Last week, while I was driving to work, I noticed that the temperature gauge in my car was high and that my car was overheating. I couldn’t do anything while I was at work so I decided to check on it after when I got home. While I was driving home, I heard this hissing sound and right away I knew that something wasn’t right. When I finally got home, I checked under the hood and saw steam shooting out of the radiator. As I took a closer look, I found that the high heat had cracked the radiator and put a hole in it. I realized that I would have to replace the radiator if I wanted to drive my car again. So I told my dad about it and he said that if I took it into a repair shop, it could cost anywhere from $500-$800 to get it fixed. I really didn’t want to spend this much money so we decided to try to fix the radiator ourselves and save some money. So first, I went to Carquest and bought a new radiator for about $180, which I thought, wasn’t too bad. Compared to paying $800, I thought this alternative was a lot better. After that, my dad called my cousin, a mechanic, and asked him advice on the best way to replace a radiator. Then we went about trying to replace the radiator on our own. I swear it must have taken us about 3 hours to take out the old radiator and put in the new one. Needless to say, we were exhausted. But just as we were putting in the last screws, we noticed that there was a pair of holes that didn’t match up with the holes on the car. “Great,” we thought, just as we were about to be done, this one little problem stopped the whole operation. We called our cousin back to tell him what happened and he told us that he would come to help us out. When my cousin came, he detached the radiator, drilled new holes into it, and attached it back to the car in less than half an hour. We couldn’t believe that he did all the work that we did in less than half the time it took us to do it. I was really impressed but kind of upset that it took me and my dad so long… haha. In the end, I’m just glad that this whole thing was over. This whole situation happened because I was a dummy and didn’t check the oil and radiator fluid in the car. It was an expensive lesson but now I check it every chance I get.