This ever happen to you? My car repair woes…. LOL!..

OK, WTF??? Why does it always seem to go like this??? 😆 😆

So… anyhow…. here is what happened.
I drive a lot for my job… all over the Twin Cites, and a good part of the state of MN at times repairing PCs and printers, etc. for my companies clients.

This Friday, I had driven seemingly all over and then on one of my trips, close to my destination fortunately… I got stuck in some slow traffic and all of a sudden… the engine temp light comes on and it starts chimming away!!! DING….DING….DING…. 😯 Awwww shit!!!! 👿 👿
I find that I can’t exit soon, so I turn on the heater and open the windows wide.. decent day, so not bad. Dinger goes off, light goes out, but it is still showing high. I finally get off the street and into the parking lot of my destination and so I drive around and around until it cools down again. I park, pop the hood, cooling fans are not turning. CRAP!! I know what I will be doing this weekend I think. So, I went ahead and did my assigned tasks and the rest of the trips went fine that day, with fast enough travel between them that it kept cool.

I looked it over on Saturday and decide I will go get some parts at the local pull-it-yourself-parts junk yard to try to fix it.
I close the hood… and …. WTF???? It won’t latch!!!!
I take a close look, and …. DAMN!!!! The spring that pulls the piece in that locks it shut…. IS BROKEN!!!! 👿 👿
Ok.. at least it didn’t break the last time I looked when not at home…
I go get a handfull of different solenoids, a flasher unit just for the hell of it, and a connector end with wire so I can test the fans and the spring for the hood, and….. I had noticed something bolted below the battery under the hood that I thought was a voltage regulator…. didn’t bother taking it…. (damn….you’ll see….)
I get home, put in the spring…. it works!! Yeah!!!
I take a look at the manual again… says there is a solenoid for the cooling fans… does not say where!!!! Ok, so I start to Google…. 97 Caravan cooling fan… Google 3rd choice suggests…. 97 Caravan cooling fan solenoid location… WOW!!!!
Click on the forum it was posted too, and immediately see that I should have grabbed that “thing” I saw under the battery….. 👿 👿 😆 😆 😆
Oh, well, I’ll stop in another day and grab one…
I decide to try to see why my horn does not work…. fuse looks ok… decide to pull it out anyhow to look at it.. and….. SNAP! it comes apart and one leg stays in the fuse box and breaks off flush with the fixture!!!! #@^#^*&!!!!!
I manage to pry it out with a dental pick after 10 min of working on it and put in a new fuse… old one was “good” but had corroded, so that is why it broke. Horn still does not work, but one less problem maybe…
I start putting everything back in place…. ok so far… not expecting anything else… (stupid me…) I push the air cleaner assembly back in place.. and…. (you could have guessed this one by now…) SNAP!
WTF!!!! What now???? Broken vacuum line…. DAMN!!!! DAMN!!!! DAMN!!!
Figures….
I had broken it once before, hard plastic line, fragile, I had fixed it with some nylon tubing and glue…. it broke near 1st repair. Did the same, working now… except for the cooling fan, horn… oh yes… and the air bag light which I didn’t dare start working on now… is till on… and cruise control hasn’t worked in a while, but I will leave that till later too…

Seems like when ever I work on something like this, I end up 3x as much time fixing other crap that happens trying to fix the original problem……. 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆

Just sharing…. thought you’d get a kick out of this… 😆 😆
I’m having a beer…….I deserve one after this…

Revwarnut