How to save money
This week’s story is about how to save $15.
First, go out and buy a diesel pickup truck that is older than your last-born child, which. surprisingly enough, are more expensive than one might think, even at the ripe age of 20.
Next, decide that you’ll change the fuel filter yourself, because you watched a YouTube video about it, and while it wasn’t the exact same diesel engine or the exact same truck for that matter, it seemed like it was close enough.
Plus, you’d be saving the above-mentioned $15. See, the last time you had the fuel filter replaced it cost you about $50 for a qualified diesel mechanic to do it for you.
That seemed a bit high at the time, mostly because you’re cheap.
So you went to NAPA and bought a filter, which cost $35 and you decided to save $15 and do it yourself, even though you have the mechanical aptitude of a small mouse. Which is to say that if it can’t be fixed with a couple of whacks of a hammer or a crescent wrench, well, then it probably wasn’t all that broken to begin with.
Even after you watch the YouTube video again (the narrator sounds like he’s in Iraq), you stop by your friend Tom’s house for some advice. He’s literally torn trucks like yours apart and put them back together again, but even he’s smart enough to look up the correct procedure in a big reference book he has.
After reading the procedure in the big book, he asks you a simple question:
“You got the filter with you?”
“Yep,” you say.
“Open it up.”
Inside there’s a little piece of paper.
“Those are the instructions,” he says with a smile.
So the next day is a nice, sunny Sunday and you decide to change that filter. You manage to get it out, replace the o-rings, get the sensor that tells you if there’s water in the fuel hooked back up, and get the filter back in properly and the canister that holds it back onto the engine.
Now you know it needs to prime, so you turn the key which starts the fuel pump and then you turn over the engine.
It starts briefly and then stops.
You turn the key again.
It starts briefly and then stops and then won’t start again.
Whups. You didn’t prime it right.
You call Tom. Tom checks his big reference book.
After some searching and some over-the-phone tutelage, Tom helps you find the primer pump on the engine and then talks you through how to prime the pump and get the air out of it, which requires loosening a nut to release the air and then finding a rather large manual pump you push with your thumb.
You would have never figured it out by yourself in a million years.
Not even with a great big hammer.
The moment of truth arrives. You jump in the cab, turn the key and the engine grumbles to life.
You’ve just saved $15. Thank you, Tom. Thank you.
Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News and wannabe mechanic.