After spending nearly four decades up to his elbows in grease, Chuck Taylor has seen his share of strange car problems.
Taylor's been a licensed technician since the age of 19, spending much of the intervening years working on transmissions and differentials at Taylormotive in North Vancouver.
When discussing some unusual repair jobs, he remembers one six-cylinder Thunderbird that was running rough, and Taylor soon realized the car was only hitting five cylinders. The compression seemed fine but the car was still misfiring. Taylor couldn't be sure of the problem until he took the motor partially apart. "It had an internal passage inside the engine that had a pipe burned out," he recalls. Because that one stainless steel pipe was rusted to Swiss cheese proportions, exhaust gasses were flowing into the engine.
"It's almost like putting a fire extinguisher in one cylinder," explains Taylor. "It just couldn't fire the mixture because it got polluted from the exhaust port that was bleeding into that cylinder."
All it took was a new pipe to put the Ford back on the road. Even more puzzling was a Toyota Cressida that rifled through its gears at an alarming pace. "You would start out from a stop and it would shift all its gears all at once, one-two-three by the time you're going 10 kilometres an hour," says Taylor.
The sedan's problems forced Taylor to trace every wire and circuit. "With cars today they're all tied in electronically and this is where diagnosis is so critical today in finding problems. It's not always what meets the eye when you're driving," he says. "Some cars have multiple computers and they all talk to each other. And with our climate the way it is if moisture gets into a computer it can send the signal scrambling and cause all kinds of grief." In the case of the jumpy sedan, the problem came down to one bad signal.
"All the input from the transmission goes through the speedometer and it had a faulty signal coming from the speedometer to the computer in the car and it actually affected how it shifted the transmission," says Taylor. Discussing some of his more memorable moments in the garage, Taylor recalls how a driver's hearing and response to his car's strange sounds likely saved his life. The driver was set for a trip up to Whistler when a persistent grinding sound made him think twice.
"I took it around the block, brought it to the back of the shop, and I turned the corner to go into one of the bays and it came crashing to the ground," says Taylor. "It kind of stunned me."
A ball joint had popped out of its socket and the car simply let go.
Stories like that illustrate the importance of doing more than just topping up your fluids, says Taylor, who recommends annual inspections to ensure the car's structural integrity.
