Just had a customer tell me they 'fixed' their own truck with zip ties

Had this guy roll into my shop in Philly yesterday with a 2015 Ram 3500 that sounded like a dying lawnmower. He tells me he saved money by doing the repair himself, but he's real proud showing me how he zip-tied the turbo actuator arm to the vgt ring. I'm standing there looking at engine codes reading overboost and underboost at the same time. He actually argued with me for 20 minutes that it was fine because the truck still moved. Took me 3 hours to un-jam everything and replace the actuator he cooked. Customer's still mad at me for charging him $400 instead of his $5 fix. Anyone else get people who think a temporary bodge job is the same as a real repair?

3 comments

3 Comments

joel_jones12d ago

Man if the truck still moves that doesn't mean it's fixed. I see this all the time with guys who think driving something down the road is the same as it working right. That actuator arm is a precision part on a modern diesel engine, not a fence gate latch. Zip ties have their place but not on a VGT turbo that cycles thousands of times a day. The customer cooked his own actuator because the zip tie held the vanes in one position and the computer went crazy trying to adjust. $400 is cheap considering he probably would have blown the turbo entirely if he kept driving it that way. Some people just refuse to understand that mechanical sympathy is a thing.

marywilson12d ago

Last summer I had a guy bring in a lawn mower that he'd "rebuilt" with a coat hanger holding the carburetor float in place. He swore up and down it ran fine for two months until the whole thing melted into a puddle of plastic. I spent an hour picking bits of coat hanger wire out of the intake manifold while he stood there telling me about his uncle who fixed a tractor with baling twine back in '82. Cost him $150 for a new carburetor and half my afternoon. He still swears the coat hanger was a better fix.

mark43612d ago

Ha! I used to think those old timer fixes were genius, but stories like this totally changed my mind. There's a big difference between a temporary field repair and something you expect to last in a modern engine.