3.5 Ecoboost Water Pump Nightmare

What would you expect to pay for a water pump failure? A few hundred dollars right? How about over $4000?

We had a customer who was traveling from Iowa bring in a 2010 Lincoln MKS with only 78,400 miles and the 3.5 EcoBoost engine, stating he had a turbo problem according to the local ford dealer. We inspected and confirmed he had a broken shaft in the rear turbo. We ordered a turbo and when it came in proceeded to replace it and the oil line that feeds it due to some build up we couldn’t clean to our liking given how critical oiling is to a turbo. Continue reading “3.5 Ecoboost Water Pump Nightmare”

Festool, Is it really worth it?

I stumbled upon Festool after spending years making various things from lumber, including speaker boxes, desks, more speaker boxes, an aquarium stand, even more speaker boxes, and a storage organizer for the rear end of a suburban for sport shooting. One day I needed to cut down some 4×8 sheets of MDF into 12″ wide and 8′ long pieces for shelves in my bonus room. I don’t have enough garage space for large tools like table saws so I started researching a better way than; measuring my skill-saw, measuring my wood, placing a straight edge, clamping it down, double checking I would cut on the intended line, fine tuning and finally making a cut while trying to see through the MDF dust cloud and then fining out sometimes the cut was off.

I quickly found the term track saw and 2 options to solve my problem, Dewalt and Festool. Dewalt seemed to pretty much just offer a saw and track and that was about it. Festool had so many options for tracks, saws, vacuums, tables, routers, the list goes on and on but the part that really got my attention is their focus on systems and everything working together. I quickly found out they supposedly had great dust collection (which i never cared about, or so I thought) and a cult-ish following and some haters as with most things.

Continue reading “Festool, Is it really worth it?”

Welcome to the Crutcher’s Blog

Over time I will be covering numerous topics of interest from my many years of experience in the Auto Repair field as both a technician and business owner. I will also expand out into some personal interests such as Technology, and my Festool collection, which makes building things out of wood fun, efficient and cleaner. As scattered as it all sounds it really does all tie together as my story unfolds.

As the site is coming together feel free to contact me with any specific information requests for the blog.