As Murphy’s Law would always establish, there’s no better time to have something go wrong with the car than when you need it the most. Mom and dad fly into town tomorrow, Kris is working first thing in the am and the kids need to go to school.. what better time to have a critically high misfire rate appear than 4 o’clock in the afternoon. I got the call as Kris was coming from picking up the boys from grandmas house and her car was running poorly and the check engine light was flashing. Ugh.
I met her in the driveway when she arrived and sure enough, it was running terribly. The code and symptoms pointed to a specific fuel injector. I moved it into the 3rd garage bay and Kris agreed to head to the auto parts store to retrieve the one fuel injector they had in stock while I began tearing the top end of the engine apart.
Four hours and several rounds of muttered obscenities later I restarted the engine after pulling the intake manifold, fuel rail (giant PITA!), reinstalled the injectors (I only had the one replacement… otherwise I would have replaced them all), replaced the spark plugs since I was in the neighborhood already and then reassembled. Miraculously it sprang to life but it smoked like a dumpster fire until it burned off the cleaners and de-greasers dripped down the vacant injector ports as I was reassembling everything. The check engine light remained off and she purred like a kitten… albeit a kitten on her 14th life with 256k miles… but a kitten nonetheless. …just in time to go get mom and dad from the airport at 7am the next day.
