Parking Lot Car Repair

Outside my office in the 35 degree light rain I noticed a car jacked up with the wheel off. At first I thought it was a flat tire, then noticed that dude was way under the car. I offered assistance, but he already had another car parked nearby to warm up in and all the tools he needed. He's replacing the fuel pump. Turns out it's not even his car, he's helping out a (girl) friend. I decided to just keep an eye on progress, ready to grab a paramedic and help if the car fell off the jack, or his cigarette interacted with the open gas tank.

I know a lot of us have been there. Away from home with a broke down car and a need to get it going again where it sits. My most memorable roadside repair was replacing a water pump in an '80s Chevy van. Driving from Tennessee to MIchigan, in the middle of nowhere, the pump completely gave out. I was sick at the time and my wife had been driving. A stranger drove me about 30 miles each way to pick up a new pump and made sure we were okay before he left. Miserable in the roadside heat, but determined and desperate to get back on the road with my (then pregnant) wife and two young kids. I got the pump replaced and we made it to a motel where we just rested for the next day before completeing our journey.

He must really like this girl....

I've done at least 3 coworkers' brake jobs in various office parking lots.  I hate seeing people pay $500+ for something simple they can help me do for under $100 in parts.

I figure it helps them be less scared of doing minor work, and promotes better understanding of how their cars work.

I helped my father do a wheel bearing on my sister's old Catalina in a parking lot.  Her boyfriend had been driving it and let a known worn wheel bearing turn into a flopping nightmare that almost let the wheel fall off.  It had gotten so hot that it actually welded the inner race to the spindle.  We ended up having to hacksaw it off using a diamond-wire blade.  That was exciting.

The worst I ever did myself under emergency conditions was replace the alternator on the old LeMans in a parts store parking lot on a cold night.  Being an old GM product, that wasn't too bad.

That takes some cojones to do in a parking lot in that kind of weather. I'd tow strapped it to the nearest covered parking first. 

While I'm no stranger to parking lot wrenching myself, I haven't had the urge to do bodywork in a parking lot outside of the Best Western Gateway Grand in Gainesville, FL in October. This guy, however, pulled into my old work parking lot about a year ago and felt it was a great place to slather on some Bondo. Once it was on there, he bolted.

I dont have many stories but a couple that I will never forget. 
 

1. January of 2000. 
I was deiving from Maine to Florida in my 1989 Celica All-Trac. Past Boston it started running hot, its January. I pulled over right before NY and pulled the plug to the temp sensor in the rad, not that complicated. This let the fans run full speed all the time. 

I decided to go to Manhattan, no GPS ... just AAA provided paper maps. Clusterberkeley but my plan was to go to an JFK or LaGuardia and park the car while I assesed the situation. 

I stayed at a Hostel in Harlem ... that's a whole different nightmare. Somehow I got a hold of a computer and went into the Yahoo MR2 mailing list asking for help. I needed tools mainly. No dice. Found a dealership in Manhattan and a tech that would lend me his tools in order to remove the thermostat. I will never forget the pain of driving into Manhattan with no GPS, an overheating car and not being really sure where to park. 
removed the thermostat and started driving south. Got to DC and only had to stop 3 or so times to add water. 
from DC I got to NC stopping every 30 minutes or so. From NC to Florida it took me 3 days, I sleep at rest areas and probably had to stop 200 times. I made it. 
 

2. November of 2008 

Rented a 2008 Audi Avant diesel manual in Munich. Decided to go to Paris, all good. Left Paris, Berlin bound. 
Its my wife, my 2 year old son and my 2 month old son, plus me.

2 hours outside of Paris I get a rear flat tire. NP ... until I realized there was no spare. The hole in the tire was the size of TX and no way the supplied repair kit could fix it. No cell signal, I dont speak French. 
Drove 10 or so miles on the shoulder to the nearest "city". Figured out that a the post office they sold calling cards as my phone still had no signal. 

I could not find anyone to speak English or anything that I would understand. Finally as I was about to give up a lady about my age in line came and talked to me in English. She called her husband who drove me everywhere trying to find a 17' tire (non existant in 2008 unless you are in Paris), then called Avis France all this while my whole family was at their house. Long story short, Avis came took the car away and I spent 2 nights at this family's house. A Taxi came to pick me up once they couldnt fix the car and took me to Paris to Charles de Gaulle airport, the family told the taxi driver where to take us, that we did not speak French and the older guy took us everywhere sightseeing on the way. I could not understand one peep of what he was showing us and wanted to get the hell out of there. 
We spent a night at the airport waiting for a car ... I finally understood they did not want to give us a Fench car as it would end up in Germany. Finally someone returned a Passat wagon from Germany and we took that. 
What a clusterberkeley! But very thankful to that French family that took us in. During the whole nighmare I forgot their names or where that was so I could never properly thank them, my biggest regret. 

LOL.  Back when I lived in the city, if I was so lucky that the car was drivable, I'd take it to a parking lot to do the job.   That was a luxury.

I remember more than once laying under the car in the street, in the rain over the weekend so I'd have a way to get to work on Monday.

Worst I've had to do was serpentine belt on ny old Bravada in the snow. The shifter cable bushing on the Saturn in good weather wasn't bad.

My now-wife's 89 Camry wagon lost the water pump and timing belt while she was 2 hrs away for the summer working an internship and renting a room in some random family's house.  So she limped it back to the driveway where she was staying and I drove down and replaced the timing belt/water pump, which I had never done before having only owned big ol' timing chain V8's at that point.  This was ~2006 so the internet was a thing but not a super great thing full of how-to youtube videos yet.  I did enough research to figure out that I was going to need a chain wrench to hold the crank pulley, bought one on the way there, and somehow it worked out OK.

In reply to AAZCD :

Does the dude have more than just the jack that comes with the spare tire? 

Does he have a jack stand?  If not, at least go out there and position that removed tire under the car so the car then crushes him less. 

We had an '93(?) Pace Arrow motorhome with the Ford V10. Drove great for weeks. We start a 8 hour trip home and two hours into the trip it starts to rain. As soon as the roads were really wet and getting the underside wet the transmission drops out of gear into neutral. Long story short, it would drive normally until you reached about 30-35 mph then it would kick back into neutral. After hours of driving like this I was able to (with almost-telepathic feathering of the accelerator) occasionally hit 40 mph downhill.  We arrived home about 6 hours late. That was a long freakin' day. It did the same thing with the next big rain, this time on the interstate in rush hour. Laying on my back on the wet shoulder spraying WD-40 on all the transmission connections as traffic flew by. We started our search for another motorhome after that. Never found out what that problem was.

John Welsh said:

In reply to AAZCD :

Does the dude have more than just the jack that comes with the spare tire? 

Does he have a jack stand?  If not, at least go out there and position that removed tire under the car so the car then crushes him less. 

That's what got me out there in the first place. From my viewpoint, it looked like he just had an emergency jack. Turned out he had a good hydraulic jack and a stand. Now, about three hours after I first noticed him, the car is back together and gone.

I helped a buddy drop the gas tank and do the fuel pump in an XJ in a parking lot in south Marietta back in college. Not fun, but much better weather than that poor guy.

I replaced the camshaft in my CJ-7 in the parking lot of my dorm in college. Which means radiator, water pump, timing chain & sprockets, intake, etc. I had front row parking right by the main sidewalk. I got really good at ignoring comments from other students walking by.

Similar to OP's post, I helped a girlfriend out by replacing the fuel lines on her Rabbit parked on the street. Got a faceful of gas on that one.

I try to avoid doing parking lot/ road work, but have definitely been there.

- replaced an upper control arm in a 77 Granada on the side of the road in HS. The upper control arm snapped right behind the ballpoint. The coil spring loaded the upper control arm, so looking back it was not the safest location. 

- replaced a clutch line on the side of the road on Staten Island when SWMBO and I were dating. Luckily traffic was light so I made it from Stamford, CT to SI, NY without being able to use the clutch. 

- replaced a couple bad injectors on a GM 6.2 diesel on the side on the highway, in the dark, with no flashlight. (I had plenty of practice in daylight to prepare).

Other ones were minor: using paper clips to hold shift linkages together,  heater hoses moved to recirculate, and similar small repairs to get home. 

llysgennad said:

Similar to OP's post, I helped a girlfriend out... Got a faceful of gas on that one.

From the car? 

Amateurs.

When the transmisison let go in my old truck much younger Gimp and myself were stranded off 95 and tried to get a 700r4 to swap in but the only yard open was imports.  So we could not make that happen.  On the same stretch of 95 in traffic jam in 90* temps i had a headgasket let go on my caprice, with Carli when we were just friends who rode together because Gimp and her roommate from college were near each other.  I got to an autozone with the gauge pegged, let it cool, got a gasket and yoinked the thermostat and put the housing back on and got us home 390 miles.  I think that's when she realized i was a special kind of crazy and we started dating a couple weeks later.  
 

had a rotor shear through the veins on my other caprice and did that in a parking lot.  Most of my other parking lot repairs are wiring splices, crimping rotten lines, fixing rotten lines, replacing wheel studs kinda stuff.  

Oh boy, I have converted a Saab Sonett to an electric fuel pump in a I80 rest area near Red Desert Wyoming, and .even better, but with good assistants, changed out a BBC in a dually in the rest area on southbound I81 just north of Scranton PA. The engine swap truck was stationary for 22 hours. Both of those in nice weather.

When I moved from Texas to California we rented a U haul truck. 

We worked on it in parking lots and on the side of the highway at least a dozen times when it died on us.  Spent half a day in El Paso at a U haul shop for them to work on it.  Never did figure out what was wrong with it.  Definitely not the fuel filter, fuel pump or distributor

Never, ever, rent from U haul

When you drive old Air-cooled VW s , working on the side of the road is just part of the adventure ,  put a new clutch in the bus on Thanksgiving in Southern Germany in the parking lot across the street from a VW dealer ,  changed a motor in Gaviota just north of Santa Barbara , drove my bug home 60 miles in 2nd gear because the shift rod broke , and on and on..

We spent our dinner money on brake pads one time because we were metal on metal 200 miles from home. The fix was simple enough on the side of the road, but being hungry all the way home after a long day of climbing/hiking sucked. We put every cent we had plus the deposit from three pop cans in the back seat into the tank and it was pegged on E when we got back. 

Same friend and I lost an alternator on his truck when it was -15 air temp. We were going hunting for the weekend. We walked to a bar and called my girlfriend who came and got us. She drove us back and we hopped in my car and headed out again. She was upset that we didn't cancel the weekend. On the way past his truck we took turns handling wrenches in arctic conditions to pull the alternator, grabbed a new one near deer camp, and replaced it on our way back. We put a note on the window explaining why the truck was where it was and nobody towed it. That was nice. 

I have AAA now. 

John Welsh said:

In reply to AAZCD :

Does the dude have more than just the jack that comes with the spare tire? 

Does he have a jack stand?  If not, at least go out there and position that removed tire under the car so the car then crushes him less. 

Earlier this week I had to replace the starter in my 4Runner that I had replaced exactly one year earlier.  All of my jack stands (4) are under my TR3 that seems to have grown attached to them.  I jacked up the vehicle but was too chicken to crawl under it.  I pushed the spare tire with a 4x4 on top of it under the chassis beside me to also keep it from crushing me too badly.  My wife had a distant relative who was a mechanic get killed by a car falling off a jack.  

Years ago I was doing research downtown and went to return to my office in my Nissan truck.  Right away I could tell the clutch was acting funky.  I got 2 blocks away and could tell I wasn’t going to make it back to the office.  I happened to be passing an import parts store and rolled into the parking lot.  I diagnosed a failed slave cylinder and walked into the store for a seal kit.  The kit was $12, but they didn’t have it in stock.  They did have the whole slave cylinder for $14 though.  I gladly accepted the upsale.  The parts lady, who I had known for a while, handed me 2 wrenches off the display and said ”bring them back when you’re finished”.  I changed the slave out in the parking lot without having to raise the truck.