PART II
At this point in the tale, I’ve taken possession of the truck and been in Florida for a week working on it in the blazing sun and insane humidity. Despite having studied pictures of the truck for months up until this point, I will say that it was intimidating to see in person the first time. While I anticipated some problems, I will readily admit there was a point or two during those first few days when I seriously considered my options for getting out the purchase as enormity of what I had done sank in. There was even a bittersweet moment one afternoon on the third day when I was taking a break and there was a blessed breeze blowing across the field and into the truck and Pink Floyd’s Wish You Here came on. I got a little misty-eyed as I thought about what my parents would have thought about this ridiculous adventure. I think my Dad would have been all for it while my Mom would have been worried sick and white lighting me (lighting a candle) the entire time.
Other than those few moments of doubt, I was generally having a blast that entire week, despite the potential engine problems. I had planned so long for this and prepared as well as I could and now I was executing that plan. I was going over every inch of my new truck and making a rapidly growing list of things that would need to be fixed. I also had a few early successes. I freed a number of the locker doors that were stuck, lubricated the locks and got the power door locks working on all but one door. I also cleared up an air leak and got the rear suspension to hold air overnight. Finally, I started to put back some of the interior panels that had been removed during the decommissioning process. Even washing a year’s worth of grime off the cab windows made me feel better. Despite all the planning I also had a few oversights. The first day it didn’t even occur to me to bring snacks, or water, or sunblock and by mid-morning I was dizzy and had a nice start on a sunburn. I had also only brought one pair of shorts and two t-shirts, so I was washing things in the hotel tub at night and drying them on the A/C unit. On the second day I ripped my shorts from the fly down the entire right leg. I quickly fixed this with some duct tape and continued to wear the shorts for another five days. Sadly, they finally had to be put down as duct tape and leg hair are not a pleasant combination.
The following Monday I gave the garage where I had left the truck a day to look it over and then decided it would be best if I actually went there in person. The head mechanic, I’m not sure if he owned the place or what, told me that my particular engine was known to be problematic and that he was the only one there that had worked on that type before and knew English. We went through my notes and he said he would take a look at as soon as he could. While they had told me originally they would look at it on Monday, I had to keep in mind that this was a very busy shop with dozens of trucks being worked on. Those trucks were driven by men and women who made their living with them while I was just some jackass with a big new toy.
At this point it was clear it was going to be a couple of days at least. Besides not wanting to run up a hotel bill while I sat around and waited, I also had to get over to the other side of the state to help my family friend who was packing up her vacation house. The plan had been for me to use my truck to haul what I could back to Grand Rapids, which included a 400 lb bronze tower bell. I had conceived a rather clever system of straps and braces to secure this monster and keep it from killing me in the event of an accident. The move was complicated by the fact that the house was on an island, so moving everything entailed first hauling it down to the dock on golf cart trailers, then a 20 minute boat ride and reloading it into a truck. Since my truck wasn’t going to be available, I was going to be driving a Uhaul. After a few days of packing I left the island and headed north on my birthday. While that probably sounds awful to some, I can honestly say, there are few things I would rather be doing on my birthday than a nice long road trip. I’d done this drive back and forth between Grand Rapids and Fort Myers for a number of years and thoroughly enjoyed it. I arrived late the next day after driving straight through.
After resting up for a few days I called the garage in Miami and talked to the mechanic. He had looked at my truck and his initial diagnosis was it was a bad EGR cooler. Again, more detail will be in the EGR specific post, but essentially, the EGR cooler cools the exhaust gases before they are shunted back around to the intake side of the engine. The EGR cooler is a particularly expensive piece of kit and would be $2000-$3000 to replace. It was also one of the main problems with early versions of these engines due to design flaws that caused premature failure. However, I wasn’t convinced because the EGR cooler would have it’s own error codes, which I wasn’t seeing, though I also wasn’t prepared to argue with someone who had a lot more experience than I. Because of the potential cost, the mechanic wanted to get a second opinion from a friend of his who worked at the local International/Navistar dealer and who was much more familiar with my particular engine, just to make sure he was interpreting the diagnosis correctly. Again, being 1500+ miles away I was at their mercy and other than my own self-imposed schedule, wasn’t in any great hurry. It was also the week of Thanksgiving and the garage was only open for a couple of days that week. The only hiccup was there was still another load of stuff to move from Florida and I was trying to juggle whether I could use my truck for that second trip.
I flew back down to Fort Myers to continue to help pack up the island house. After a few days I decided rather than trying to rush my truck and coordinate getting back over to Miami and drive a possibly unreliable truck north full of someone else’s valuables it would be better to just rent another truck to complete my friend’s move as she had a hard deadline of December 1st to be out of her house. So for the second time in a little more than a week I loaded up a rental truck and headed north.
After a couple of days of rest we were into the second week of December. I called the mechanic again, but he was in the middle of a tow and said he would call me back, though he never did. Again, it may sound like they were giving me the run-around, but beyond the reasons I already stated, they also weren’t trying to get me to agree to an expensive repair. He could of just said that will be $3000 and I would have paid it. All during this time I had been doing research on my engine, including studying the service and troubleshooting guides and watching every obscure YouTube video I could dig up. By this point I was getting a good grasp of how all the various systems of the engine functioned and interacted (fuel, coolant, air, ECU, EGR, aftertreatment). While I was certainly still your basic ignoramus, it was starting to make sense rather than seem like just a mass of hoses and pipes and mysterious components.
One of the things I did from the first day at my truck was keep detailed notes of everything I did and things I noticed about the truck (you can read these as the other posts from November.) I kept track each time I started the truck, what warning lights came on, the diagnostic codes, etc. In my first discussion with the mechanic, he told me the alarm buzzer I was hearing was directly related to the stop engine light. I had asked because I wasn’t sure if it was that light or the ABS light. Most of the warning lights have three stages of operation: the light on, the light on and flashing and the light on, flashing with audible alarm. Later, I realized that while the alarm buzzer was coming on immediately upon starting the truck along with the ABS and brake warning lights, the service engine light and stop engine lights took some 60 seconds or more to appear, which suggested to me that the alarm buzzer was not related to the check engine/stop engine lights. Additionally, none of those lights were flashing, which further confirmed my diagnosis.
It had been four weeks since I left my truck and with the additional research under my belt I decided it was time to move things along. I was pretty sure the garage in Miami wasn’t yanking my chain, but I also knew I wasn’t a priority for them and I was starting to think they didn’t have the right software to talk to my truck, which is why there was little progress being made. I emailed the office manager to let her know I would be there in two days and scheduled another flight to Fort Lauderdale. On my way from the airport I made the brilliant decision to detour through a Krispy Kreme and pick up two dozen donuts. We hadn’t talked money at the garage, but my Dad always taught me it never hurts to do a little extra, so I figured it couldn’t hurt. To say I knocked it out of the park with the donuts would not be an exaggeration. The office manger immediately brightened up and a number of the mechanics from the garage gave me a “gracias” or thumbs up. Also, I like Krispy Kreme as much as the next person. The head mechanic wasn’t there, but the office manager called him and he said what he could do was get me in to the International dealer that afternoon via his friend that worked there, so I wouldn’t have to wait a week or more to get truck looked at. However, I decided against this for several reasons. First, even if they looked at the truck that day, there’s no telling what kind of delay I would face for whatever parts I needed. Like almost every industry, spare truck parts were severely impacted by COVID related supply chain backups. Secondly, being a dealer, I would be paying a steep premium for labor and parts. Finally, I was more convinced than ever that it was an emissions issue and I wouldn’t be doing any harm by driving the engine and even if it was the EGR cooler, I could replace that on my own at half the cost once I got it back to Michigan. Plus, if it did de-rate and I had to trailer it the rest of the way to Michigan, then that’s what I would do. My brother runs the roadside assistance program at Hagerty Insurance and has towing and trucking contacts throughout the country. While it would no doubt not be cheap, it also wouldn’t be the end of the world if I had to pay to truck it back to Michigan. At least there, I would be at my home base where I would be comfortable working on it and not have to worry about being stranded in a hotel parking lot or something.
As an added bonus, the mechanic at the garage said there was no charge for the diagnosis and they even sent out a guy to jump start the truck for me, further confirming my impression that they weren’t out to screw me over. I thanked them for their efforts and for looking after my truck for nearly a month and was on my way. I drove it back to the lovely Fairfield Inn in Pembroke Pines, where I was by now becoming a well known guest/annoyance to the staff. I wanted one more chance to give the truck a once-over and check all the fluids before heading to Michigan. The coolant was a bit low so I stopped at an Autozone to pick up a jug along with a couple spare quarts of oil, just in case. I also picked up a spare set of wipers, which I unwisely returned the next morning, figuring that I wouldn’t need them since I had a fresh set waiting for me back in Michigan and what was the likelihood that I would see any significant rain? Pretty damn likely, as it turned out, and this decision would hilariously come to bite me in the ass when it rained the entire third day of my trip through the mountains of West Virginia and the wipers basically disintegrated and did little more than slosh water around the windshield in a blurry mess.
I also made a quick stop at Best Buy where I saw one of my truck’s sister ships from Pembroke Pines on it’s way to a real emergency and picked up a set of noise-cancelling ear buds. They didn’t completely eliminate the incessant alarm buzzing, but they dulled it into the background so it wasn’t drilling into my brain. They did a much better job with the general road and engine noise.
During the 1600 miles I covered in roughly 24 hours, I had ample time to calculate that the alarm sounded 84 times a minute; 5040 times an hour; for a grand total of 120,960 times during my trip. Beep.