hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2020.txt

Episode: 2020
Title: HPR2020: Automotive Billing
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2020/hpr2020.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 13:23:02

---

This in HPR episode 2020 entitled Automotive Reeling, it is posted by first time both Ryan and in about 34 minutes long.
The summary is how I feel for automotive repairs.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
Hello hacker public radio. This is Brian. I thought I'd talk to you guys a little bit about some auto mechanics and how most honest mechanics build.
I get a call from a friend of mine. My car won't start. It's in the parking lot at my job.
So I go to look at it. Unfortunately, husband came, tried to jump, started, took the key that has the chip so I can't even try to start it because it has an immobilizer on the ignition.
Battery is dead. I ask how much fuel is in it. The answer is very little with the chuckle.
I'm going to take the battery out, I'm going to stick it on my charger, send it through a cycle, come back with a couple gallons of fuel, see what it does and then diagnose the no start if it's still there.
Well, I get back to the car, I get the key, I go to start it and it fires up and coughs at me.
So I go, okay, well maybe it was out of gas. Give another crank to get some more fuel up through the rail and hold the pedal down a little bit and it fires up and revs and huge cough.
I go, okay, there's a problem. Most likely it sounds to me right off the bat. There's a big air leak. I'm going to go check. I open the hood, I start wiggling some vacuum lines.
The entire throttle body is loose and I find that it's cracked off of the intake manifold.
Now, for folks who are not familiar with what a throttle body or an intake manifold are, the way that a car breathes is sucks air in through some intake pipe that goes to one side of a filter, the air filter in the air box.
The other side of the air filter is a pipe that goes to the throttle body. In between there is usually what's called an air mass meter and it's an electronic module box looking thing that reads the mass of the air as it comes through.
And it's actually got a heat filament in there that heats it to a certain temperature and gets a standard measurement so that it can do a proper fuel air mixture.
Now, the throttle body at the end of that tube is what they call the butterfly. It's just a flap that plugs the hole in the tube.
When you press on your accelerator, it opens that flap which is why the accelerator is really not a gas pedal. When you press on the gas pedal, you do nothing but open an air flap.
The fact that there's more air getting sucked into the engine causes the engine to then suck more fuel. This is in the old style carbureted systems.
The new style fuel injected systems, you still operate the air flap with your accelerator pedal but many of them are what's called drive by wire so they're no longer connected with just a cable from the pedal to that motor fly and it's all computer controlled.
So that throttle body has a big heavy plate mechanism and it's got a bunch of vacuum lines and position sensors and all sorts of stuff on it.
And then on the other side of that is your intake manifold and that is where the air gets intake to the vehicle.
And on the other side of that throttle body which is what's measuring the amount of air that gets into the manifold, the manifold distributes it into your cylinders.
This vehicle is a four cylinder Mitsubishi 2000 glot and that is a vehicle with a known problem with a steel intake manifold and no supporting mount for the throttle body.
So the throttle body cracks off of the intake manifold and it's actually the intake manifold that breaks.
Most people just have a crack this one was broken completely off.
So I get myself a chuckle I left I said you need new intake manifold and let's see what that's going to cost us.
I get very lucky.
I find one that's off of 2003 that should fit my research tells me it's a 99 to 2003.
So I go out to the junkyard I pull it off of this 2003.
I head back home.
I place the orders at the park stores for the gaskets the intake manifold gasket the throttle body gasket the coolant neck gasket.
Because on this vehicle the coolant neck or the lower radiator hose goes actually attaches the outside of the intake manifold flange.
So you have to spill coolant and you have to replace that gasket which is actually an o-written because it's just a cast pipe fitting.
This vehicle also has the fuel rail with the fuel injectors going into the intake manifold which is an extremely uncommon but is also not extremely common.
They usually will go into a separate point on the head of the engine also with areas for the injectors cut out of the intake manifold.
So that you don't have to pull your fuel system to change your intake manifold.
So there's a lot of components on here. There's also many vacuum control pieces.
Now once I get it all back together I realize that actually this 2003 is different from the 2000.
There's a vacuum line in a different place and it's also lacking a mount that was welded to the side of it.
That's for the ignition control module and other fancy piece of our fuel injection systems.
So after I get this together I come up with a longer piece of vacuum line, reroute it to fix the rerouting in the box of the vacuum line that was different.
I just bend, snap, bend until it snapped. It took a lot of bending because it was a pretty decent steel.
The flange off of the old intake manifold drilled a hole in the new flange on the new one and mounted the ignition module to the new 2003 so everything's back together and great.
I proceed to fill it with coolant.
Now in the process when I pulled that coolant back off I realized one of the coolant lines going to the heater core had a bunch of sediment on it which is indicative of a leak,
a very slight leak that allows the coolant to bubble and leave deposits which will seal themselves up eventually, hopefully for those who want to ignore their cars.
So I go well. I'm going to help her out. I'm going to pull that line off. I'm going to scrape all those deposits off.
At this point in the job she wants her car back so I'm not going to order a new hose.
I'm going to throw some silicone on it and stick it back together. So I do that.
This hose had a spring clamp holding it on which unlike a standard screw type hose clamp can only apply so much compressive force to the outside of the hose.
And usually on an old worn hose your best bet is to put that clamp back where it was because it left indentations and the hose itself won't be as squishy so you may end up with a leak if you don't put it back in the same place.
This one was rotten to the point where putting it back in the same place after cleaning the deposits and siliconing it.
I poured the coolant in and it kept taking a little more than I expected.
And I noticed it was just leaking out of that hole.
So I had to pull that line back off and re-silicon it and I put a screw type hose clamp on, told her she wants to sell the car.
I told her just put that note in that says that that was remedied but not repaired the leak in the coolant line and I put it on her invoice for her.
So I get the car back together. I fired up. It's great. Runs good.
All in all, she called me to go assess the car. I went and assessed the car. That took me half an hour on the easy end.
It took me more than that because I had to drive across town and back. But took me half an hour to assess it, came home, hooked up the battery and stuff.
We'll include that in half an hour. I had to go back to the car. Then I actually assessed it and found the brake.
Then I went to the junkyard. junkyards an hour out. Then I removed the part off the car at the junkyard. Then I drove home. Then I went to the part stores. I got those parts. I went back to my house.
And at this point in my billing cycle for her, her balance is still zero.
I've spent most of a day and pieces of another day and I haven't even gotten to build that or yet.
But that's okay. That's part of that overhead. When you bring your vehicle to a mechanic, at least where I live, the average price in the mechanic shop is $100 an hour.
That $100 an hour is what you get built.
Many times, the work that went into it is far beyond that. Occasionally, a job comes in that the technician is so familiar with.
They can knock it out in half of the time the book says, a lot of shops will still charge you for the book time. That's how they make up for those extra time spent that are unbelievable hours.
All in all, I build my friend for this job. She paid for all the parts out of her own pocket, which cost $100 total because it was junkyard and local parts shops and simple things.
And I didn't mark those up. So I build her $150 for the labor. That on the books was three hours of shop labor to replace her intake manifold.
And she saw that at first. And she said, oh, $50 an hour, that's a lot. And I said, well, kind of. It's a lot if I worked an hour. But that three hours of work is really representative of a day.
So sometimes you really think the shops ripen you off and they are because I've worked at a few of them. And a few of them really do rip you off.
They build full book time no matter what on all jobs, even when half of the time in two jobs they're doing are combined doing the same thing for the same job, which happens a lot.
You pull this part off and now you have access to two pieces underneath. So you change both of them. Well, a lot of shops will bill you the time to take that top part off twice.
I'm saying that's fucking total bullshit. So just because HBO needed some shows, this was on my mind. It just happened to me.
I figured I'd send it out there. Hopefully it's interesting to somebody.
You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday, Monday through Friday. Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HBO listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast and click on our contributing to find out how easy it really is.
Hacker Public Radio was founded by the Digital Dove Pound and the Infonomicon Computer Club, and it's part of the binary revolution at binrev.com.
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released on the create of comments, attribution, share a light, 3.0 license.