Modern Cars

Unleashing the Torx-Wrench Wizardry for Blend Door Gear Actuator Replace...

Modern cars. Relatively cheaper*, better, longer lasting but more encrusted you useless geegaws. Once they've been around the block a couple of times those little gee-gaws start breaking. Mostly it's of no consequence, you just quit using that gizmo that wasn't really all that useful anyway and you just press on. But eventually some little gizmo that actually does something useful, like heat the inside of your  car breaks and then we get into situations like the one in the video.It may not be exactly like this one, but the vent system on all cars is a horribly convoluted mess crammed in between the dashboard and the firewall. Doing almost anything usually requires taking the dashboard out. However, if you can cobble together a special tool that will allow to make the required repair without having to take the dashboard out, well, it's dang well worth it.

When they designed the car, they probably figured the car would be in the junkyard before the gizmo broke, so no, we're not going spend 50K redesigning it to make it beefier or easier to repair.

This resonates with me because the heater quit on the SUV so it needs to go into the shop. I don't know if they are going to be able to do anything with it, but i'll give 'em a shot.

P. S. On account of I used the word 'dang', I remembered this tune:

Roger Miller "Dang Me"
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* relatively speaking. Car prices in 1960 were $2,752 while gold was $36.50 an ounce, which meant a new car was worth a little over four and a half pounds of gold. A new car now can be had for $20K and with the price of gold running right around $2K, that means a new car is worth about 10 ounces of gold, less than one pound.