A few years ago, a friend of mine named Caleb needed to change the struts on his subaru forester. My dad had tons of tools so I offered to help him change them. We were both pretty young and neither of us had ever really worked on cars before, but I knew the basic idea behind what we needed to do. Changing a set of struts is fairly simply. You jack the car up, remove the tire, remove the coil assembly that contains the strut, take the strut out of the coil, put the new one in and put the whole thing back together. We had all the right tools to do the job so we figured not too much could really go wrong, which turned out to be a bad assumption.
We started the job early in the morning on a nice summer day. We were working out of his garage, and quickly raised up his car and removed the front driver side tire, which was the last part of this job that went smoothly. We started to remove the bolts that held the strut assembly in place, and found that they were fused from rust. We sprayed all the bolts with WD40 hoping to loosen them, and set to work with a pair of breaker bars trying to remove them. Trying to get this strut assembly turned out to be just about impossible. I've done this same job several times and never had a problem with it on another car, but this forester put up a huge fight. For every bolt we had to use two breaker bars pulling in opposite direction to loosen them. For most of them one of us had to pull up on one bar while the other had to jump up and down on the other one trying to create enough torque to get the bolts loose. Each of the bolts took us at least half an hour to remove. By the time we got to the last bolt we were totally exhausted. We had put so much effort into each bolt that both of our hands were covered in bruises. It was starting to get dark out but we were determined to at least finish the front pair of struts. Unfortunately, the car was determined to win this battle. We tried everything to remove that last bolt, from butane torches to torque wrenches, but simply could not do it. When it was getting close to midnight we finally gave up and decided to try it again a different day. We fought with his car for over sixteen hours and the car won.
Wait, you mean you never changed out the struts? You put it back together with one good and one bad front strut, or the original two bad struts?
ReplyDeleteI appreciate endings that tease the reader a little, that don't reveal everything, but here the result of the narrative is pretty much a promise you implicitly make to the reader, so I think you can't get away without just a little more car talk.
That said, you do a nice job with the story set-up, your frustration, your ingenuity (I'd have thought that much torque would just snap off the bolt heads, leaving you with an even uglier problem....)