I know a lot more about trucks and diesel engines than my brother, Patrick. But you'd be surprised how little that matters sometimes when it comes to fixing either of them. I'm the kind of guy who gets bogged down with problems where I know the correct procedure to fix something, but if I can't do it "right," I'm stuck.
My brother has no such limitations.Over the years, I've watched him solve countless problems with the oddest techniques and tools-like the Thanksgiving he used an old kite string as a throttle cable on his Volkswagen Beetle. He drove that car 60 miles to go look at another (equally worn out) VW with the string running from the carburetor, under the car, through the hood latch, and up to the driver-side window. He used his left hand to pull the string and rev the engine, shifted with his right hand, and steered with his knees. When we got up to highway speed, he rolled the window up and pinched the string in place-sort of like a mechanical cruise control. It worked great until the string broke and we'd have to pull over and patch the whole system back together.
Then there was the time he helped a stranger outside a movie theater who had locked himself out of his car and was stuck in the pouring rain. My brother used a screwdriver and the trailer hitch from my '89 Blazer to pry the guy's doorframe open so we could reach in and unlock the door. I doubt that door ever shut right again, but the guy was happy, and my brother never thought for a second, If only I had the right tool.
And how could I forget the day he called me to find out how to restart a diesel engine that had been underwater off the coast of Florida for three months. He never did get it started, but that's only because he couldn't get the 1,000-pound engine out of the sunken boat it was trapped in.
I think part of my brother's mechanical luck is that he isn't troubled by the "it can't be fixed that way" or the "that will never work" rules that apply to the rest of us. And that's why he once fixed a blown head gasket in a three-cylinder diesel with some RTV and a lug-nut wrench. I know, I know, I still don't believe it either.
My brother's latest round of mechanical miracles all revolve around his Super Duty. When he bought the truck, the 7.3L Power Stroke had almost 200,000 miles on it. Of course, with that many miles, the truck was bound to have some issues. The first problem came from the original 4R100 transmission. It started slipping terribly, so the dealer he bought the truck from fixed it without replacing it. I don't know how exactly, but I've driven the truck, and it works fine now.
Then, one day, I got the call that his 7.3L stalled out and wouldn't start. My brother described what sounded like a classic cam-position-sensor failure. Without a scan tool to know for sure, all we could do was guess and have him shell out $230 (I know, he got ripped off) to buy a new one. It turns out that wasn't his problem.
I probably would've spent a bunch of cash replacing expensive parts that I thought would make it run, but it ended up being a crack in the fuel-feed line that kept it from firing. My brother figured that out after he got the engine started using nothing more than a can of WD-40. All he did was squirt a little of the spray lube into the air filter while he cranked the engine over. The 7.3L burned the WD-40 as fuel until the air bled out of the fuel system and the engine idled on its own. I was thoroughly impressed. That kind of stuff never would have worked for me.-David Kennedydavid.kennedy@primedia.com