I had some bad luck with my car lately too... It's been having trouble starting for a while now, and I had it in the shop a few months back and they did about $700 of work (replaced most of the ignition system) that was supposed to fix it. I specifically asked them to check the fuel rail pressure and the injectors, and they said they did, and all the injectors were working perfectly. I got it back, and it still had the problem. I took it back to them, and left it for three days, and they "couldn't reproduce the problem." So I go to drive it home, and it has trouble starting right there. I was just fed up with it, so I took it home.
Anyway, finally took it to another shop a couple days ago, and they says it's almost always the fuel pressure regulator (which was my thought, since I had the other shop test the pressure) and it'd be about $450, since it's a cheap part, but on my engine, you have to tear off the entire intake to get to it. Well, they get in there, and call me... 4 (of
fuel injectors are literally just dripping fuel. Note these are the same fuel injectors the other shop told me were just fine and "not the source of the problem." These suckers cost $178 each, and with 4 already failed, and all this time/money taking apart the engine to this point, it's a really good idea to replace all 8 of them. Thankfully, they found some aftermarket ones that were "only" $112 each. So saved a fair amount there, but I still ended up with a repair bill of over $1700. This is on a '99 suburban that, while still pretty good to me, is only worth about $9600. The worst part is that's more than it was going to cost to fix the door that got smashed, and so I STILL have that huge dent in my door. (There's a rant about THAT incident somewhere else on the forums.) I'm not exactly swimming in money either, and most of that money there was going to go into replacing my desktop computer, which is really choking lately, since most of the capacitors on the motherboard are blown and leaking.
So yeah, as long as we're getting it all out, there's my sob story... and also my excuse for why I've not been online much lately, nor gotten the new server online yet. Yes, I'll take any excuse for that at this point. :-)
