duct tape is not a valid car part alternative

Long time no see! I’ve been preoccupied with car trouble and project deadlines for school. With my car, the Check Engine light came on maybe two weeks ago, but it still drove okay for a while. I checked the fluids, which is about all I know how to do save change a tire, but they were fine, so I kept driving it. I noticed it would vibrate more than usual at idle, but then it evened out once I’d driven a few miles. Then one night, I went to go out with the girls and my car wouldn’t get over 20 mph, even upon flooring the accelerator. We managed to get it back home, though it felt like driving a washing machine from all the shaking. It has a little diagnostic box under the hood with a very crude interface, but it was neat to work with. I had to stick a little metal lead into a socket, then press a button from between 1 and 3 seconds, then it would flash a series of LED codes at me. All the codes corresponded to problems with the “fuel trim being too lean or too rich”… Like I understand that.

So I had it towed ASAP to a local Volvo repair shop, since I couldn’t get it started at all then. They assessed the damage at first being a bad thermostat, a bad preheat thermostat, grungy spark plugs, and a bad air mass meter, but when they took it out for a test drive, it stalled at a stop light and still ran very ragged under 35 mph. They figured out that an O2 sensor was bad, so I okayed them to fix that and the rest of it, too. There had been the possibility that my dad could fix whatever they didn’t, but he suggested I just go on and have them do everything since there would be the problem of getting the car to my dad or vice versa (we live across the state from one another).

There was some humor when it came to fixing that preheat thermostat because at first the guy I spoke with there (one of the managers, not the mechanic working on my car) said mine had been taped up with duct tape. But then when I called back like the next day to check on things, he told me to hold on, the mechanic had been saying something. When he got back on the line, he said that I didn’t actually have a preheat thermostat at all, there was just the empty box that holds it, and that was filled with duct tape. I just started laughing at this and asked “So you mean I’ve been driving around without this thing the whole time?” Apparently so. From what I understood, the whole point of this device was to bring the outside air temperature up inside the engine to a comfortable temperature for the engine to run in. Since I didn’t have one, the engine was working with 30-degree air or whatever was outside, and it’s wintertime, so of course it’s pretty cold out. Hence why the engine would tremble until I’d driven a few miles and it warmed up.

I had an epiphany yesterday, though. I’d been trying to think why on earth the past owner of this car would have thought it okay to replace some part with a wad of duct tape. Then I realized, we got this car at an auction in Florida (my dad and I disagree about this: he thinks it was Georgia where my uncle bought it; either way, it still came from a state much warmer in the winter than Kentucky), and how cold does it ever really get in Florida? My guess is that the part broke and the past owner either didn’t know its importance and didn’t care, or didn’t want to spring for a new part that he felt wasn’t necessary in such a warm climate, so he just removed it and… stuck in some duct tape? I admit, I don’t understand the duct tape; I think he had too high of expectations for its performance in this situation…

Anyway, so the total parts + labor + towing fee + initial look-at-it-to-diagnose-problem cost me $1,054.36. I could have bought a new used car (ha ha) for that cost, but then it probably would have needed some repairs or a checkup at least to get it up to the same quality as my Volvo once repaired, and I like this car, so I decided to fix it rather than buy another. You can bet your bunions that I’m asking everyone who’s getting me a Christmas gift this year to just give me money, though. :P