One of the best trucks on the road! Then why won't CAR WIZARD's techs work on this '99 Silverado?

dollar for dollar this is one of the best trucks you can buy and i have this one already in pieces let's find out why [Music] so this is a 99 chevy silverado half ton with the 4.8 ls based motor no it's not an ls it's not an ls1 but it is based off the ls motor this is the first year you could get this body style in 99 you could also get the older boxy body style but i remember when these came out they are really really cool i thought they looked amazing i still think they look like a really nice truck today and like i just mentioned a minute ago if you're looking for a good truck you don't want to spend forty nine thousand dollars on one you can find one of these like this is a two wheel drive 4.8 you can find these all day long on marketplace six eight ten grand that are in decent shape maybe need a little work i'm not sure what the customer paid for this one but they got a pretty good deal and then they want to go through and fix everything there's going to be almost thousand dollars invested in this truck and the customer asked me do you think that it's worth all that car wizard i said absolutely because what's the alternative a fairly new tundra for 58 grand i know people who could write a check for a brand new truck and not even flinch and they won't because the prices are stupid stupid high this is what i would be looking for if i was looking for a truck and it's also the reason why i bought hoovey's 2005 ss truck it's rusted all to hell several things aren't working i don't care it every time i start it it runs it doesn't turn off the air conditioner on me when there's an emissions problem and it just runs and it works and it works the question can arise here how do i know i'm getting a good car and we're also going to be doing a video very soon on that it's not necessarily for a gear head it can be used by gearheads someone who understands cars inside and out but it's for the average consumer who's looking under the hood and says i really don't know what i'm looking at but i watched the car wizards video and he said to check these items so i'm going to check those so that'll definitely help you guys out you want to make sure and keep an eye out for that video one of the complaints this customer had was that if you install the fuse for the horn it will honk from here to kingdom come it will never stop until the battery's dead it'll just keep honking also the air conditioner they tried having to get charged at some other shop and it would just leak back out and then they just felt like they didn't trust what was going on was a very very good service to their truck so they brought it here we have already found what's wrong with the air conditioner and why it won't hold a charge and it's something that'll help you guys if you're looking at a car it's easy to think well i don't need the horn it's not a big deal i'll just leave it off but kansas is a state that does not do inspections as far as safety or emissions right now some day they may but that doesn't matter you still need a horn it's nice to have a horn if a child walks out in front of you you can stop real fast hit the horn hey watch where you're going or you know it's good to have a working horn there's multiple other small items we're going to fix on this truck but the two things i want to show today is what i did to figure out what's going on with the horn and also what i did to figure out where is the refrigerant leaking on this truck so without further ado let's start inside the interior so you can see i have the dash all in pieces already been tracing down this horn issue you can also see that it didn't take me five or ten minutes it's taken me a little while to figure it out i started with the actual steering wheel you can see the horn contacts here and i tested through using this horn connection everything is good with the steering wheel there's no issue here it's easy to think well it's the the clock spring that's easy wizard but you would be wrong you see the hole in the clock spring there that's for this little guy here that's colored blue the horn ring and the contact is behind this metal plate and it has nothing to do with the clock spring and then it runs through a contact inside of the turn signal and then through a black wire all the way to the front one thing i did is hook up the fuse and got it honking i unhooked the steering wheel it still was honking i also disconnected this main connector which is for the steering column all the wires of the column run through this main connector and it still was honking so this tells me that my honking issue which is likely a shorted to ground wire has zero absolutely zero to do with my steering column my clock spring my steering wheel all those things have been removed out of the equation that's no longer even on my radar just by unhooking this connector i've deduced all those are not the problem so let's move to the engine bay our problem is not here so here i have the main fuse box here in the engine bay all apart tracing the wiring that goes to the horn and it comes into this relay right here now i hooked the fuse up i disconnected the relay and it would stop but it's easy to think well then it's a bad relay so i switched it with a different relay it still honks forever it would not stop so it is not a relay i verify that with this little handy-dandy tool here it looks like a relay but it's not it has a switch so now the computer or the horn button or anything else does not control the horn i do i control the horn now and that can help me to do stuff from here to the horn is everything fine so we'll put it in place of the relay and i'll turn it on so i now know the horn works everything from here to the horn is fine the problem lies from this fuse box to that big connector at the column it's not in the column we just proved that i actually actually cut the wire here let me show you guys what it looks like so this little wire here is the control wire for the horn this little black wire goes to that big connector that we just looked at underneath the dash if i put a power probe to it which i'll grab real quick this little wire here that i'm touching goes from the fuse box to that big connector under the dash but we have that connector unhooked completely so once i touch this wire it should say nothing an open circuit there should be nothing there whether power or ground it doesn't matter there should be nothing but let's see what it says straight to ground so that's a very quick way for me within 30 minutes i knew the answer to this equation which they had a button on the dash bypassed it this is before the current owner had it they had bypassed the horn with a button and it really didn't work very well and the person who just bought the vehicle said i don't want my horn like that can you put it back the way it's supposed to be and yes i can that's what we're going to do here so the wire from this fuse box to the horn ring or the actual horn pad on the steering wheel is shorted to ground and it's not we just saw that it's not the column it's not the steering wheel because i physically unhook that completely out of the equation so from that connector bulkhead connector to the fuse box it's shorted to ground now where is it shorter to ground i don't know i'm not going to pull the entire main harness and cut it into pieces to find this wire what i did is i took this green wire here and ran my own temporary horn wire i connected it here like it should be and connected it to the connector and hooked everything up temporarily and my horn works just like it should so i'm going to run a new wire a control wire to that connector to here and that will solve the problem the old wire that's shorted to ground it's no longer going to be used it's just going to sit there unused we're not even going to mess with that and then once i get the new wire in i can put all this stuff back together but i'm not putting it back together yet because when we get into the air conditioning here now you're going to find out so much more has to come apart let's move over to the other side of the engine bay so the complaint the customer has with the ac is that when it's charged it works it blows ice cold it works beautiful but it doesn't last very long and it runs out and he took it back to some shop or whatever and they're like we can just keep recharging it he's like no i don't want to keep recharging it i want to find out what's wrong with my ac why is it leaking out so one thing that we do here in this shop is i have this ultraviolet light i don't know if you guys can see that it's purple purplish black light basically most modern vehicles especially 2000 and newer come from the factory with uv dye in the ac oil one thing you do is you take this light and go look along all the hoses lines connections joints and look for glowing green dye spilling out of everywhere i kind of did that i looked around at all the connections you can see a green coloration here which is normal because that's where someone's connected the ac machine to and it spewed a little bit out when they unhooked it that's normal there's nothing wrong now if it was all over the place that means this port might be leaking but this is just a normal little spray but this green color that you see right here is what we're looking for on all these connections i have already gone all over the condenser all the lines the compressor everywhere there's no there's no die there's no leaks but i remember something my mentor showed me many many years ago i had done the same situation in a different vehicle i said i can't find the leak i don't see anything and he said did you check the condensate water i was like what bro what condensa he said the water that we know that drips out of our air conditioner on a hot day on the bottom of your car it's normal it gets rid of the water it drips it on the ground he said shine your light in there and see what you see and it glue like a nuclear reactor sludge when it was just like green slime and i knew right away i have to remember that tip that trick for the rest of my life that saved me it also saved me on my buddy bill you guys have seen his 993 in here or that gold triumph tr8 that was in here he had his 993 to the porsche dealership and it kept leaking its refrigerant out every year and they told him just bring it back every year you're suppose this is normal on these older ones we just recharge it you go on your way bring it back next year after the third time doing that bill said you know what i'm going to take it to the car wizard because it shouldn't leak out not in a year he brought his 993 to me i did check for leaks like normal saw nothing but i checked his condensate water that's dripping out of the bottom and it glowed green that means only one thing the evaporator core inside the dash is where our refrigerant leak is so that simple trick was not even known by a certified dealership so that piece of knowledge that my mentor gave to me years ago is worth gold it is so nice let me show you exactly what we found on this truck so i have a puddle of just plain water and on a normal car with no refrigerant leaks this is what you should see nothing just clean water that means we have a ac system that is not leaking refrigerant out of the evaporator core but this is not the water from our truck this is just some water i dumped on the ground to show you guys there's nothing glowing here now let's look under the truck i did run the ac for a little bit and got some water to drip and let's see what do we see here oh my goodness guys look at that it's like nuclear slime that is uv dye and compressor oil coming right out of the evaporator into the plastic hvac case and dripping onto the ground that is definitely an evaporator leak that is my diagnostic process on anything i work on in any car i don't do guesses well let's try this part let's try that part i want hard fast data it must be black and white and that's exactly what i've gotten on the horn [Music] and exactly what i've gotten on the question where is my refrigerant leak on my truck it is 100 guaranteed the evaporator core inside of your dash i don't need to go any further do any more testing i have concrete evidence now guess what that means the whole dash has to come out and it is not a fun job on these older silverados i've probably done 75 or 100 of them i can do them pretty quick but let me go get my techs and see which one of them are going to be the lucky guy to get to do this job i'll be right back okay michael so this has a leaking evaporator core are you going to be the lucky guy to pull the dash you know wizard i've done evaporators on range rovers i've done a couple of them since i've been here on camera uh but everything i touch on this car is gonna break this is 25 years old american plastic it's not gonna last uh i'm not the man for this you're not the man for this i'm not the man for this yeah i get it all right all right daniel it's your turn there's evaporator core leaking on this car and the dash has to come completely out and are you our man no wizard you hired me to work on ferraris not on this i am sorry yeah i understand you're an exotic tech not a farm truck tech holy hell you're tall are you going to pound me to the ground no no okay so the evaporator core is bad on this and the whole dash has to come out is this going to be your lucky day no i'm way too big to get in there way too big yeah you are a big guy and this very very delicate plastic in here you know 10 15 years ago you could pull this dash and not worry so much but with the age on it you can just hear it can't you all right well i tried all right well i'll let you get back to work all right so it's easy to get mad and say what kind of mechanic are they mechanics are they getting paid to do this or not and the answer is i don't blame them i hired daniel to do exotic work and he does he's very good at it this is not an exotic car i'm paying him a really good price per hour not to do this michael is the same scenario he kind of when i'm gone he kind of runs the shop that is not his wheelhouse this is not he's actually done one or two of these and he's told me before he said i'll do this one for you but this will be the last one i will never do these again these older trucks with the plastic that break like i just mentioned they can take the best mechanic and make them pull their hair out it can be that bad is that why you don't have hair left yes that's why my hair is all gone so it looks like i get to pull the dash which is fine because i've done like i said almost a hundred of them i don't mind making this a hundred and one let's go take a look inside at the dash so as you can see i already have some panels off and set aside which is fine because those had to come off anyway to get the dash out but this is a very tedious job and you have to follow step by step you can't skip steps there's no tricks here to pull the airbag out pull a lot of the parts and individual panels off then you have to pull the instrument carrier off then you have to pull the hvac box out which first you got to drain the refrigerant and also remove the heater hoses and when i get all this apart we'll do a quick little show you a little video or something it's going to be like you guys have seen in the past before on range rovers and things there's going to be two or three carts full of panels and parts and panels and just completely packed full of parts every time you pull one of these things out you can hear it it just wants to break it says please please touch me so i can crack so you have to be careful so i want my mechanics to be happy they're not going to be happy if they do this job and i don't have a problem with it i i enjoyed working on these old chevys i've worked on a lot of them no problem at all i do have a quick story when the north stars of the cadillac started really getting into their blown head gasket issues there was a shop a guy i knew that owned a shop who stopped working on them and it's like this is easy money there's so many of these blowing head gaskets now why are you stop working on them and he said the same thing kind of what we saw here he said i have really good mechanics in my shop that are really hard to find and they have all told me that if i bring any more north stars in they will walk out and go find a job elsewhere so you have to keep your help happy you have to they have to work they have to earn money but it has to be beneficial for everyone involved so it looks like i get to pull a dash and while we're there we're also going to do the heater core even though it's not leaking because you can be rest assured that i do the evaporator core and the customer drives it home and three months later the heater core will start leaking why didn't we address that while it was apart so we're going to it's only going to add 50 or 60 bucks to the bill we already have everything apart anyways so we're going to go ahead and do the heater core as well now luckily we have not had a catastrophic failure of the ac system which means i do not need to do the compressor and the receiver dryer and expansion valve and the condenser all those things are fine there's no debris or anything in there they're working great i just need to address the leak which is inside the dash i'm actually kind of looking forward to it it's been a long time since i've done one of these and it's kind of time myself back in the day i could zip zip i could really knock this thing out i want to see can i do it again so it's kind of interesting kind of glad my guys would rather make money elsewhere it kind of gives me a challenge so if you're curious what kind of tools kind of like the power probe or that relay switch that i just showed you that we're going to use on this truck check my amazon affiliates link in description below we get a small cut and we really appreciate it and make sure to hit the subscribe button because every time we get a car done there's two more rolling in which means more videos for you guys thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Car Wizard

Views: 395,162

Keywords: car wizard, david long, hoovies garage, tyler hoover, car issues with tyler hoover, omega auto clinic, car repair, car maintenance, Hoovie, mechanic, Car issues, BendPak, Car trek, Car, Repair, Chevy, Silverado, 1500, ac, heater core, condensor, horn, electrical short, grounded, used car, used truck

Id: jhoQ3ly9pbk

Length: 20min 41sec (1241 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 04 2022