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I love the 3 pack a day smoker vehicles. Just a absolute joy to work on lol
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[quote=”Cammed 05″ post=154935]I love the 3 pack a day smoker vehicles. Just a absolute joy to work on lol
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yeah those are pretty bad.
I have a nice 3M respirator in my toolbox that’s intended to protect me from chemical fumes or grinding dust in the air, but it’s almost exclusively used to protect me from customer filth. Even if the smell is barely tolerable, the really bad cars tend to have the interior blanketed with skin flakes and other human/animal dander that gets stirred up in the air to be breathed in. You get in one of these filth-mobiles and are immediately disgusted, only to start it and have the HVAC system blow who-knows-what kind of dust right in your face. I sometimes wonder how often a customer sees me pull their car around and take off my respirator when I get out.
Personally I think it is good ‘manners’ as a customer to ensure my car is clean inside and out and the trunk emptied before taking it to techs to work on!
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As a college student, I worked at a car rental place. We had a brand new town car come in. Beautiful car. It was a very rainy summer in Dallas Texas. The first renter took it for a long weekend, but it was pouring rain sideways when he returned it. No walk around was done. What he didn’t say, is that his large chocolate malt from whataburger was set down on the rear floor then spilled. The car sat there for extremely hot rain for nearly two weeks. When I opened the door, I nearly puked. We sent it to a body shop. They replaced all seats and carpet, but the stink was stuck. The company totaled the car out because of that stink. Because of a chocolate malt.
I always dread going out to bring in minivans. Those things have the worst amount of stuff spilled or left in them than any other vehicles I work on.
And to ChrisKaye I appreciate customers that clean out their cars for service it really does help us to do a better job. How am I going to give a good road test when I am trying not to vomit?
Used to have a customer, I called his car the Cigarolla. There were ashes everywhere and the windows had the haze on them. This thing, while it didn’t seem to immediately smell that bad it was up in the air and my eyes started to burn from it. I smoke and this thing was irritating my eyes so bad it felt like I was having a large allergic reaction. It spent the night in the shop and the next morning the boss came to ask me about something and you could see he has trying to figure out what the smell was. He had been smelling it all morning and couldn’t figure it out, until I pointed out the Cigarolla was the perpetrator.
A few months later, the car showed up on our lot in the middle of the night. It had hit something and the trans was cracked from what we could see. I’m guessing the insurance adjuster opened the door and then closed it, writing the vehicle off.
Cigarolla I love it it.
When I was over seas we had a Humvee that stank to high heaven. We took it down to motor pool because we thought for sure it was a dead animal stuck somewhere in the fan shroud.
Nope.
Someone wrapped a half eaten chicken wing up in a napkin, and shoved it into the AC system. It made it safely through the rainy winter season, then fermented over the summer. We nicknamed that thing the ‘sum of a beach’.
Garbage trucks, spilled trucker bombs, tampons in trash cans, sulfur trucks, dr pepper and coke superglue. All sitting in the hot summer sun in VA for a week before working on them. Trucks filled with ash and clean ash trays, truckers that do not wear shoes and socks. I could go on. Now imagine all of that and having to pull up the the floor carpet (really a rubber mat) and pull a dog box out. Btw, foam padding on the flooring I swear that thing works better then a shamwow.
The tampon one was the worst. I have worked on trucks with maggots moving around with card board over them and it didn’t reek that bad. I literally put on my 3M Full Face Respirator 6800 (had it for doing mold remediation, then for cleaning dpfs, and then for that) walked into the truck grabbed the trash bag with gloves on and put it in the dumpster. drove the truck to a windy spot opened all the doors and windows, turned the a/c on full blast, sprayed febreeze everywhere it was the truckers but…. and then had it run a regen outside with the wind blowing through it. Did not touch it for an hour and the smell was standable without the mask afterwards. I nearly puked though when i opened the door the first time and I am one that does not do that easily.
Try working on construction vehicles. I had a truck come in with a lack of power complaint…Got in the truck, step on the pedal and figured out it had a mound of mud and dirt so big it was keeping the pedal from going more than a third down.
The dirt and dust make it disgusting. I maintained the bosses truck that he always smoked those back country cigars in, it had a smell that I can still smell to this day. It also had the faint smell of rotten beer that turned out to be garbage bags worth of Old Milwaukee cans he had hidden behind and under the seat. Littered among that were the leaving and half eaten lunch items from the past year. It was so gross I would not ride in it. I didn’t work there for much longer after I made all those gruesome discovery’s in his truck. Can’t handle working for a drunk. When you do fleet work everyone treats the vehicle like crap and then hands it off to you. They expect you to not only fix but to also keep it clean for them too. Its a constant struggle
Back when I was younger the shop I worked in a shop did alot of fleet work. I did not, I worked in another part of the building. However, that day the owner/ boss decided to have me do a bit of fleet work, ha ha. He said, see that tanker truck outside, A full sized semi with a HUGE tank on it. well its leaking mud, and I want you to scrape of ALL the mud that it’s leaking with a shovel off the pavement, and put it in a garbage bag put it in the dumpster.Then take the hose and clean the mud residue off the pavement with a power washer. He also added to make sure that none of the “mud” it was leaking wasn’t going down the gutter, next to the parking lot. Anyway, when I got out there I was overwhelmed by the smell, nastiest mud liquid I ever smelled, in fact, I came to the conclusion pretty fast this tank was not holding mud, but it was actually Honey Dipper with rusting, leaking tank and the “mud” was sewage. Fleet mechanic showed up about 25 minutes into the scooping job and he said, son, that aint mud, and I said, really…The funniest thing I EVER saw in a shop was when a very picky transmission mechanic was working on a Suburban with an interlock which is one of those things people have to breath into in order to start the car. Well he wasn’t going to put his mouth near that so he went and pulled another tech off a job who was creative at such things and the two of them spent a great deal of time trying to use and air compression with a bunch of stuff all in order to just get this Drunk’s vehicle started.
[quote=”Cammed 05″ post=154935]I love the 3 pack a day smoker vehicles. Just a absolute joy to work on lol[/quote]
What’s worse is the guy that smokes half a butt and lights up the other half later. Taxi #12 had an assigned driver that was a total greasy old hippie that was bald on top and what hair he still had growing down the sides was long, wiry, dirty, and ratty. That MF’er smoked a lot in his taxi like that and, of course, it gets infinitely worse when the windows have been closed all day in the summer sun. It wasn’t enough to have to stifle a vomit putting that car on my hoist; then a breeze rolled through the shop that drafted that funk down under the car while I was working on it. It didn’t really smell any less concentrated as it was in the car when it came down either.Then there’s the pothead’s car. Marijuana is something I never could get along with. It makes me puke. The potheads always just finished up a bowl before they get into my shop and it seems like it’s always my next car to work on. I remember an Astro van that was really skunked out bad and it had to come back the following week for recommended repairs. I found the customer before he could leave and I had what I thought was an honest and fair discussion with him.
“Hey man, I can’t help but notice you really like your weed. I’m not trying to preach at you and tell you that it’s wrong, but I can tell you it’s not right for me. I can’t get near it without getting sick. When you come back, I’m going to be the guy working on your car and I’m the only guy qualified to do the work. So, I have to ask that you do me the favor of not sparking up in the van for a couple days before you come back and, if you can, leave the windows open overnight to vent some of this funk out.”
He laughed, but he also agreed to do what I asked. When he brought the van back, he had just got done roasting what some would consider pretty good weed and then bombed the hell out of the van with some cologne that was just as nasty. It was not a good compromise on his part. If I could ever find that van again and I could get into it, I would just so I could puke in it. It’s a favor worth returning.
As someone who has played hockey most of his life and had witnessed some pretty rank equipment. I can say with assurance that adding more smell on top of an already bad one never makes it better.
aah yes, the cars that have different species of mold growing in them that you never knew existed, the cars that the person smokes so many cigarettes in them the smell of the car would never be the same, those cars make your job so much fun…
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