I got a phone call yesterday from a friend stranded at a local restaurant with someone else's car. First he wants me to pick him up and drive him home, but then about halfway there he calls back to say that the car might just need jumpstarted.... Easy enough.
I get there, and sure enough, this little Hyundai is making all the indications of a bad battery, so I pull my Libby around to get ready to jump it.
I should have used my jumper cables, but this girl had hers out already. I should have taken it as a bad sign that someone who has jumper cables but doesn't know how to use them might not have the best quality of cables, but at the time, it saved me the minute of having to dig my cables out from under the seat.
So we hook up the cables, everything seems fine and I start up my Jeep and after about 30 seconds have her start her car, seems fine. And that's when I notice the smoke...
By the time I'm out of my Jeep, the insulation on the cables was already melting off. I didn't have gloves or any safe way to disconnect the cables, so we called and got the fire department en route, and I had to sit there and watch as they melted onto my fender.
When the fire department arrived, they disconnected the cables (insulation was melting onto the firefighters gloves, so I'm pretty satisfied with my call to let a pro unhook them) and confirmed that nothing else was burnt up on either vehicle. VERY thankful for them getting there so quickly, and that no one was hurt, and no serious damage to either vehicle. For my own benefit, the fire chief confirmed that the cables WERE hooked up correctly and that it was a faulty cable and not operator error.
But when I say, limited damage, there was SOME damage. I had to watch as the burning cables seared into my fender flare....
The chief of the local VFD was nice enough to pose with the burnt-up cables.
The paint was just minimally damaged, a little bit of marring that will buff out, and there was a little bit of melted cable that got onto the bumper, but it's intact, so that leaves the fender flare as the only thing that truly needs replaced.
I stopped by the dealership today and got the part number for the flare: 5JH47CD7AF and a quoted price of $85.53 for the part. I'm going to call around to see if I can get a better price or find a used one at a parts yard.
The real question is how easy it is to take off and replace the flares... I can't imagine it's too hard, and I've got a couple buddies, one of whom is an ASE Master Tech who have helped me with a few projects over the past few months, but I wanted to see what kinda mess I might be getting myself into doing the work ourselves.
