My new truck and my first experience with a mechanic shop.

I recently decided to buy a new truck. I traded in my Jeep Grand Cherokee on a Dodge Durango. It has third row seating; which is nice when I have my nieces and nephews; it has leather seats, rear air, etc. It is a nice truck and I REALLY like it. I got it on the 20th of January.

Well, this past Sunday, my husband and I were driving back from his work and the check gauges light came on. Great! My husband looked down at the instrument panel and the heat gauge was creeping up. I immediately start stressing because I have had vehicles overheat and crack a head or blow a head gasket-which isn’t good. We get home and park the truck and didn’t think anything more about it. We go out the next morning and start to let it warm up to take the kids to school. It didn’t get hot at all while it was idling. The minute we start driving, however, the temperature gauge starts creeping up there again. We bring it home and park it again. My husband, who works for a tow truck company, towed to a local shop. The shop looks at it and runs some tests and tells me that it is a cracked head or blown head gasket and it would cost anywhere in the range of $900 to $1100 to fix. HOLY COW!! However, since I have had experience with this type of issue it didn’t seem right. All the experiences I have had are if it is a head or head gasket then it gets hot even while idling. The guy at the shop had a good explanation of why it was getting hot while idling but I wanted a second opinion. My husband towed my truck to the actual dealership shop to get the second opinion. They had it for a couple hours and called and told me that they put more coolant in it and a new radiator cap. He also said that they drove it like 15 miles and it didn’t get hot. Which is a good thing because we couldn’t even drive it three blocks before it would get hot. So that is the good news. The bad news he had was I was losing coolant. GREAT!! He said that where it was leaking meant either a freeze plug or a cracked block. EVEN GREATER!! A cracked block is SO much worse than a cracked head or a blown head gasket. He said to find out which it is they would have to pull my transmission. OK fine. That would cost $650. That’s a good chunk of change but still less than the head issue. He assured me that it wasn’t anything to do with the heads at all. The reason the test (vapor test) the first shop did failed was because the “vapors” were escaping out either the cracked block or the freeze plug, whichever the problem was. I felt pretty confident at this time that I had made the right decision to get a second opinion. They pulled the transmission and found out it was just a freeze plug, $10 as opposed to probably a couple thousand! YAY!! Things are looking up. So now I am sitting here waiting for the call so I can go get my truck. I am so excited.

I decided to write about this experience I have been going through all week because I just knew when the first shop told me their answer that that wasn’t right. Not saying that they are incompetent in their job but I just knew in my gut that wasn’t right. It wasn’t that it would be expensive but somehow I just knew that wasn’t what was wrong. My dad was always working on cars, so I know a little bit. This was just another example of gut instinct and I am glad that I listened to mine. Unless, of course, this doesn’t fix it and I end up back at the shop.