Fri Aug 20 12:27:06 PDT 2004

So on Tuesday evening my car died. Wouldn’t start on it’s own. Laurie and I were able to jump it, but as soon as we removed the jumper cables, the car died again, which strongly indicated that the alternator was pretty much toast. On Wednesday evening Michael and I went over and fiddled with it, checking connections and stuff like that and in the end pulled the battery and plugged it into a wall-charger to try and get the car mobile again. This was a mostly good plan, the only downside is that the battery was a bit too old and really wasn’t going to hold too much of a charge. The theory was that it would hold enough to get me down the road to Les Schwab where the could test and possibly replace the alternator.

Thursday morning the battery was charged and after installing it, we headed straight for Les Schwab’s and were told that they don’t do alternators, but Northwest Auto did, and they were just down the road on CPass Road across from Winco. Well, I misunderstood them slightly and didn’t go far enough down the road to find them before turning into the industrial parks and within 5 minutes, the battery and therefore the rest of the car died. We then went in Laurie’s car and found Northwest Auto just a scant 500 ft from where we were looking. They referred us a towing company and thanks to AAA, it didn’t cost us anything to have the car towed the 1/4 mile to the shop.

From there on it was pretty smooth sailing they were able to replace the alternator, the battery, which was overdue to be replaced anyway, the serpentine belt, which also needed to be replaced and do an oil change for just under $560, which isn’t bad considering the alternator was $150-200 retail and a battery is around $70 and that serpentine belt replacement required removing one of the engine mounts (I hate designs like that). And they got it all done in one day without any hassles. The place is:

Northwest Auto Care Center 1800 NE Cornelius Pass Road Hillsboro, OR 97124 503 645 0185

I worked with Steve Batchelor and he did a good job helping get everything taken care of and they also identified a couple of other issues with the car like the coolent needing to be flushed and the rather obvious issues with the brakes, but wasn’t pushy about them.

Now I’ve got to try and decide if I want to actually do the rest of the needed maintenance on ht car or if I want to try and sell it off and get something smaller and less prone to require large sums of money…