As some of you already know, our car died last week and we had planned to work on removing the alternator this weekend. I have never worked on a car before but we didn’t let that stop us.We had our little manual for the job, it showed photos and directions for getting the tasks accomplished so we bundled up. Headed out to the freezing garage to shuffle boxes and make room for the car, we didn’t want to work on the car in the snow. Once we made room for the car we put it in neutral and used another car to push it into the garage.

We spent about 1 1/2 hours trying to get the damn car on the jacks so we could get under it.. Nothing we tried raised the car high enough to slide the jacks under and eventually we gave up on raising the car.

We got the battery out of the car and were starting to loosen the pulleys for the belts that we needed to remove that were almost impossible to reach. We spent forever trying to loosen a stinking nut so we could remove the belts. We were trying so hard that when the wrench finally moved an inch or two our knuckles slammed into another part of the car scraping them all up and even slicing!

We look like we put out hands in the garbage disposal or something! Those nuts were freaking stuck on good, we were so determined to get it off that we actually stripped the nut more than we loosened it. That took about 3 hours.

In the end, about 4pm we still had made no progress, our backs hurt from trying to maneuver ourselves into workable positions, our toes we cold and our hands were bleeding. I threw down the wrench remarked at how much we didn’t get done and that we were out of time now (we had to do a secret shop that evening).

I went inside, slammed the front door real good and then sat on the floor in the kitchen defeated.. My kitties came to check on me and to smell the blood oozing from my hands, the dog even tried to paw me with hopes I would snap out of it. I was mad and very irritated. Working on cars sucks, how do they expect you to be able to see what you are working on and to get your hands in there to do the work when it’s all jammed in there like that? N reminded me that in Japan (Nissan is a Japanese car company) they usually have smaller hands and maybe getting to certain areas in the car was no problem for them.

That didn’t lessen my anger and I proceeded to get ready for our mystery shopping when N came in and said the car was running. What do you mean it’s running? How is that possible?

He said he just reconnected some hoses and tightened the things we loosened.. then he tried the car just for curiosity and it started! So, technically we fixed the car, it wasn’t the alternator we fixed but banging our knuckles on stuff and jiggling things around seemed to do the trick.. Nice huh?

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