I was driving back to Upstate New York from seeing the solar eclipse in Asheville, and a horrible…read moregrinding noise started to come out from under the hood of my 2001 Honda Civic in Northern Virginia. I couldn't figure out what it was, and kept driving, until finally, in a small town in Pennsylvania I'd never heard of, the battery light flashed on, and I pulled over into a gas station parking lot to find that the belt running my alternator and A/C compressor had snapped.
What a nightmare. I've never had a car break down before, let alone on a long roadtrip, and it's always been one of my worst fears. Yet, as luck would have it, I was just a quarter-mile down the road from HC Automotive, and when I walked in holding my broken alternator belt, half an hour before closing, Jon not only managed to reassure me with a calm explanation of the potential causes, but immediately ordered a replacement belt, and printed out a map for me so I could drive to his shop on the back roads, without having to pay for a tow.
When he looked at the engine and discovered that the A/C compressor pulley had seized up--a fix way more expensive and way more time-consuming than just a new belt--he suggested we instead replace it with a shorter belt for an A/C-less Civic, bypassing the A/C compressor, and thus enabling me to continue my drive (albeit sweatily). He spent quite a bit of time on the phone trying to find the belt, but it was the end of the day, and parts for a rare version of a 16-year-old car aren't that easy to find, and so he wouldn't have been able to get one until the next day. So he instead put in a generic belt of the right length, albeit with one fewer rib. Hooray!
It worked perfectly, and got me all the way home, turning what I thought was going to be an overnight stay into just a few hours' delay. The cost was $246, of which $38 was for the belt, and $175 for an hour and a half-ish of labor (the last hour of which was after the posted closing hours). Plus, his shop has free coffee, wi-fi, a clean restroom, and a good assortment of golfing magazines :). Thanks, Jon!