Ferrarioldman (SportAuto) for President!!

Well, today's oil change wasn't exactly as smooth as I'd hoped. David (dcdc) and I were making great time, and we're buttoning up the car after only 1.5 hours. From my perspective, that's pretty decent on a 348. Having a big garage lift makes a huge difference!

Imagine if you will, good ol' Daniel closing up the bolts on the bottom of the oil tank (I pull the four little ones, inspect the screen, etc. instead of the single large one), when all of a sudden the ratchet begins to spin freely. Yes, that's right, with the strength of 27 oxen, I stripped one of those four bolts that holds the tank plate in place. With a stripped bolt, my car had about as much chance of holding any oil, as a snowball in Hades.

Stripping the bolt wouldn't be such a problem by itself, but here I was graciously borrowing David's lift, his Ferrari is out in the driveway, his kids are getting ready to go play soccer, his wife is gone, I'm 45 miles from home, Mrs. JRR is out of town, and my poor Jack Russell was home alone (about to explode). I was fuming. Visions of leaving my car at David's and walking back to Winston-Salem flashed through my mind. Worse yet, the thought of a tow-truck was equally frightening.

After a few choice words (not suitable for reprint), I decided to call SportAuto and PRAY that Tom Jones was there. To my 1000% delight, he was. Tom, Steve, and Darryl had a nice laugh at how stupid I'd been... then told me to scoot up to Summerfield and borrow some tools. Less than 37 minutes later, I had a fresh Time-Sert 6mm set in my hands and some personal instruction from the Jedi Master himself on how to stay cool and fix my oil tank.

It helped when Tom confessed that it'd happened to him too --- once --- back in 1934.

Anyway, 14 minutes later, I was back under the car at David's house, and the Time-Sert (basically a heli-coil type device) worked perfectly. We dumped a bunch of 5W-20 into the tank. No leaks.... so we fired her up. Pressure looked good, oil temp came up as expected, and the ground beneath the car remained bone-dry. I made a spirited run back to Summerfield to return the tools to Tom, and the bottom of the tank appears to be "good as new".

HUGE HUGE HUGE thanks to SportAuto for being open and being cool enough to loan a complete dip-**** like me their tools !!!!

When it comes to customer service, these folks are THE BEST.


Humbled by my stupidty, and forever grateful,
Daniel


p.s. Tight is good. Tighter is not better