A Nice Friday Surprise

And I don't mean that with any kind of sarcasm. It really was a VERY nice surprise.

Our car stinks. It's had all sorts of problems. (and that's 3 separate links) The latest was over Christmas when the "check engine" light came on right before our long trip to Colorado. Perfect timing there, car! A recap: Turns out a catalytic converter was bad, which we learned after almost $100 to Ford for a complete check. They wanted over $2000 to fix it, but the guy was nice and told us to check out a muffler shop. Then, while in Colorado, we had to have it checked again because it was making some awful clunking noise. Midas told us a piece of the catalytic converter was rattling around in our muffler, now. Their estimate, over $1700. Sigh...this was not looking good.

We came home and Tim took the car to some other shop, who said the part alone would be at least $1400 and that all 3 of the catalytic converters were bad. We felt a bit lied to there and if I've learned anything at all it's to listen to our guts. So we waited another week and Tim called around to different shops until he found someone who sounded reasonable, which means that he didn't tell us over the phone that it would cost an arm and a leg. This is the guy that made our Friday.

Tim, after waking up late (sorry about your alarm, honey!), made it to the muffler shop around 8 am. He called me at 8:45 am to let me know the guy would be done at 9:15 am. Not done looking at the car...done FIXING it. I thought I had heard him wrong since I was half asleep. (Brenden has been sleeping until 8:45-9 am...Thank You, Brenden!) Nope, he assured me I had heard him correctly. Then the best news - it was going to be WAY less than half of what everyone else had quoted us. Only one converter was bad so he cut out the bad part, put in a new one, took the clunky piece out of the muffler (which was fine) and turned off the "check engine" light. For under $500. I'm still amazed.

So if you ever need someone to fix your muffler or brakes or need an alignment please check these people out:

Ralston's Muffler Shop

708 S. 9th St.

Broken Arrow, OK 74012

918-251-4211

And thank you Tim for researching so well and being willing to take our car to several different places. Our car and our checking account thank you as well!