Blue Mechanic

Sorry, Ilario and Victor, y’all seemed like nice guys, but your expertise was seriously lacking. Brought car in with liquid spewed all over serpentine belt, alternator, and engine. The liquid turned out to have been radiator fluid, but they tried to tell me it was engine oil spewing out of a bad head gasket. I figure mechanics should be able to tell difference between radiator fluid and engine oil. However, to their credit, they didnt push hard on a pricey gasket fix, but it took three or four days to properly diagnose the problem, which turned out to be a loose radiator hose caused by overheating, which was caused by a faulty cooling fan belt tensioner. Then they incorrectly told me the cooling fan belt ran the water pump, and I definitely should not drive the car until the tensioner was replaced. (And a replacement tensioner was nearly impossible to find.) In fact, that cooling fan belt did not run the water pump, and the car was okay to drive without a functional cooling fan as long as I was careful about idling at a stand still for long periods of time or going up hills in the heat, etc. These fellas only charged me $ 40 bucks for diagnostic work, but I wasted a lot of time and grew a few extra grey hairs in the process. (I finally found a used tensioner at a junk yard in CO Springs, and I drove the car over there with no overheating problems.)