6. Man Card

 Ok, enough about feelings.  For a couple weeks now I've been detecting something not quite right with my truck, narrowing it down to what felt like a miss or a slip.  I have an appointment at the dealer to get it serviced next week so I'm ready for the trip, but the other night driving home as I went to pass someone on a country road the check engine light came on and the truck started vibrating.  Crap, well better to have something happen now than when I hit the road.

I happened to be on the phone with my best friend at the time who said he'd bring over his scanner so I could pull the code from the computer and at least know ahead of time what to tell the mechanic to look at.  P-0304 - a misfire in the number 4 cylinder, likely due to a bad spark plug.  I'm from a generation that still took auto shop in high school, so I felt like this was something to investigate further myself rather than just be at the mercy of a dealer.  Getting under the hood of a 2015 vehicle looks a lot different than the mid-80's stuff we had at school, so many more wires and sensors, turbos and covers on seemingly everything.

A couple YouTube videos later I was confident this was something I could tackle on my own and headed down to the auto parts store.  Granted for anyone with mechanical abilities a spark plug change is a pretty simple task, but doing this work myself saves a couple hundred bucks and gets a little testosterone flowing.