When has a car's design turned a simple job into a torture test for you?

Ooh, on der Scheißwagen - and I assume every other installation of the OM642 - there's a little motor that controls the intake manifold swirl flaps.  It breaks for a wide and sundry collection of stupid reasons.  You can get to that little motor without too much work.  Except that there's a wiring harness in the way.  That wiring harness is all enclosed in a hard plastic shell that goes right above the motor and right under the turbo's intake port.  Can't be moved out of the way unless you also disconnect the turbo.  So to get that little motor out you've got to disconnect all the exhaust, the egr tube, the water-cooled EGR, and all the other stuff to get the turbo off.  Of course, Mercedes tells you never to re-use most of the bolts that hold the turbo on and there's a half-dozen gaskets that have to be replaced.

05 sequoia starter. V8, lots of room. Figured that would take me an hour tops. Didn't realize the starter is under the intake before made that assumption. The bolts to get the thing off are unobtainable. That ended up being like a 6 hour job instead.  

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My brother is not a car guy but years ago he was poor and figured he could figure out the water pump on his 1986 Honda Accord DX. I came by to check on it and noticed little plus sign (+) indents all over the driver's side fender. 
There are like ten bolts for the water pump, all but one are exposed, the other is behind the timing belt cover, which, naturally, adds quite a bit of work and hassle to an otherwise simple job. His eventual solution was to get tin snips and cut off that piece of the cover. 

The plus marks were because he was holding a Philip's head screwdriver when overcome by rage. 

Co-worker asked me yesterday if I could replace her starter in her 02 Jeep Liberty. According to YouTube, you need to remove either the driveshaft or the oil pan. Wouldn't be a big deal if I had a lift and it wasn't a 20yrold rust belt vehicle with 200K+ miles on it. Don't think I'm going to mess with that.

SWMBO's 2016 Explorer (3.5 NA) had the water pump fail. Usually not a big deal, but on the Explorer, and I'm assuming all transverse mounted Duratec V6s, you have to remove the valve covers, intake manifold, crankshaft pulley, an engine mount, and the entire timing assembly. And you're doing all of this through the PS wheel well. Resetting the timing requires the use of some Ford-specific tools. I ended up letting a shop do the work.

Apparently the early engines had a different water pump that would fail internally and kill the engine. Thankfully, ours was the revised design and leaked through the weep hole.

EDIT: Meant to say transverse, not longitudinal.

Front wheel bearings on SWMBO's 09 Prius.  They're nice, simple unit bearing / hub assemblies like the front end of my Jeep.  But unlike the Jeep, Toyota didn't use a small lip inserted into a cast iron knuckle to locate the hub and then some big bolts to hold it in.  No, that's too easy to get back out later.  Instead, they used some medium size bolts and have the steel hub insert about 1.5 inches into an aluminum knuckle. 

So when some previous mechanic doesn't use antisieze, the only way to get the thing out is to pull the knuckle, make a jig to support it, find an appropriately large socket to sit against the back of the hub and then beat on it with a sledge for a few minutes until it eventually starts to move.  Then you get to wire wheel the inside of the bore in the knuckle to remove the massive amount of corrosion and decide if the knuckle is too pitted to re-use.  Then you goop everything up with antisieze and fight with the new hub to get it to go in straight and slide in easily enough that you can get it pulled into place without snapping the damn bolts...  Oh, and those stupid bearings don't last worth a damn either, regardless of what brand you buy.  The OE Toyota ones in there now better make it until that car gets sold, so hopefully SWMBO does a good job of avoiding anything that's not perfectly smooth pavement...

By comparison to crap like that, both my Jeep and the BMW are a dream to work on.  I'd honestly say that out of the 3 cars in the garage right now, I like working on the BMW the best.  It's complicated, but logical.  And they understood the idea of corrosion protection on fasteners.  So as long as you follow the directions, everying comes apart just like it should and there's very little fighting with the car (poorly designed rear lower shock mounts excepted).  Even stuff like pressing the ball joints in / out of the rear wheel carriers isn't bad.  You go into that job thinking "oh man, this seems horrible", but by the time you're done you realize "that actually wasn't bad and wow that annoyingly expensive press tool with fancy bearings in it works really, really well." 

The Jeep isn't too bad to work on either, but you have to ignore the instructions, as they make you do twice as much work as you really need to for a lot of things (no, you do not need to discharge the A/C to remove the cylinder heads, just put a thick blanket over the battery and flip the whole accessory bracket with the compressor and alternator off to the side and tie it down).  And for some jobs like the crank position sensor, you get pretty good at improvising tools (that one involves about 2 feet worth of u joints and extensions) and working blind.  But even those jobs are more of a personal challenge to be able to do it, as the Jeep isn't actively fighting you like the Prius, it's just making you work to figure it out. 

Harvey said:

Someone (not me) tightened the oil drain plug too much and after one oil change I went to tighten it up and it started spinning. The pan is aluminum. I did everything to try to put a new plug in it.

This might work.....(need to have the right size and wire the lever down...)

On a BF series Mazda 323 GTX (hell I could just stop this rant right here), 

If you wanna change a rotor  you don't just remove the  caliper  and slide the rotor off the hub. Oh no. You get to locate the recessed bolts on the backside of the hub. Once you get that done, you can remove the rotor. But that means you are taking the wheelbearing assy apart. And what that is, is a pair of taper rollers that are every bit as robust and tough as what you find in a pair of not very high quality roller skates, with a bespoke, specific for that hub, spacer. Don't lose it. More often than not, at least in my tortured partially suppressed memory, taking the rotor off meant breaking at least one of the bearing assemblies. But even if you didn't, putting everything back together meant following this multipage instruction set meant to get the bearing preload just right, cuz if you didn't they would self destruct just outta spite. So changing rotors goes from a 45 minute job to an all day ordeal, if everything goes exactly right. Which it never did, cuz BF series Mazda 323 GTX. 

In reply to Jay_W :

Makes the job of changing rotors on a 1990 GMC k2500 sound easy.

The GMC had the rotor mounted behind the hub flange, with the wheel studs installed through the rotor. To change rotor you had to remove the hub assembly from the spindle (axle nut, etc), knock out all 8 lugs, and then slip the hub/bearing assembly through the square hole in the rotor.

Turbine said:

SWMBO's 2016 Explorer (3.5 NA) had the water pump fail. Usually not a big deal, but on the Explorer, and I'm assuming all longitudinally mounted Duratec V6s, you have to remove the valve covers, intake manifold, crankshaft pulley, an engine mount, and the entire timing assembly. And you're doing all of this through the PS wheel well. Resetting the timing requires the use of some Ford-specific tools. I ended up letting a shop do the work.

Apparently the early engines had a different water pump that would fail internally and kill the engine. Thankfully, ours was the revised design and leaked through the weep hole.

And it's an even worse job with the transversley mounted engine in the Flex.

In reply to M2Pilot :

The Explorer is also transverse.

Hell, I think they might be the same chassis.

Changing plug wires on my 2003 S10 with the big 2.2 liter was stupidly harder than it ever needed to be, as they snake from the driver's side of the head, around and under the intake manifold, and go to the opposite side of the engine block and way down low on the block to the idiotic place where the coil packs are mounted.  Also, the rear- most spark plug is nearly inaccessible due to the location of the EGR tube.  The oil filter is supposed to drain into a plastic funnel type thing when loosened, as the filter itself is right over a chassis member, but the plastic drain thingy inevitably leaks so you get a mess regardless.  Access to nearly everything in that engine bay is harder than it needs to be, as if the design team never took maintenance of anything into account.  That, or they just plain hated mechanics.

In reply to No Time :

Ive never seen such a thing before. How absolutely stupid to make a consumable take so long to remove. I get engineering mistakes, but not when a method for attaching a rotor already exists and is infinitely better than that engineers idea.  

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

My bad. Definitely meant transverse lol

lnlogauge said:

In reply to No Time :

Ive never seen such a thing before. How absolutely stupid to make a consumable take so long to remove. I get engineering mistakes, but not when a method for attaching a rotor already exists and is infinitely better than that engineers idea.  

I had the idea the '94 or '95 Accord front brakes were similar. You're absolutely correct-- they were quite literally reinventing the wheel. 

I'm delaying  fixing  the ac in my disco after the compressors decided  to seize.

The compressor isn't to bad a job, but I should be changing  the tx valve too. Problem being  is its In the evap housing, and it's removal requires the entire dash and most of the stuff underneath it.  All for a 30ish dollar part. I may end up doing  the heater core at the same time if I go ahead  with it, because it's  pretty  much a dash out job too.

The other part of me says just swap out the compressor with a second  hand one, change the drier, charge it and hope

lnlogauge said:

In reply to No Time :

Ive never seen such a thing before. How absolutely stupid to make a consumable take so long to remove. I get engineering mistakes, but not when a method for attaching a rotor already exists and is infinitely better than that engineers idea.  

It has to be a rotor offset requirement driving that decision.  Outside of that, I cannot think of any reason to invert those two parts vs. what nearly everyone else does.

In reply to einy (Forum Supporter) :

That's literally how basically every 3/4 and 1 ton solid front axle truck is up until the last ~20 years. It's dumb but that's how it was done. All of the big 3 did it.

Anything with a 9003 light bulb. Berk that bulb. Berk that dinky little wire. Berk the engineers that still used them on any car built this century.

einy (Forum Supporter) said:

Changing plug wires on my 2003 S10 with the big 2.2 liter was stupidly harder than it ever needed to be, as they snake from the driver's side of the head, around and under the intake manifold, and go to the opposite side of the engine block and way down low on the block to the idiotic place where the coil packs are mounted.  Also, the rear- most spark plug is nearly inaccessible due to the location of the EGR tube.  The oil filter is supposed to drain into a plastic funnel type thing when loosened, as the filter itself is right over a chassis member, but the plastic drain thingy inevitably leaks so you get a mess regardless.  Access to nearly everything in that engine bay is harder than it needs to be, as if the design team never took maintenance of anything into account.  That, or they just plain hated mechanics.

How GM made such a mess out of a pushrod 4 I will never understand.

The coil pack is easier accessed through the passenger wheel well. 

In reply to flatlander937 :

I'm not sure why, but it seemed much more of a poor design decision on the IFS in the 1990 than the 1987 with SFA. 

I think the difference may be that that with the SFA it made more sense to remove the spindle nut (and manual locking hub), since it was similar to replacing rotors on the rwd trucks and provided an opportunity to get fresh grease in the bearings.
 

Pretty much everything on a Trailblazer/Envoy. Timing chains have a 34 hour labor time, and I've never actually seen anyone pay to have them done. Because of the way the front axle runs through the oil pan and the way the steering gear mounts, you have to remove the front CV axles to unbolt the steering gear, which involves splitting the upper ball joints, popping the outer tie rod off, and removing the calipers and wheel speed sensor. The bolt holding the steering lines requires reaching it with a super long extension over. And the stupid little seals on the steering gear are a nightmare, half the time they leak right out of the box when the steering line fails to punch through them right.

The early Colorado/Canyon also suck. They have the stupid design where the rotor bolts to the back of the hub. So, at least around here in the rust belt, a brake job turns into a $1000 job, because you have to replace hubs, rotors and pads. Also, to pull the valve cover or replace spark plugs on the 2.8L/2.9L/3.5L/3.7L, you have to remove the intake manifold, which in turn requires pulling the front wheel well, alternator, intake manifold, and some other stuff I can't remember. It's been a while, but it was pretty roundabout.

P3PPY said:

lnlogauge said:

In reply to No Time :

Ive never seen such a thing before. How absolutely stupid to make a consumable take so long to remove. I get engineering mistakes, but not when a method for attaching a rotor already exists and is infinitely better than that engineers idea.  

I had the idea the '94 or '95 Accord front brakes were similar. You're absolutely correct-- they were quite literally reinventing the wheel. 

A lot of people did it this way.  If the brake rotor is going to be smaller than the wheel's bolt pattern, it HAS to be done this way.

We don't see it so much anymore  because automakers are no longer trying to put 9" rotors on the front of cars to clear 13" and 14" wheels while using a 4.5" diameter bolt pattern.

A clutch job on our '12 WRX is proving to be waaay more time consuming than it should be. Mostly because I kept doing the-I shouldn't have to remove that part, crap, I do have to remove that part. Combine the everything is in the way, and, yaay awd, with the fact that my 15yo is learning to drive by using my 4 runner to play dominoes with my sons TT and the WRX and knock it off of the jackstands, and its even more fun. Fixing a hole in the floor and re-rounding a few things that were now oval was actually one of the easier parts of the job. 

To add to my above list. 

1987 Lincoln Towncar water pump. 

Everything on the front of that engine is bolted in front of the water pump. To start removing the water pump, you must first unbolt every accessory and bracket from the front of the engine.