Saturday, August 23, 2008

Turns Out, I May Have Needed That After All...

You see, God can do funny things with the timing of mundane events in the lives of men.

I bought a car. For parts. It has a manual transmission and my daily driver has an automatic. The idea is to convert my car to a standard transmission. Yay.

I get it mostly torn apart, and a water line on my house breaks. Work on the car stops.

Then I go ahead and change the timing and drive belts on my driver, along with the water pump.

And the timing belt stretched. I had installed it too loose to begin with, so normal stretching resulted in the timing skipping a tooth. This is a Bad Thing for a car.

I thought the noise I heard was from the intake valves in the engine being bent.

The noise is apparently a bad axle.

The axle was new (7000 miles) and under warranty.

If I had been working on the auto-to-manual conversion instead of repairing plumbing, or changing timing belts, or spending a week troubleshooting what that noise was,

I would have had the standard transmission in by now.

That would be fine, except that I would have caught the blame for the axle failure.

So I would have been out another couple of hundred dollars for a new axle or two, when it was actually a bad part from somebody else. And God has (depending on the pro rating on the warranty) saved me that money which I didn't really have to spend, as well as a LARGE loss of face in front of my wife and the Hyundai tuning community online.

Coincidence?

If you insist. I call it a blessing in disguise.

Thank you, Lord!

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