Mechanics, car problems

After unsuccessfully searching for recomendations for a mechanic on DR1 I thought I would share this since the Car Talk guys evidently are not going to read it. (Car Talk is a humorous, call in radio program about automotive problems on National Public Radio in the U.S.) If anyone knows of a Daihatsu mechanic who has his or her own vacuum guage and a timing light. . .

Jan. 9, 2006
Dear Click and Clack,

I just bought a used, year 2000 (approx.) Daihatsu Hijet minibus from a Japanese import lot here in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. It measures 5 feet wide by 11 feet long and is 6?3? tall and is a 5 speed with a 660cc, 3-cylinder motor and uses lots of regular gas, which costs $3.50 a gallon here. In 5th gear at 100kph it runs at a little over 4 grand but it is adorable.

It?s been ?tuned up? a couple of times now by street mechanics who each had one wrench?the 10mm is ubiquitous? a pair of bent pliers, a screwdriver and a piece of cardboard or burlap to lie on under the car in lieu of a creeper. The timing was set by ear. When I have asked whether that thing that they are tweaking is a fuel injector or a carburetor they tell me it is ?somewhere in between? and keep on turning the four adjustment screws on and near it until it idles smoothly and restarts easily. After one bout of adjustment one mechanic shrugged and suggested that I should start it cold by not touching the gas pedal and when starting hot that I would need to keep it matted until it started and this system has worked fine except for on New Year?s Eve when, thankfully--because drinking while driving is not discouraged here and we would most likely have been killed had we actually ventured out-- it would not start at all. One of the muchachos spent about 3 hours New Year?s Day underneath it installing 3 new spark plugs and now it starts again using the methods described above.

In the city it runs great and is peppy when weaving in and out of traffic?which is essential here to avoid being run over by gigantic guaguas (busses) making left hand turns across your bow from the far right hand lane through busy intersections but on the highway, after about an hour of driving at a steady cruising speed, it sometimes shows the unnerving symptoms of running out of (or maybe of being flooded by?) gas and jerks, I mean IT jerks, and it almost dies but this symptom is not at all predictable. Occasionally I think I detect an increased smell of gasoline in the air when this happens but, since the motor is directly under the front seats, this may be expected from time to time due to proximity. I have, so far, always gotten to where I was going. One of the mechanics working out of a grease pit found the fuel filter under the chassis and blew it out from both sides with a compressor and proudly announced that it had been installed backwards and reinstalled it the right way, but this seems to have made little or no difference. I have also poured an assortment of carb-cleaners and dry gasses into the gas tank and just when I think that did the trick I find myself lurching toward the breakdown lane again. I do not want to spend much time standing around in the breakdown lane because when the street thugs here steal your sneakers they don't wait for you to take them off, they remove them at the ankles with a machete-- without hurting the sneakers.

My real question is why am I getting only 25KPG? I have confirmed that the gas stations here indeed sell the stuff by the normal gallon and I have checked the odometer by using a handheld GPS unit and it agrees. I was hoping for more like 60kpg. One ?mechanic? tells me that 25 is normal because my model of Daihatsu has a turbo, and, indeed, the van does have the word Turbocooler written on the side in what appears to be factory lettering but I do not know what an actual turbo looks like or how much gas one might consume.

What do you think?

P.S.?
Well, I thought that the new plugs had cured the ?dying on the highway? problem but three days ago it died dead in a village far from home. A mechanic who materialized out of the bushes determined that I had a bad ?pita de abajo? which was failing to control the flow of gasoline. He described this pita as a small vertical pin that works like a float and is next to the real float and is located in the lower half of the carburetor. He then adjusted the carburetor for highway driving, so that I could get to where I was going, which meant that the thing ONLY ran at 3500 rpm or above, practically floored, and stalled instantly at idle but could be restarted. This strategy worked (at the expense of much of the clutch while negotiating speed bumps, traffic lights and craters and goats in the road) for 200 miles when it died dead again in a smaller village, even farther from home, and so the next mechanic had to be fetched by a friendly stranger on a Honda 50cc Club Special motorbike and he determined that the fuel pump was working erratically. So, after finally locating a new-used fuel pump we changed it on the side of the road?and it is a submerged fuel pump so we had to drop the gas tank and he figured that maybe a wire was bad too so, after stripping the ends of a found length of insulated wire with his teeth he ran it from the tank to the fuse box where he jammed it in alongside one of the live fuses. The motor idled and ran at normal rpm for 5 miles, even though the screws on the carburetor had not been reset, but then reverted to its custom-highway tuning of before-- but I made it the 80 neck-jerking, backfiring miles back home, and boy was I glad to get there.

So now what do you think?

P.P.S.
I have taken the Daihatsu minibus to a fancy authorized dealership to be worked on. They tell me that there has been a spate of bad gas in the country and that this could easily be causing all of my problems. The bad gas evidently came from the National Refinery which, fearing fuel shortages over the holidays, topped off their supplies of gas with an, as yet undetermined, although clearly detrimental to the fuel delivery system, substance? garages have been reporting ten-fold increases in fuel pump and pita de abajo replacements in the past weeks.

P.P.P.S.
I just retrieved my minibus from the Daihatsu dealer because they refused to work on it because, evidently, none of the running system is Daihatsu?they did not know what it was, but it was nothing they had seen before. So I bucked and burned the clutch back to Moto Plaza where I bought it and I will find out more on Monday how this is going to be resolved.

PPPPS?Moto Plaza?s solution was to remove ALL of the air and vacuum hoses from the motor. There had been a web of about 15 drinking straw sized, black rubber tubing that almost obscured the top of the engine from view which is now gone and they even removed the big hose that ran from the air cleaner to the carburetor so that the carburetor was sucking in dusty air directly from the street. The motor ran much worse.

So, now they are replacing the motor. Supposed to be ready on Thursday.

Thursday?I picked up the minibus with its replacement motor installed and made it ? of the way home (about 5 KM) before it died again. Moto Plaza sent a mechanic (the same one who installed the motor) who eventually started it but could not keep it running so we threw his motorcycle in the back and bucked and jumped and coasted and pushed it back to Moto Plaza.

Moto Plaza gave up and has given me another minibus, which is white and older and not as zippy but starts and runs although ALSO is only getting about 20KPG.

(March 30?the white minibus is still running but still getting only 20 KPG city and 27 KPG highway. I am now searching for a thermostat because I have learned that because it never really reaches a good warm operating temperature could be the reason for all the problems because the carburetor is always running rich and the choke might always be open. Because of being a Japanese version it does not appear on any of the big dealer?s computers. I called Moto Plaza and they told me that they routinely remove and throw away all thermostats from all their imports so they do not overheat. I asked them to look for one for me, even an old broken one from the trash so I can bring it around to show at auto parts places in hopes of finding a good one to buy.)
 

Chris

Gold
Oct 21, 2002
7,951
28
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www.caribbetech.com
I know this is supposed to by funny danduva, but I found myself nodding my head sagely, thinking, yes, that's kinda normal ... somehow we managed to hang onto the thermostat though ;) .
 
Good Mechanic

IT IS FIXED. After all the wasted efforts described above I went to Amanecer International on Lope de Vega esq. Camino Chiquito (Pedro Livio Cede?o) and Mario, 809-566-9608, tuned up the carberetor using a secret screw way down under that none of the street mechanics had ever touched. Now actually moves forward faster than the gas gauge needle goes down!

(I did install the thermostat which came from Elvis Auto Parts, who I also recommend which is almost next door to Mario)
 

jojo2130

New member
May 30, 2005
492
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Oh My God, that was a great way to start the day ,laughing, especially since yesterday I stopped to get a radiator installed. And to charge my air conditioning in my Toyota. I arrived to find them soldering together my "new" radiator and asking for "algo Mas" and with my AC compressor rebuilt after expressly telling them not to do anything to the car without my authorization , because I wouldn't pay.

I was given a course on AC and filters and told what I should buy so that the newly charged AC with the rebuilt compressor would actually create cooled air inside the car !

Joe