It’s always the small things that cause you the largest annoyances. For example the other day I noticed that my driver side headlight was not coming all the way up so I pulled over into a lot to check it out. You can just imagine my shock when I saw that the reason for this was that the edge of the hood was firmly wedged under the headlight. I could not for the life of me imagine why this could be so I closed the lights to investigate. The light was now most definitely resting higher than the edge of the hood. I began cursing as I tried to think what could cause this to happen, someone trying to sit on the car that shouldn’t have, something heavy being knocked onto the car in a lot, ect. After several minutes of fiddling around with trying to “re-adjust” both the corner of the hood and the light enclosure, I noticed something odd about a space on the supports. There was an empty hole where the hood bumper support was supposed to be. So, apparently it became fed up with this hard lived live and took a dive. In addition this left a nice set of scratches in the paint along the front edge of the hood. All this left me in the awkward position of having to pop the hood latch in order to turn my lights on and then having to walk around and then close the hood.
I went by the stealership the next day to inquire about getting a replacement and decided to just pickup a whole set for both trunk and hood since this is apparently the only part they don’t mark up 5000%. Took them 4 days to finally get in what they claimed would be there the next morning so I swung by to pick them up. Of course, like most other parts for these cars, it is not an exact match as they had changed the design. This one being shorter than the original and I have to set it so that it is dangerously close to falling out in order to hold the hood in it’s proper place. So a little more work will be required to get everything squared away. Most likely something to pad the hood indention where the bumper meets so it doesn’t have to be so loosely connected.
Such a small, cheap thing to cause so much grief
The next offender on the list is something we often take for granted, the key fob. I only received a single key and fob when I bought the car a little over a year ago. I’ve long since had some door, t-top and trunk keys cut so I would have a back up, but when you have the alarm set and use the door key it will still go off if you are not quick enough to put the ignition key in. The trunk button on the fob never really worked in the first place but over the last couple of weeks it has been getting to where I would have to repeatedly push the buttons over and over using the edge of my nails to get them down as far as possible just to lock and unlock the doors. Not fun in the rain. I finally became fed up with messing around with cleaning the contacts, button pad and battery and just ordered a replacement. It finally came in today and while I hated shelling out that kind of money for such a small and simplistic device, I am very glad I did. I quickly programmed it to go with the car and now I barely even have to touch the buttons and they work flawlessly.
You can see a side by side of how worn out the old one is compared to the shiny new and functional unit
