the trans internally.
We wound up rebuilding the trans and he came up to get his vehicle. I took him for a test drive before he left to ensure that he was now going to fully enjoy his vehicle, and he said that this was the first time since he had owned the vehicle that the trans operated well and that he was going to sue GM. I wished him well and he left.
Two days later he called and I got on the phone. I asked how the trans was and he said fine, but he was upset, as his wife had found a used condom under the driver’s seat. I was about to reply that he should be more careful, but it occurred to me that his bride might be on another line and he was between a rock and a hard place.
“We want to know who had sex in our car” was the next statement. I have to admit vast experience with being the last guy to touch the car, but this was beyond belief. I said that our people are paid to repair cars and that there is no time for sexual activity in a busy shop. He wasn’t having any of that and kept interrogating me as to how this could have happened. I explained chapter and verse that there were at least 40 cars on the lot including a stretch limo, a custom van, a couple of Mercedes, Cadillacs, a big Bimmer, and a host of other vehicles much more comfortable than his little Cutlass. He kept going and I was running out of gas.
As a parting shot, I said to him that the only way I could see to solve his problem was to bring the condom up to the shop and we would have a lineup and see who it fit. He hung up and we never heard anything further. Thank God that there was no DNA testing in those days or we would have had a CSI team visit. Every one of us has had customers come back and claim that the A/C now wasn’t working, or a turn signal or brake light was out, after we completed a trans repair, but this deal holds the record.
The lesson learned over the years is to be what everyone expects you to be: polite, courteous, concerned for your customer and cool under fire in the wonderful world of transmission repair.
Mike Weinberg is president of Rockland Standard Gear.
