Cleaning Up A Half-Ass

"If you don't like your job, you don't strike...you just go in every day, and do it really half-assed. That's the American way!" -- Homer Simpson

I'm beginning to get really tired of cleaning up after people who half-ass an important task. Remember the wired-open choke on the Ramcharger? That's an example of someone need to do an important job the right way, but instead, they just half-ass it. This can happen as a result of laziness, carelessness, ignorance, or any combination of these. (NOTE: if you are ignorant about engines or have no mechanical aptitude, or if you're lazy or careless, you have absolutely no business working on an engine. The ignorant can be educated, so that's not too bad. If you're lazy or careless, you're best leaving your lazy, careless butt in front of the TV, where you probably provide your greatest contribution to American society by chipping in on the TV ratings.)

Have any of you had to clean up after someone else's laziness, carelessness, or ignorance? Moms need not answer...that's not quite what I'm looking for. I'm talking about remedying a situation in which someone put in half an effort and ended up f***ing things up or making a bad situation even worse, because the person didn't bother or didn't know to do a little research and get something done the right way. There are few things I find more frustrating than this. It just chaps my hide to discover something that someone else did, that now affects me, and that I end up having to repair after the fact so that things on my end will go smoothly.

Strangely, both the situations that spring immediately to mind involve carburetors. There was the choke issue mentioned above; a little bit of research and a little bit of effort would've gotten whoever that was through the problem and with a correct solution, not a half-measure that just screwed things up. The second situation I ran into just tonight.

I've been spending a fair amount of time working on the Mustang lately, primarily because working on the vehicles is therapeutic for me. It really is a very Zen activity; when I'm focusing on the task at hand, be it replacing some part, or doing diagnostics, or tuning the engine, or cleaning it up, or whatever, I'm completely focused on that and the rest of the world fades quietly into the background. I lose track of time. I don't think about Grandpa, or the garbage going on with the Board of Directors at the school, or financial worries, or job worries, or family problems, or any of that. It's just me and the work...nothing else seems to do that for me these days, not even computer work.

Then I find something and it snaps me back into the real world, the world of half-assers. After doing some troubleshooting with the vacuum gauge, I decided it was time to go ahead and replace the non-stock two-barrel Motorcraft 2150 carb on the Mustang with the stock Holley 4180c that I bought on eBay and rebuilt with the boys. The vacuum gauge was telling me that I still had a slight vacuum leak somewhere (which makes the engine run rough), and from what I was seeing and what I already knew of the car, the carburetor was the most likely culprit. I will say that by the time I was done this evening, I feel pretty strongly that my diagnosis was correct. Basically, the previous owner has removed the 4180 and put on the Motorcraft. Now, the Motorcraft 2150 is one of the finest stock carburetors ever made, by general consensus. They are widely acknowledged to be very easy to work with and highly efficient at atomizing fuel into the airstream, which is what the carb is supposed to do. So I don't fault the carb in this case...the problem was with the installation, or rather, the installer.

You see, the Motorcraft 2150 is a two-barrel carb, while the stock Holley is a four-barrel carb. The intake manifold is built to take a four-barrel carb. When you put a two-barrel carb onto a four-barrel manifold, you have to use an adapter plate, which is usually fine...unless you screw up the installation in some way. The carburetor is one of the most important parts of the whole car, so it's not something to fiddle with lightly; working on it is important and must be done carefully, deliberately, and with adequate preparation. You're asking for trouble otherwise.

Carburetors are held onto the manifold with double-ended studs; one end screws into the manifold, while the other end accepts the nut to tighten down the carburetor itself. This allows you to get the right torque on the nut and put the correct amount of pressure down onto the carb throttle body and gasket, without risking overtightening which leads to breaking off a bolt or stripping the bolt hole threads.

Again, that is, unless you do the careless, half-ass thing and replace the stud with a bolt, and end up stripping the threads in the hole anyway. Which is exactly what the previous owner did. The carb was attached to the adapter plate at one level, then the adapter plate was attached to the studs on the manifold and bolted down. However, as I examined the work, I could see that the person had either tried to do the install really quickly, or they were just careless all around, because they had cracked one corner of the adapter plate while tightening the front-right nut. Also, something had happened to the left-rear stud, so they just used a bolt and a washer to hold down that corner. The result of this was exactly what you would expect; the threads in the bolt hole were stripped.

When I examined the hole prior to installing a new stud, it appeared that the stripping was slight and only near the top of the hole. So I put the new stud in, tested it, and all seemed well. I then spent another two hours cleaning off the mating surfaces on the EGR spacer, preparing the surfaces and new gaskets, installing and sealing the gaskets, and putting it all together. Finally, I was ready. I called the boys out with me, where they could see that the manifold-to-spacer gasket had been installed, the spacer was in place, and the spacer-to-carb gasket was ready and waiting. All that was left was to put on the carb and tighten her down. I had the boys out with me so I could add in a lesson about how to use a torque wrench, a very important part of auto work. We tightened the other nuts down, we had our lesson...I even let each of them tighten one nut to the correct torque setting, so they could get a feel for using the torque wrench themselves. The suspect stud was at the back of the carb and a bit difficult to reach, so I left it for last. I began to tighten, and everything was well...I was getting close to the correct torque setting...then the nut inexplicably began to turn freely. I was confused, so I backed it off, reach down and tried tightening the nut by hand. It didn't turn, so I put the wrench back on. Again, it got a little tight then just let go. I took off the wrench and turned the stud...it tuned freely. In fact, I pulled it and it gave way and came completely out of the hole, not a good thing.

I was angry, because I once again faced a repair of a half-ass job. My only options now are to try to clean up the hole with a tap and try the stud again. If that doesn't work, I'll have to drill it, tap it, and put in a threaded insert, a more involved job. None of this is a huge deal, I can do any of this. (In fact, these are my best option when compared to the $200 or so I'd spend for a new intake manifold, plus $20 for manifold gaskets and another 4 hours of time removing and replacing the old manifold.) To me the issue is that it's probably another $20-30 in tools and parts, as well as another hour or two of time, that I should never have needed to go through. The previous owner (let's just call him The Idiot from now on) could easily have done this himself when he realized that something was wrong with that stud. If he lost the stud or broke it, he could've bought a full set of replacement carb studs for $10, because that what I spent yesterday on them. I fully understand the frustration of getting deep into a job and having something go wrong...there's a huge temptation to just push on, jury-rig a solution, and figure that's as good (or just hope it holds up). That's a big trap, though. Remember, The Idiot had also cracked a corner of the adapter plate with overzealous tightening of the nuts; he probably had this problem with the stud and said to himself, "F*** it...I'll just put in a regular bolt so I can get this done." Millions have fallen into this trap, the trap of thinking that you need to just finish the job, rather than backing off, cleaning up the damage, and finishing the job right. I know this because I was in his exact position. I could've taken the bolt he used, since I still had it, and screwed it into the bolt hole to hold that corner, called the job done, and hoped everything held up. The problems came for both of us right at the end of all of our hard work. I can almost hear his thought process now.

I mentioned to Heidi later, that this trap is probably what led him to dump the car. With the screwed-up installation of the carb, it was probably slightly leaky and never ran right. The importance of engine integrity cannot be overemphasized; good vacuum is crucial to getting the fuel/air mixture into the cylinders efficiently, and a leak anywhere in the system can really mess up performance. When he ran into this, I bet he figured the carburetor was not the problem (he had just replaced it, hadn't he? And that pesky bolt simply couldn't be causing any trouble). So he tried some other stuff to make it work, then when he couldn't figure out why the engine was running like garbage, he gave up and let the towing company keep it...which eventually led it to me via eBay. Funny how little mistakes, small moments of carelessness with important tasks can alter our destiny.

I will take the high road here, because I've already taken everything off, the carb, gaskets, EGR spacer, and studs, so that I can clean up The Idiot's foul-up...because it won't be right until I do.

Thanks for reading along.