All for want of a piece of tape.

A lot of my vehicular stress, which I very briefly blogged about in the closing paragraphs of this post, was reduced over the weekend. Now I can get ulcers about other things.

Wife and I traded vehicles a couple of months ago; she started driving my Escape, because she has a longer drive and it gets better mileage, while I took over the wheel of her Explorer. Both of us now go through one tank of gas a week apiece, whereas previously, she was filling up the Explorer twice a week, and I was filling my Escape up once per week.

When I started driving the Explorer, one minor problem would rear its ugly head on occasion, and it was completely random in its occurrence. At intersections, or when turning off of one road onto another, the Explorer would sometimes lose power and die. It didn’t put up too much of a fight when I would start back up, but woe to those who were in a hurry behind me.

The dying problem wasn’t an issue once I got up to speed on the highway, but it was a problem in town and where I work. Wife and I had misdiagnosed the problem as having to do with dirty fuel injectors. Her solution was to give me the opportunity to “clean out” the fuel injectors by finding a wide-open stretch of highway and just gunning it for about a mile. Hooray!

The Explorer would then run fine for about a week or so before the same problems would return. It was an inconvenience, but nothing a bottle of fuel injector cleaner (and a series of Steve McQueen moments) wouldn’t fix.

Cue hot weather. The 90-degree heat and 300-percent humidity seemed to wreak havoc on the Explorer. It’s about 15 miles to work for me one way, and my vehicle would die on average of 3-4 times per trip. This development was a grandly inconvenient one, and I feared it to be a terminal one as well. The Explorer has almost 190,000 miles on it, so every cough, sputter and hiccup that it experiences causes me to think the end is near for it.

I finally got it into the shop last Saturday. My mechanic ran a diagnostic on it, found the issue, got underneath the vehicle, and spied a loose wire running down from where the distributor used to be in older vehicles (I hear that most of today's vehicles are distributor-less, so ... OK.). This stray wire was occasionally hitting up against a clamp underneath the vehicle, which was in turn causing a “double flash” of some sort (I am a layman, so he could have said that it was my Explorer's pancreas that was the issue, and I would have said, "Oh no! Not my Explorer's pancreas!").

Anyway, this "double flash" had the ultimate effect of shorting out the engine. Or something.

A piece of tape to put the wire back into place, and I was on my way. The Explorer is running as smoothly as it ever was, and the internal-combustion-engine gods have moved on to other things. I'm just glad I don't have to dread driving anymore for a while.