Reptiles at Risk

Repairs completed!

Posted by Jeff Hathaway on August 8, 2007 at 8:48 AM

In the morning at New River Provincial Park in New Brunswick, the sun was shining, the birds were singing, and it was great not to have to fix anything!

Not that there wasn't stuff that we could have been fixing, but at least nothing that was a high priority! Saint John was very good to us. After our first night in a truck stop parking lot, for reasons too complicated to explain, we went down to the CBC Radio studio for an early morning interview, which went well, and then did a couple of library programs. After the afternoon show, we visited the Saint John Market and then went over to the home of the family of Mark, Mary Ellen's boyfriend. They were very happy to see each other, since Mary Ellen has been away with us since May! We had a great dinner with them, caught up on some laundry, etc. Before dinner, we took the van over to Canadian Tire, as we were leaking diesel fuel quite noticeably! Sadly, they called just after dinner to say that the leak was in the engine area, and they wouldn't be able to do anything since they don't work on diesel engines! Too bad they didn't tell us that when we dropped it off! We shouldn't complain too much, though, since Canadian Tire has been good to us in the past, and remains one of our favorite stores.

A few phone calls later, we discovered that a truck service garage, Bayview International, was open until 11PM! Remarkable! We took the van over there, and convinced one of the mechanics to take a quick look at it. By this time, we knew that the leak was at the fuel injectors (at least 3 of them), and the mechanic confirmed that some o-rings on the fuel returns were the cause. We left the van there (huge thanks to Mark's father, Rob, for driving me back and forth a few times), with a plan to source the o-rings in the morning. The mechanic told us if we could get them from Ford, they could probably install them later in the day. We tried another place, Parts for Trucks, that was open late as well, and they had o-rings, but without the specifications we didn't know what size! After some thought, we looked up Ford dealerships on the west coast online, and called Burnaby Ford! Dean, in their service department, was very helpful. He looked up the part number, found one in stock, and measured it with calipers for us! Thanks a bunch, Dean!

A quick call back to Parts for Trucks secured a full set of the correct o-rings for us to pick up in the morning. If 3 were leaking, we figured the others must be getting weak as well.

We picked them up and took them over to Bayview International, and they got to work on installing them- I'm glad we didn't have to try as it wasn't an easy job! They got everything done in time for us to head out for our evening program at New River. Thanks, Robin, and everyone else at Bayview International!