There is this repair place that has been recommended by both the local version of Consumer Reports and a local TV station. It's so homespun that its website is still under construction, which leads me to believe no one's working on it. That's OK, that probably means they're too busy fixing cars to fix their website.
I had thought about these guys over the past several months as I kept taking my car back in for repairs, but this place does not have what The Mechanic Around The Corner does: location. It's two miles away and on the other side of a busy street. Moreover, it's in an isolated part of town; if I wanted to use the bus to go home or do something else, I would have to walk a hell of a way to get to a stop. That's the reason I have eschewed these guys.
But this, with the fumes and the inability to start, made me change my mind this morning. So what if takes me 15 minutes to get from this place to a bus stop -- and 40 minutes to get home? If I don't trust The Mechanic Around The Corner anymore, why not try these guys instead?
So I did. Unfortunately, these guys are also closed on Friday. Fuck me. However, the gentleman on the other line, a seemingly old guy, asked me, "What's the problem?" So I did. He said that he works on imports as well as old cars. And when I told him the problems, he surmised that they are in fact interconnected. Assuming that what I'm smelling when I turn on the air to external is gas fumes, he said that it's probably a pressure regulator. When it gets busted, he says, "The car runs pretty rich."
I asked him if one of the symptoms of a broken pressure regulator is decreased gas mileage. What I have been noticing (and afraid of) ever since these problems began is that my car is fucking just eating through gas. I have computed that I generally get between 20 and 24 miles per gallon, and that a full tank gets me through at least 320 miles before I hit the "E" on the gauge. But the needle has been descending at a much faster rate. And when I went to deposit my U. of M. "tube work" check and I took a sharp left turn onto the frontage road, that needle, which was on the tick mark just above "E" when my trip home began, dipped as if it was in a compass on the Black Pearl and Jack Sparrow decided to spin the ship to evade the British Royal Navy. It's now just above the empty mark. Ten miles and so much gas, gone like that. My car is fucking jacked up.
You may ask, Why do you now think it's a pressure regulator? I really don't know. I think I'm being lied to by The Mechanic Around The Corner, so I'm susceptible to hear certainty about my car from someone. And I've gotta tell you, the man on the other end of the line sounded like -- and this may be preposterous -- a father figure to me. He was helpful, knowledgeable, and patient with his diagnosis. I want to believe him, I want to think that he has a handle of what is wrong with my car just by how I described the issues to him over the phone. And right now I so regret that not only is his shop closed this weekend, he doesn't even regularly work Saturdays.
If I could have held out three more weeks I would have gone to him and his folksy old shop. But I have no choice. I'm going to The Mechanic Around The Corner Friday morning, and hopefully whatever needs to be fixed will be fixed by the time they close that day. That opens me up to a wrong diagnosis; who knows, maybe they'll say it's not a pressure regulator, and maybe it really isn't a pressure regulator. But I'm at their mercy -- these guys could call me back with one of those "Oh, and we found something else ..." calls. I'm girding myself for that.
And in the meantime I'm going to check the prices of pressure regulators. But before that I'm going to look at my checking account online, just to make absolutely sure I have money in case the The (fucking) Mechanic Around The Corner says this repair is going to cost me another goddamn grand.
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