I hate getting paid to do nothing.

"gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee" (gogmorgo)
08/12/2015 at 12:06 • Filed to: None

Sitting in the waiting room at a Chrysler dealer because of a Caravan. I work for a government agency, so it’s especially frustrating, as I feel like I’m wasting taxpayer money.

It does make me feel better about not being able to find the problem with the fan, because the dealer mechanics are struggling as well. I’m the dumb labour in the fleet garage, and sometimes I think my boss grossly overestimates my mechanical ability, so I kinda was questioning his decision to farm this one out without having an actual mechanic look at it first.

In other news, they have a couple Cherokee TrailHawks on the lot, and one Renegade TH.

Edit: tried to upload pics here but got kinja’d. Tried again on imgur, got kinja’d again. Maybe I’ll try again with the pics tonight.

For anyone curious, the Cherokee TH goes for ~$41,000 north of the 49th, and it’s baby brother goes for ~$35k.

The Renegade reminds me a lot of my Niva. It’s about the same size (and shape), and is also a small 4x4 based on Fiat-not-actually-4x4 components. I like it. I haven’t driven it. I asked, but it’s already sold so they didn’t want me driving it. More modern gadgets than I care for, but it’s a new car so what can you expect.

Don’t care so much for the larger siblings, the squinty face is still growing on me, but the Cherokee definitely looks better in black.

Update: finally got pics. For those curious, the heater fan issue was because the resistor pack had blown out in such a way that it was backfeeding power through the control panel when power was applied, while still testing good when it wasn’t receiving power. Usually when a resistor pack goes, you just loose all but the highest fan speed, but this one had the fan completely nonoperational. All the components bench tested good, which is why I was stumped.

The main reason we had the van at the dealer was to get the body contol module reflashed as the power door locks weren’t working properly. We’ve got a fully equipped shop and do just about all the work on our cars ourselves, but we don’t have scanners that do more than pull diagnostic codes. We figured the two issues would be related and reflashing the bcm would correct both, but I guess they weren’t and it didn’t.