Let’s start with some good news.  Sunday evening I was talking to my Dad about the problems with the Blazer, and he reminded me about a family member, Jean, who owns a transmission shop.  I hadn’t even thought of him because his shop is in Georgia, but it’s actually closer than any of the other shops that have been recommended to us.  So when Monday rolled around we decided we’d rather take the Blazer to someone we know versus letting some random person out of the Yellow Pages look at it.

Luckily Jean doesn’t adhere to the typical “when it snows the entire south shuts down”, so his shop was open Monday despite all the snow.  Within 5 minutes he was able to tell us it’s more than likely not our transmission at all.

See we’ve had this weird grinding noise going on for a couple months now, and we’ve had mechanics look at it, but not one person has been able to diagnose it.  Hubby even pinpointed the sound to coming from the distributor, but all 3 mechanics who drove it told us it was a wheel baring.  We knew for a fact it wasn’t, and we’ve been on a search to find what’s causing the sound.

Jean immediately knew the sound was coming from the distributor before Hubby even mentioned it.  He also knows Hubby will do the job himself if at all possible to save some cash, so he told us to change the distributor cap.  If that doesn’t fix it, bring it back and he’d look into it further.  Hubby bought what he needed, and we headed home to change it.

The bad news, it’s not the distributor cap.  It’s the actual distributor.  The rod is lose in there, and the grinding noise is it grinding into the distributor cap while it’s flopping around.  We’re seriously lucky the Blazer is even running.  We’re lucky it hasn’t done some serious damage to the drive gear on the camshaft.  Now the Blazer is parked, and we’ve got my Dad’s truck again.  We ordered a new distributor, and I’m thankful it was only $80.  When we replaced one in a previous car it ran us close to $200.  $80 is about the amount I was planning to spend next week on Hubby’s new wedding band.  It can sit in the jewelry store for another week instead.

This doesn’t mean the transmission problem is definitely going to be fixed by replacing the distributor. It means it’s something that has to be done immediately before we drive the Blazer again at all, but it could possibly be causing the transmission troubles. If the computer is adjusting things to compensate for the distributor problem all kind of weird things can happen.

If this doesn’t fix the tranny problem our next option is to have the tranny fluid cleaned. You don’t change the fluid. They hook it up to a machine that pumps your current fluid through a screen, then reverses the process back into the transmission cleaning out any gunk you might have in there clogging things up. Then if that doesn’t fix it our last option is to replace the torque converter, since the torque converter lockup mechanism is what’s going crazy anyway.

Basically all of this is going to run us about $350 at most versus having to completely rebuild the transmission like we were fearing. I’m just glad to know that’s not what we’re facing because we seriously couldn’t afford it right now. Now I just want to get all of this done as soon as possible. As much as I love driving my Dad’s Dodge 3500, the diesel bill seriously adds up quickly.