Whether it be by difficulty or frustration, what's the longest you have worked on a car?


For me it has probably been a few different suspension installs. Besides prepping and installing Ground Control coilovers on my car (around 4-5 hours including letting permatex set and doing strut bearings and bushings in the rear) I swapped two full suspensions with handtools in about 4 hours which was moving pretty quickly. I also spent 5-6 hours over two days when I pulled my manifold to clean and paint. I also move have a habit of cleaning everything so I'm sure I could be a good bit faster but it's also a hobby. I tend to break work up into multiple days also so my SINGLE longest session hasn't been much longer than 6 hours.

 

Rear strut bearings you say?

I have had my car on stands on the side of the road for over 10 hours thanks to the Konis, but only 8 or so of those hours were we working.

 

I didn't think I needed to clarify in this forum...

 

Forgive me--I've only taken apart my rear suspension two or three times, whereas the fronts I know by heart.

If the rears did anything interesting I would probably be more interested in them.

 

Did knock sensor, water pump, and heater core in one day on my old VE. Well over 12 hrs. Is it just me or does time go by twice as fast when working on a car??? I was a tech once and remember that a busy 12+ hr saturday went by twice as fast as a slow 8hr tuesday.

 

It's not just you.

 

my oil changes take over an hour....

too busy sniffing oil or something...

 

When I cut my TCM harness, Severed 12 wires IIRC, it was a bad time. But with the patience and help from an OBDII logger, I came out victorious. Took about a day and a half working on/off until I figured out what was going on. Electrical gremlins. TBW FT/LW in this case. Limp mode FT scary.

 

How'd you use the OBD logger to determine what was wrong? I severed my dash illumination wire and have yet to fix it. Everything is back together the way it was, but it still doesn't work. The weirdest thing is that the lights on the window switches in the rear work but none of the gauges, console lights, or window switches work in the front.

Sorry to hack. It took me 10 hours to do all of my suspension using hand tools and the first time ever changing springs. The 00VI took me two weeks but that's only because I wasn't sent all of the parts I needed. Actual labor time was probably 20 hours.

 

Longest time working was a DE-K swap on my friends car and when I did my 00VI. My arms were cramping up hard.

 

Installing my turbo kit

 

Nice. That sounds like some fun times.

Honestly every time I've rigged up something electrical without outside help I've felt invincible. That's a bit more than I've done so far.

Guess that's why I finally decided on Electrical Engineering.

 

I monitored all four throttle sensors and then saw which one was giving erratic voltages, pinpointed the problem (instead of chasing down all 4 sensors) and was able to fix the problem.

 

both side axles for sure. reinstalling the drivers side was the biggest pain EVAR!!

 

Passanger side axle on a 4th gen. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. It was a beating. But, the 2nd time took less than an hour

 

both axles on a 3rd gen, first one took forever.. but after finally getting it done the second one took about 1/3 of the time.

 

Pass axle only took me like 2 hours the first time?

 

2 whole days installing my headers. i'm never doing that again. I couldve finished them in a day but laziness, frustration, soreness, set in pretty quick.

 

mines been on jack stands for 3 weeks now or so. i've only been able to work on it for a few hours after work on weekends, well fri/sat. all for a new drivers axle, poly control arm bushings, wheel bearings, tie rods. should be done this weekend though

 

Suspension install took the longest for me... Sunup to sundown Saturday for the fronts, then after work Monday and Tuesday for each side of the rear. Used only handtools, FTL.

 

about six hours my first y-pipe install. didnt help that i tried to do it when it was cold so i had to keep going in to warm up.

 

Wait 'til you install headers, or mess up electronics, like I did. :

 

same here it was snowing while i was doing mine for the first time. then had to put half of it back together to go borrow a friends impact wrench

 

longest lasting job was building my VE from 3 cores and then swapping it into the car. took almost 2 years from when I blew the engine in the car until it was running again.

longest job I worked on STRAIGHT? hmmm.
1. prepping the car for IASCA World finals in 2000. worked for about 4 days straight on it with only 1-2 hours of sleep per night until the event was over.

2. swapping engines on a customer car. 2 1/2 days straight.
drove 3 hrs to Austin after getting off work on a friday night to diagnose a "starting problem" on his VG.. wound up being a broken timing belt. I told him the engine was toast, but he wanted me to put a belt on it and see if it would run anyway. all 12 valves were bent on it- engine gone.

So we went to a junkyard and got another engine, then pulled the dead one out, swapped the new belt and water pump off the dead engine, pull the heads and installed new HGs and cleaned all the varnish out of the engine, then reassembled..

installed engine and the ****** wouldn't run right. fuel injectors went bad sitting at the junk yard. so I had to pull the intake manifold off AGAIN and swap all 6 injectors with the ones from his old engine. finally got it running about 10pm on sunday, then had to drive 8 hours north to see family for the weekend.

 

definitely had some 10+ hour working sessions. One included changing a knock sensor on a 3rd gen with a buddy. That was FTL.

 

Wow.

 

10 days when I pulled my engine to make many repairs. Started on a saturday, worked most of the day then and on sunday, 5-7h per night after that. Then another whole weekend and a few nights afterwards.

Stupid things were slowing me down though, I had many tools completely break, found out Courtesy sent me a wrong gasket, discovered that my engine mounts were toast in the middle of it all, and also just dealing with a lot of oil/grease buildup on the external parts made things much slower. The bolts on the front of the crossmember had been smacked around over the years, I had to bring a small vice up to them and squeeze each edge to get it to fit into the socket... a lot of stuff like that was happening.

After putting it all back together, I started 'er up and heard a grinding noise. My dipstick got caught in the wrong place, and was being smacked around, dropping tiny aluminum pieces into the oil. Took 5 hours to get from fully assembled car to taking off the oil pan, fixing the issue, and assembling it.

3 days after finishing I went on a 1000-mile road trip, everything was great, just had to adjust the belts a bit.

The whole experience is finely detailed and illustrated here: http://forums.maxima.org/showthread.php?t=541287

 

going on 11 years since this project started...

1996


2007


current

 

Can't top that^^^^^

I swapped my 1996 5-spd tranny for an 2000 5-spd tranny....took about a month or more. It was one problem after another, inadequate garage space, lack of tools, lack of experience, etc. etc.

One of the most frusterating jobs ever but saved about 2,000 in labor.


Special thanks to: Sdot82, and maxhopper97.

 

Damn irish...hard to top that indeed. My 240sx has been a long project. I have a habit of working for 7+ hours in a day without food or drink, and without feeling the need for it...until I start cleaning up the parts and tools for the night and get huge headaches, hunger, and thirst.

For my maxima...probably installing my suspension.

 

Boy does that sound familiar


For my I35...Changing pads/rotors & finding that one of my calipers was frozen....on Sun evening. Of course no one has it in stock, the the ONE place that had one tells me it's the drivers side when I needed the pass side. On the way there, the CEL comes on...bad o2 sensor. So I spent the week under the car with the brakes & wiring up the unvirsal 02 sensor. Good thing I had JUST finished up my engine swap on my stang...

...which brings me to the topic of this thread. I pretty much spent all day Sat and some Sundays working on my Mustang from the Beginning of May until the beginning of September. I remember running out to the garage one day after work on fri to get an early start. wrenched until maybe 2-3AM & figured it was about time to call it quits. Told myself I'd do this 'one last thing' ended up falling asleep out there under the carr on the creeper! Who knew they were that comfortable? At least I was able to get started right away Sat morning!

& to answer the question, 10+ for me.

 

update:

within the last week:

Thursday: Spent 8+ hours working on the Cherokee. stripped the interior of all carpeting, seats, and trim pieces. Installed all new carpets. Reinstalled all trim/seats. Installed rear speakers (and ran wiring). Installed junkyard 3rd brakelight (my year didn't come with one). Drilled out and retapped/rethreaded an upper strut mount (had to cut away 6x6" piece of metal flooring to do so). Installed quick-disconnect front swaybar links. Retorqued a bunch of suspension components. Changed air filter. Installed 1.25" spacers on rear wheels. Installed wheel inner fender liner on front left.

Today: Changed oil/filters in the Jeep, Maxima, and wife's Mazda3. Installed several new switches in Jeep. Did some cleaning in Maxima.

This week: total 13 hours working on cars.

Having a garage when it's 30 degrees out and rainy/sleeting/windy: priceless.

 

Off topic, but do you have a picture or two of the strut mount work?
Also, I hope you made your own quick dissconects with parts from Home Depot.


To all you fellow .org people:
Good to hear that some people have time to work on their cars.

 

Cleaning my intake manifold. Took 8 hours just to get it off...haha.

00vi is going in this weekend, itll be atleast a 2day project.

 

rebuilding my 96 5spd tranny. Took two weeks waiting for the shims, removal, rebuild and install.

 

3 days...me and my dad swapped out the VQ35 when it crapped out and put a fresh 30,000 mile VQ in it...

 

a picture? no...The upper rear shock mounts on the XJ is bolts that are welded onto the inside of the frame. The only access is to cut a panel in the cargo area and cut the bolt off from the inside, and then rethread the metal (or use a nut-and-bolt through the hole).

I didn't need to make discos, there were some skyjacker discos that came with the truck when I bought it (along with various other stuff....TC skidplate, auxiliary gauges, etc)

 

I spent about 8 hours, including travel time to install Max2Moons new and lowered suspension all the way around ^_^, theres pics on the forum somewhere ><

 

Couple weeks

 

Changing a clutch on a '87 Escort GT. Me and 2-3 other guys working on it in our free time. Total work was probably 8 hours but that was spread out over 3 weeks