Bugs In The Rugs - - - What have you encountered from the insect world while working on a car?

Bugs In The Rugs

         Ants, moths, bees, flies, wasps, spiders, scorpions, roaches, yellow jackets, fireflies, centipedes, silver fish, lady bugs, katydids, mosquitos, termites, fleas, mites, and fly larvae (maggots).

         No, that’s not a list of insects on the back of a can of insecticide.  That’s just about every type of creepy, crawly nasty little bug I have encountered in a car at one time or another.  It’s enough to make your skin crawl. 

         Sometimes it’s not so much what you run into, but where.  For instance, I was working on a little foreign car, checking out a faulty turn signal.  I diagnosed a bad lead on the front turn signal socket, and had already pulled the lens off and supplied a ground to the bulb, so I knew what I needed to do.  Just sling under the car and reattach the ground lead that was hanging there.  The car was low to the ground, but I managed to wedge myself under there just enough to make the repair.  As I managed to turn my head to see the turn signal housing, there… just a ¼” from my nose was a large nest of red wasps.  They were all darting around working on their nest totally oblivious to me.  I didn’t stick around long enough to introduce myself. 

         Something I’ve learned after being at this for a few years: If you get one of those carpet cleaning trucks in the shop for repair, make sure you have plenty of roach spray handy.  It’s not uncommon to pop the lid off of the fuse box to find hundreds of those nasty little critters trying to find a new hiding place. I’ve even seen a few behind the lens of the instrument cluster just minding their own business as they walked over the gauge needles. They tend to eat wires, leave their acidic droppings on circuit boards, and their dead relatives laying in the vents. Nothings worse than getting “bug sprayed”… with bugs when you turn on the blower motor.  

         Now when you’re trying to find an odor, or some reeking smell that has literally chased the owners out of their car, don’t be surprised if you’ll eventually find a dead mouse or some other strange varmint carcass in the duct work, trunk, or under the carpet.  The worst is when the flies have found it and started laying eggs on it.  For the investigative type mechanic, the fly larvae is a good way to determine how long whatever it was has been decomposing in the customer’s car.  You see, a fly can lay more than 100 eggs on a warm moist body and in 8 to 24 hours the larvae will begin to hatch. Those wormy, wriggly, crawly little ugly, nasty things stick around for about 5 days and then start to pupate into an adult fly.  A capital “G” for gross.  Knowing all of that will allow you to inform your customer when their little friend became post mortem in their cabin filter or wherever it was you found it, although at this point they’re too grossed out to really care about your CSI skills!

         Spiders can bring out the heebeegeebees in the biggest, baddest mechanic on the planet.  I once worked with a guy who was completely petrified of spiders.  We were tearing down an old car that was in for restoration when he removed the door panel and a large tarantula came crawling out from the bottom corner of this old rusted door.  Honestly, I’ve never seen or heard such a big fella scream like a little girl.  He not only came up with his own high pitched language that only he could understand, but managed to dart across the shop and up onto the top of his tool box so fast he didn’t have time to let go of the door panel. He stayed up there perched on his tool box talking some sort of gibberish only he could understand, as he was kicking tools out of the open drawers.  The tarantula had to go, or he wasn’t coming down.  I got elected to shoo the little critter out the door. We literally had to pry the door panel out of his hands and coax him down with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. His tool box needed a bit of straightening after all was said and done.

         Ants for the most part are pretty harmless. I’ve never ran across fire ants in a car, but I can only imagine what that would have been like.  The ones I’ve run across are just the busy little ant type doing busy little ant things. Sometimes the hardest part is finding where they’re coming from.  Half the time you’ll see these little guys marching along one after another in single file heading to another part of the car.  If it’s a car that’s been sitting in one spot for a long time chances are they’ve built an elaborate home somewhere in the car and it’s your job to find out where.  Good luck with that.

         Sometimes you wonder how some of these insects find their way into a car in the first place.  Like pulling a spare tire out of an old car and find a scorpion staring at you.  Or mud dauber wasp nests all over the engine compartment.  They sure do find some of the oddest places to build their little nests.  One time I’ve even found them on the carburetor choke plate on a car that was only sitting for a few days.  The owner tried to start it, but had no luck with it.  He then had it dragged into the shop to have the no start problem checked out.  After a bit of carburetor spray to dissolve the mud it started right up.

The owner being the kind of a jokester he was, now had a new story to tell about his old car.  He started his little tale with, “Guess wasp up with my car?” 

         Whether it is a family of arachnids or any other family of insects invading your car, somewhere some mechanic has probably already experienced it.  As they say, “There are more bugs in the world than there are people.” So there’s a good chance you’ll run across a bug in a rug or one in the trunk of that very car you’re working on.  Just work on some fast reflexes, a few nerves of steel, and it wouldn’t hurt to keep a can of bug spray handy either.