The Saga of the Car

Tyson leaving at the bus station right after Thanksgiving.

We left Colorado November 19. Today is January 19. I've been away for two full months now.

Although I started this post on the 19th, I finished it the 23.

It all started out when Tyson was driving to Logan with his brother Donny the day after Thanksgiving, November 26. The oil light had been coming on
for a couple of weeks, but we had just done an oil change, and every time it came on we checked the oil and it was still full. We thought it was an old car just malfunctioning. We were wrong. It probably meant the oil pump had gone out because as they were driving, the suddenly heard a loud sound and the car died, right in the canyon. Tyson called me and I came to get them. They pushed the car about another mile, then coasted another five miles down the hill until the car was about a mile from a mechanics. We had it towed the next morning.

Because it was a weekend, the mechanic's shop was closed that day (Saturday, November 27), and Tyson had school on Monday, he left on the bus to finish the last two weeks of school and be there for the closing of our house, with a power of attorney form for me. On Monday the mechanic called and said the engine had seized, and our car was officially dead. Caput. For a few days we debated about buying a car either in Utah or Colorado, then Tyson said he'd seen a motor on ebay that would work for our car, and wanted to try taking out our old one and putting this one in. Just for some background info, Tyson's changed the oil and spark plugs and wires, and that's about the extent of his mechanical training. So of course I said he could do it, and that became our new plan.

Tyson came home December 14 on the train (which deserves a whole other story about him getting picked up and homeless people and a snow storm. . .but I'm going to have to skip it), and Tyson bought a crane and started taking out the old engine, He worked on it every day, minus his dad's birthday (December 22) and Christmas day.

It was a huge pain. Tyson had bought a manual, but it wasn't a whole lot of help. It would say something like "disconnect the front drive shaft" and have perhaps a small diagram of something that looked like nothing in the car. So we'd have to look up what that was, where it was, what it looked like, and then figure out how to take it out, then go buy such and such tool to take it out (since it's a Toyota, everything was metric). I think we made, no joke, AT LEAST 3 trips a day to the store to buy something to work on the car for the three weeks Tyson was working on it. It was ridiculous. I tried just buying a ton of tools in one shot and then figured we could make one big return trip at the end, but it still didn't work. There would be some random hose or something that we'd need a hook to pry off or whatever. It took FOREVER! Finally Tyson gave up on the book and started disconnecting everything he could see, still trying to keep everything somewhat organized so he could put it back together.

New Year's Eve we finally pulled the old engine out of the car at 11:30PM, just in time to have a small New Year's celebration after working in the garage all day together. It was pretty momentous, but we were running out of time.

New Year's Day Tyson's family came to transfer all the wires and stuff to the new engine. You see, when the people pulled THAT engine out, they just cut everything off--wires, hoses, metal pieces--that were still connected to it, so we had to use all of that from the old engine. It took all day to do that. We took the next day off, since it was Sunday (we never worked on it Sundays).

January 3--my birthday. I'd been hoping that the car would be done and we could go cross country skiing for my birthday. No such luck. Worked on the car all day with his brother, and in the evening one of our friends from Provo, Jake Bigler, a mechanic, came to help too as a birthday present with his wife Ruth. Ruth was one of my favorite roommates in college, and we'd all been next door neighbors a semester in Provo after we both got married. They miraculously got the whole engine in in just a few hours, and everything connected with Jake's help, by about 10:30 PM. Then it didn't start. Jake started going through a process of elimination to figure out the problem--the battery, the starter, the transmission, etc. The problem: THE NEW ENGINE WE'D JUST PUT IN!!! It wouldn't spin. It'd go 3/4 around in either direction then stop. Jake guessed something was caught in the third cylinder and left around 1AM to drive back to Provo with Ruth and their son. It was heartbreaking to have come so far and then come to a dead end.

But it wasn't quite a dead end. Tyson spent over 8 hours the next 2 days trying to get out whatever was stuck in that cylinder with magnets, glue, wire hangers. We called all our family Tuesday night and asked them to pray that we could get it out so the engine would work. The power of combined prayers and faith seriously worked. Wednesday morning a miracle occurred and a 5/16 piece of a RATCHET SET came out. I don't know how it got in there, and I don't know how it came out except that some angel must have seriously given it a nudge to get it through the small, narrow hole.

Tyson hooked everything back up. . .and it still didn't work. It backfired. We had some random people come and look at it. We figured out the rotor was on backwards (thus the backfiring) but it still didn't run. We begged Jake to come back down and he did Friday night. We also got something to test the compression in the cylinders, and 2 cylinders tested has having 0 compression. 0. The head to the engine was bad. Once again Jake deemed the car as doomed. But we decided to try one more thing. . .switching the head from the old engine and putting it on the new one. It entailed taking out the whole engine AGAIN to do so. But by this point we really didn't have any other options.

Let me take a moment to apologize for all the car lingo. If I hadn't been through this, I would have no idea what I was talking about. But I don't know how to describe these parts any other way than all these names I've now learned for them.

They took out the engine Friday night, and Jake once again drove an hour and a half back to Provo at 1AM. He came back Saturday about 5 AM. They spent hours switching the head without messing up the timing chain, etc., then putting it back in. We could hear them starting the car, and it kind of running, but not quite. This went on for hours. About 2:30AM they came in, to announce there was some kind of electrical problem they didn't have the tools to figure out. The gas pump wasn't getting electricity to it unless they hotwired it, and the injectors were all firing at the same time and not in intervals. Jake went home, Tyson packed, and we took him to the bus station 2 hours later at 5AM Sunday morning to go back to Colorado for school to start Monday, January 10.

We'd called a local mechanic on Friday, January 7 to make an appointment in case we couldn't fix it, but the earliest he could get it in was Monday, January 17--ten days later. We made the appointment "just in case". So the day after Tyson got to Colorado, we had the car towed to the local mechanic--January 10. It sat there a week while I waited. January 17 came, and I was hopeful to be packing the van by that night. I stopped by around noon. The mechanic told me to call at 4:30 to see where he was at. He didn't finish it. So I hoped it would be the next day. Then the next day. And the next. Friday morning I called and he said he was 95% done, just had a couple of things to finish up. I was so excited. But Friday afternoon he said it was still not done. And now I've been here yet ANOTHER weekend (the leaders in nursery seriously asked me how to spell my kids' names to put on the roll, they thought we'd actually moved in with my parents).

I'm praying it will be done tomorrow. I'm tempted to sit and wait at the shop until it's done. When Tyson had to go back by himself between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we were apart 2 weeks and 2 days, and I hoped we'd never have to be separated that long again. If it's done by tomorrow and I leave on Tuesday, it will be 2 weeks and 2 days again. I still haven't even seen our house since Tyson bought it and signed the papers almost 2 months ago between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

It's been a long learning experience. Some things that have come from it have been really, REALLY good, and other things I feel like I could move on and do without. But it's all going to work out.