07/18/2026
We just had another case of be careful where you take your car.
We were contacted by a lady who drove through flood water a while back and had to get another engine. She took it to a shop that installed a used engine. Soon after that she started having running issues.
That shop told her that she got bad gas so they were supposed to have cleaned the fuel system, but that didn't fix it. So they thought there might have been a problem with the ignition so they replaced some parts, that didn't fix it.
So they told her to have it diagnosed at a local dealership and to bring them the result.
She took it to the dealership to have it diagnosed for the engine cutting out, almost dying several times and she also mentioned that going over tracks the car lost all electric power briefly and then it came right back on. That last part was important.
The dealership tried to recreate the problem on a test drive but it wouldn't act up so they checked the rest of the car over and found several other concerns that they wanted thousands to fix. After that I had agreed to look at it.
Like I do on many things I prayed that God would show me the problem. I found it on the first thing I checked. The positive battery cable attaches to the main fuse box. When the engine was put in and the cables were reattached to that box they forgot to tighten the nut and the cables were very loose, the negative battery cable was also loose. I cleaned and tightened the cables and checked all of the other connections on the engine. I couldn't find any other problems and the car has been running fine since yesterday, I haven't heard otherwise.
In the first shops defense, it's easy to overlook something not being tightened, there are a lot of things that have to be undone when you're changing an engine. However, when there are problems right after an engine change it would be a good idea to look over all of the connections before replacing parts that might be causing problems. Also, the car was taken to a dealership for a specific running issue and just because it didn't act up on a test drive they should have concentrated more on the customers concern, they were told the engine was just replaced and they should have checked the engine over.
The client when talking with the shops gave them a lot of information, she was trying to be very detailed. Some of the important details may have been lost in all of that. When you take your car in for a problem it might be a good idea to just tell them the details of the particular problem you are having. The repair place will probably ask questions to get a better idea of what is going on, this is normal, if they need to know more they will ask you or they should.
I hope this helps someone and I thank God for giving me answers to problems!
