Sometimes junior techs are like clean shop rags – they’re never around when you need one. It was my third circuit around the shop and still no sign of Beanie.
“Basil! Have you seen the Bean?”
Basil adjusted his reading glasses as he nodded towards the side door. “You’ll find the lad out there, seeking his fortune amidst the unrelenting hydraulic flows of our industrialized world.”
I skidded to a halt. “What?”
Basil smiled. “He’s panning for gold in the drainage ditch.”
Sure enough, I found Beanie beside the main road with a shallow metal pan in his hands. He had an old prospector’s hat on his head and his eyes were glued to the bottom of the pan. He didn’t hear me walk up.
“BEANIE! What’s going on here?” I demanded. “I’ve got customers waiting for their vehicles and you’re playing in the mud!”
He jumped in surprise. “Gosh, is coffee break over? I…I guess I lost track of time…”
Once again, Beanie had a new hobby. It began last week when he showed us his mail order gold pan, complete with a red bandanna and battered hat. “You pan the inside curve of the stream looking for color – uh, that means placer gold,” he told us. “And when you find it, you follow the stream to its source.” His eyes widened. “You never know when you’re gonna find the mother lode!”
I wasn’t impressed then, and today’s antics weren’t helping. “Save the hobbies for the weekend.” I dragged him back inside the shop by his left ear. “Keep your mind on your work or I’ll find a better use for that pan of yours.”
The neglected job was a Ford Contour. The ‘check engine’ light was on and the customer was complaining of intermittent stalling. Beanie did a quick check with the scanner and found an EGR code, indicating that the differential pressure feedback EGR sensor (DPFE) had failed.
It was a common Ford issue and after grabbing a new sensor off the shelf and installing it, Beanie cleared the code before running into the front office to toss the keys to Quigley. Seconds later, he was at his bench, reaching for his tin pan. Gold fever had him bad and he was eager to get back to his ditch.
“Not ‘til you’ve done yer road test,” growled Tooner. “Don’t go gettin’ sloppy on me.”
“But there’s gold in them there ditches!” wailed Beanie. “Just look what I found yesterday.” He showed Tooner a jar of sparkling sand.
Tooner snorted. “That ain’t gold; that’s shredded tin foil from a candy bar wrapper. Now grab a seat cover and git!”
Fuming with impatience, Beanie left on what should have been a quick road test. But it was a long time before he returned. “The lousy thing stalled on the edge of town,” he complained as he got out of the car. “And it took me forever to get it going again.”
That was the end of his mining efforts for the day. The rest of the afternoon was spent testing fuel and ignition systems on the Ford. But the car ran perfect. Like an old prospector and his ‘find’, it refused to give up any clues to its erratic behavior.
The next morning I sent Beanie out to the parking lot on the pretext of delivering the Contour back to its owner. A minute later, a loud disturbance broke the quiet morning air. Tooner calmly sipped his coffee as he looked out the front window. “Looks like we need clean-up on parking stall six,” he commented. “The Bean is having a meltdown.”
“It won’t start again!” wailed Beanie as we all gathered round. “And listen to it crank – it sounds real strange.” Sure enough, the ailing Ford spun over as if it had a broken timing belt, yet there was still spark at the ignition wires. Pushing the car back into the shop, Tooner and Beanie removed the front covers to check the timing marks – but all was in order.
Tooner stood back and scratched his chin. “Lemme hear how it sounds one more time.”
Beanie glumly reached in and turned the ignition key. This time, the engine roared to life as if nothing had been amiss. Tooner’s eyebrows shot up. “Well, I’ll be a …” Before he could finish, the car suddenly stalled. And when Beanie cranked the engine again, the ‘no compression’ sound was back.
Basil came over for a look. “We had an old Chevy once, back in my dealership days,” he began. “It was an intermittent no start caused by ex- cessive oil pressure to the hydraulic lifters. I believe it was due to a seized oil pressure relief valve.”
Tooner shrugged. “Can’t hurt to check.” He installed an oil pressure gauge and cranked the engine. The needle pinned at 400 psi, the limit our gauge would read. “Well, look at that,” he exclaimed. “I’ll bet them lifters are pumped up solid. They’ll be keepin’ the valves wide open!”
“Now what?” asked Beanie.
“Start by draining the oil,” advised Basil.
Our apprentice looked around the shop. “But all the hoists are full. I’ll have to do it on the ground, but none of our drain pans are low enough.”
“Right,” said Tooner thoughtfully. “You’ll need a real skinny drain bucket for sure.” He eyeballed the gold pan sitting on Beanie’s bench and smirked. “And I know just the thing.”
At first Beanie was choked with the indignity of it all, but that all changed a few minutes later as he came running to show us what he’d found.
“Gold! I’ve found gold!” Sure enough, as he swished around what looked like very new oil in his pan, we could see hundreds of tiny gold flakes floating in the mixture.
Basil chuckled. “That’s not gold, Beanie; those are metal shavings from damaged engine bearings. My guess is that those metal filings are playing havoc with the oil pump pressure relief valve. This Contour has serious issues.”
After phoning the owner, we discovered that the car had been run out of oil the week before, an important detail he’d neglected to tell us.
A week later, and Tooner was still giving Beanie the gears about his new hobby.
“Bean, you’ve been through every puddle and drainage ditch in this entire area and you’ve come up empty. Let’s face it; ya ain’t never gonna find any gold with that tin plate.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” I said in Beanie’s defense. “It all depends on how you look at it.” I held up the invoice in my hand – it was for the Contour, and it now included a brand new engine. “I’d say this job ‘panned out’ pretty good.”
Rick Cogbill, a freelance writer and former shop owner in Summerland, B.C., has written The Car Side for a variety of trade magazines for the past 14 years. “A Fine Day for a Drive,” his first book based on the characters from this column, is now available for order at thecarside.com.
