I asked my next door neighbors to recommend a mechanic, and they gave me Brady's number -- their little girl goes to school with Brady's. I towed my '97 Ford Aspire (that engine is a Mitsubishi) to him because it wouldn't start. The check engine light had been on for months with some mystery code (another mechanic said it must be a problem with the light!), and it had been skipping and coughing. I was planning to keep driving it to work until it quit, and then just let the kidney people or OPB have it. Brady got it running again and said there were a couple of possible causes for the check engine light, and I should wait for it to come on again, then bring it back so he could fix only the cause of the problem. A few weeks later, sure enough, back we went. He kept it for two days and called me about it 3 or 4 times. It was sounding grim -- he couldn't find the cause of the problem, but he could see the car needed other expensive work outside of the engine problem - clutch, timing belt -- and he was leaning me toward putting her out of her misery. Then he called again and said he'd found a little piece of road trash -- tape or something -- that had been sucked in to some part he'd taken off. He pulled it out and, blammo, she's running beautifully! Know what he charged me? One hour. $85. I'm going to have him do the clutch and the timing belt, because now I think I can get another 100K miles out of it so long as I have him around.
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