Routine Car Maintenance… who knew?
So, for the past two or three weeks I have been living with a sick car.
The engine light kept coming on and the ODB2 reader displayed codes that referred to multiple cylinder misfires. Looking that up on line and in the manuals, it suggested that the cam shaft sensor may be faulty, the oxygen sensors or even a vacuum leak.. all of which are pretty expensive and time consuming repairs.
Needless to say, I've been avoiding the issue since I haven't had the time or finances to perform a proper repair since being between jobs and not knowing where cash may come from. That is… until this past Friday.
Michelle went to a Midnight Madness sale and when she came home (after midnight) she woke me up to tell me that the car was on fire. Oh boy. As it turned out – nothing was on fire – the catalytic converter was running red hot. Scratch that – cherry red hot – near melting point hot.
By the time I got out of bed and looked, the converter had cooled to a dull red glow – so no immediate danger, but definitely lost some life if it didn't melt.
Yesterday morning I started the car and she ran fine, but just as rough – the engine hesitates and lurks forward during gear shifts – normal activity as per the past few months. If there is no shortening of life for the converter, I'd be lucky.
I have been avoiding the issue for the above mentioned reasons, but this was just too much. If the catalytic converter metls or takes out the oxygen sensors – I am looking at a more costly repair than just a faulty cam sensor, so this morning I started some minor troubleshooting.
Since it seemed to be the one converter only (the car being a six cylinder, has two converters) I wanted to look at the plugs on that side of the engine to see if their was a dead cylinder. All plugs seemed fine – just way out of gap. I re-gapped them and.. guess what?
It runs fine.
I've known it's needed new plugs for a while – it has 135k on it, but never considered that the trouble I've been having is due to mis-gapped/old plugs. I just considered – hey why spend $60 on new plugs when I am probably looking at $125 or more for a faulty sensor? I can just put off the plugs till I get the actual fault fixed.
Well, there is one for me. Why look for abnormal faults when the common one is more common.
Who knew.