Hanging Out at the Auto Shop

November 7-8, 2016

Getting out of El Paso was horrible.  The only road in the direction I wanted to go was a city street with multiple intersections.  and I stalled at every single one.  Finally made it to Walmart and started shopping for a place to get the truck looked at.  Pronto Auto Repair was nearby and had some good reviews so I decided to show up there early in the morning to look desperate.

The mechanic that I spoke to was perfectly polite and told me I'd have to wait for Viktor, the owner, to find out if they could look at the truck.  I hung out in the parking lot for a couple hours until Viktor arrived and told him what was going on.  He was nice enough to take the truck immediately and I watched as the mechanic stepped through the possible causes Google had presented me starting from least expensive and getting progressively more pricey.

He stopped on the most expensive option - rebuild the  head.  Viktor stepped me through everything they had checked and showed me the lack of compression in two of the four heads.

<Side note:  That little truck had been pulling a 6000 pound camper on only two cylinders.  Now THAT'S a quality motor!>

He told me to think about which of the expensive options I wanted to do and let me know that it would take about a week.  He also agreed to push the camper to the parking lot once the head was pulled and let me live there while it was being repaired.

I called the Main Man and told him what was going on.  His response:  No, the guy you bought it from said he had done a head job.  I let him talk to Viktor and they chatted about several options.  Nothing was resolved and we left it for the evening.

In the morning I gave them back the keys and they started to go to work.  A couple hours later Viktor came out and said he thought about the conversation he had had with the MM last night and decided to do a little different testing.  He took the cover off the cylinder head and tested the valves.  It turned out that two of them were too tight.  They adjusted the valves, handed me a bill that was $1000 less than I was expecting to pay and gave me a cheery wave as I left.

All in all an excellent experience.