Wednesday, August 1, 2007

I have the worst luck with cars...

So... My father-in-law, who is a pretty cool guy, let me borrow his 1987 Toyota Pickup truck. I had it for maybe two weeks, and Tuesday morning of last week (07/24/07) I go out to get into the truck and find that it is missing; it had been stolen.

That next Saturday, late in the morning we found out that the truck had been recovered over off of 68th Avenue and Henrietta Drive. We were told that some things were missing, but overall the truck looked like it was in good shape. When the tow-truck arrived at our house, we quickly noticed that the truck was missing the two passenger side wheels and tires. The tow-truck driver had informed us that they also had taken the battery and the catalytic converter.

So my father-in-law, being the most awesomest guy he is, had the truck taken to Goodyear to have it worked on. They had the tires that we needed for the truck, but they did not have the rims to go with them. So Rich (my father-in-law), myself and Sam (my friend) all went down to pick-n-pull off of Stockton and Gerber to get the rims. After searching for 20 or 30 minutes we found two rims off of a Toyota Camry; i had assumed that the Camry and the small pickup shared the same size rims, but as I found out this proved to be wrong later. We took the rims back to Goodyear, where they immediately mounted the tires to the them, and then tried to mount the wheel to the truck. This is when I found out that the Camry does not have the same size rim. So we took the rims back to pick-n-pull and found two very old Toyota trucks and brought those rims back and thankfully the worked!

So now that the tires were situated, we were able to focus on replacing the battery, but come to find out, instead of unscrewing the terminals on the battery, they just cut it out. So, after talking to Goodyear, they assured us that they would be able to install those parts for us on Sunday as they were open from 9am to 4pm that day. So all said and done, we went to dinner and relaxed for the rest of the evening.

The next day, we did our normal Sunday routine... go to church in the morning, and have lunch afterwards... at this point, I needed to go home, and Rich was going to go get the truck and have it sent back to Vallejo to have other things worked on. He arrives at Goodyear by 2:30pm to find that the whole place is closed. No messages on the doors stating any crisis had gone on or anything; just closed. So at that point we decide that it would be best then to tackle this problem tomorrow (on Monday).

Monday morning comes and Rich gets to our house by 8am and we go have breakfast. After breakfast we head over to the Goodyear shop and they let us know it will be a couple hours before getting the parts in. They were also very apologetic for closing the shop on Sunday without letting anyone know what happened. The manager had also said he would cut us a deal because of the trouble. So we accepted his apology, and asked if we could just get the battery cables, because there was no sense in just sitting around. The manager said that was fine so off we went. About 30 minutes later we come back with the cables, and the we gave them to the guys to install. A little over an hour later, the cables were installed as was the battery and the truck now had power again. When it came time to pay, they ended up charging my father-in-law an arm-and-a-leg for the work. When asked about the supposed 'deal' they were going to cut us for the trouble, the manager replied with "Well, I let you bring in your own battery cables; I'm not supposed to do that because we don't know where they came from..." Since we were in a hurry, and it looked like it might take some time to even get the guy to budge on the cost, Rich just paid it so we could get it over to the muffler shop to have the catalytic converter installed.

We got it over to Muffler Tech who installed the catalytic converter in a few hours and the truck was quiet again. No sooner than leaving the parking lot at Muffler Tech, we find that the wheel is making the most horrible scraping noise ever. It sounded as if the truck were in pain. So we decided to take the truck back over to Goodyear (since they installed the tires) and have them look at it again; this was totally against our better judgement, but we didn't have a lot of choices at this point.

The next day, I decided to call them, since I didn't think it was going to take them that long to find out what was wrong and the guy on the phone said he was surprised that no one had called us. He also said, that his colleague says the truck needs new front shocks (which Rich replaced last year) and that was the reason for the grinding noise. I call Rich, and he agrees that we shouldn't give any more money to Goodyear at this point. So I call up Sam and see if he and I can get the truck out of there... so later that day (yesterday, 07/31/07) we go to pick up the truck and surprise! There's nothing wrong with the truck now! The grinding noise has disappeared and everything seems fine.

In the end, we think that Goodyear (which I will suggest that you never go to the one on Stockton Blvd, ever!) didn't tighten down one of the tires and that was what was causing the grinding noise. So now, the truck is working fine, and it's all back to normal.

Again, I have the worst luck with cars.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...
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ALWAYS BOARD said...

Wow! What a headache!! It's amazing how dishonest people/businesses are.

Glad it's all worked out!

How are you guys? What's new?