By John Toth
The Bulletin
I used to be able to take apart the carburetor on my 1969 Buick Skylark, rebuild it and put it back together.
It wasn’t simple, but if you followed the instructions that came with the rebuild kit, it was doable.
Those were the days when car problems were simple to diagnose. When the overheat light came on, it was time to pull the thermostat - remove two bolts, slip a new one in and re-tighten the bolts.
Fuel pump? Easy. Two bolts again. Replace the pump, and you were done.
Emissions gadgets? There were none. Catalytic converter? It wasn’t invented yet. Computer panel? None.
If I ran into a problem I couldn’t handle, I called up a friend who probably knew the solution. If we struck out, I took the car to the shop as a last resort..
I didn’t want to mess with replacing the radiator, and a valve job was way above my pay grade. But those things didn’t come along that often.
Those were the days when a poor college kid like me could buy a decent junker for a few hundred dollars and keep it running. It’s a little different today.
The check engine light came on in one of my cars. “Check engine soon,” it said in red letters. My 1969 Skylark didn’t have a check engine light. I checked the engine by lifting the hood and making sure that all the hoses, belts and fluid levels were good.
Checking the engine is now more complicated. I plugged my OBDII scanner into the car, and it started communicating with the car computer. It’s supposed to spit out a code that I can then look up. Simple enough, except for one thing.
The code said it was an emissions problem and listed a half dozen possibilities of what could be causing it. That’s no help, especially when the mechanic charges $100 an hour. I don’t mind the charge and appreciate the mechanic’s skills and effort. I just don’t want him to go through all the possibilities on my dime (thousands of dimes).
It was the sensor itself. Fine. A few hundred dollars, and it was all fixed.
Except a few miles down the road, the check engine light came back on, this time with a different code.
According to the scanner, it was most likely the catalytic converter. At least I knew that it was not the sensor.
A few more hundreds dollars later, the car had a new catalytic converter and a dark check engine light. Problem solved, right?
For a while. About 50 miles later, the check engine light popped back on again. That’s just wonderful, I thought.
I reconnected my scanner again to the car’s computer. Lo and behold, it spit out the first code that should have been fixed by replacing the old sensor.
You’d figure that they could develop a system that pinpoints the problem rather than making it an expensive guessing game. We have cars today that drive themselves. How hard can it be to invent a gadget that talks to the car computer and comes back with the exact problem that needs fixing?
We landed on the moon for the first time in 1969, the same year when my Skylark was built. I wish I still had that car. It did suck up gas, but at 59 cents per gallon, I wasn’t too concerned about that.
I traded it in for a smaller new car that got much better gas mileage and even had air conditioning.
I managed to finally solve the check engine-light problem with electrical tape.
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