My Brand New $500 Valve Covers

Brand New Valve Cover

Mom's car has been in the shop all week to fix a small oil leak. Three thousand dollars later it's back home, safe and sound. We thought the leak was coming from the valve cover. Turns out, while it was leaking from the valve cover, it was also leaking from the front main seal and the camshaft seals. Since we have to halfway take the engine apart to replace those seals, we might as well replace the water pump, all the belts and the idler pulleys. Wouldn't want to have to repeat all this work when the water pump fails a year down the road.  Plus new valve cover gaskets. After that was all done we find that the valve cover gaskets are still leaking, which means $500 for new valve covers. They're made of tin you see, so it wouldn't take much to warp one, which is probably what happened the last time I had this done. Last time I looked the car had 160,000 miles on it. Might be 200,000 by now. I try to take it in for oil change every spring and fall, but as usual I am a little late.

Oh, on a side note, they also did the brakes, pads and rotors all around. When I had this done on my car six months (or a year) ago, it cost like eleven hundred bucks.

Doing all that work under the hood is a giant pain in the ass. It's all about dexterity and having a vast array of special tools like '2006 Mitsubishi Endeavor Main Seal Installer' that Snap-On will sell you $500. Oh, and also the ability to absorb a whole late of hatred for the people who designed this car. Hopefully, the paycheck will relieve some of that anger.

It was expensive, but it was all basic maintenance. I think this only needs to be done every 100,000 miles or so. Overhead cam engines that use chain drive instead of belt drive, don't have this problem, but look out for engines that don't drive the water pump off the fan belt. Some companies use other methods, and they generally prove to be a big pain if the pump ever fails. How long should a water pump last? I wouldn't be surprised if they were lasting 100,000 miles, maybe even 200,000 miles.

Heater Repair, Revised

Heater Controls

Last November I took the Mitsubishi to the mechanic to get the heater fixed. The first problem was the controller so I bought a couple of used control panels off of E-Bay. Took them into the shop and find they are the wrong parts. What it needs is new actuators that CONTROL the flapper valves in the heater box. So I order a couple of actuators and find they don't fit. The old, defunct actuator has a seven pin electrical connector and one of the new ones has five pins and the other has three pins. Wonderful. Search the internet and find nothing. Find a list of junk yards and start calling. I called a dozen and found nothing. I even posted a note on the national junk yard board but got no reply.

Actuator Internals
All the lines on the gear wheel are wear marks, there are actually only three wide lines of conductive paint.

Okay, let's take a look at this actuator and see what's going on. Open it up and I find a small electric motor turning a gear train. That part looks simple enough, but why do we have seven pins? Take out the big gear and I find some some brass brushes that contact the underside of the big gear. There is a spiral of something on the gear. It looks kind of erratic and my immediate impression is that it is some kind of pattern that encodes the position of the wheel.

Circuit Scribe Conductive Ink Pen

I take it to lunch and confer with my cronies and Jack suggests that it is resistive paint. The erratic pattern is simply where the paint has worn off. So I order a conduction paint pen and fill in the worn spots and put it back together. Put it back in the car and it seems to be working okay.

Electrical Testing

Test Leads Kit

Before I got to the paint, I thought I would see if one of the other actuators could be made to work. They all used the same case and the same drive shaft, just the electrical connectors were different. Though mine has seven pins it only uses five. Looking inside the 5-pin actuator, it seems to be very similar, so I thought to hook it up to a meter and see how it behaved. I have a collection of test leads, but none that were small enough to connect to these pins, so I bought a kit. Still had to drill holes in the shell surrounding the connector on the actuator, but I got them all connected. Hooked them up to the meter and a battery from a drill, and ran the actuator through it's whole range of motion. The resistance on the original actuator ran from zero up to 8K ohms, on the new actuator it varied from 0 to 6K ohms. Six is almost the same as 8, right? Or so I reasoned. I tried it but it would not go through it's full range of motion, so we're back to the original.

Lever Wire Nuts

I cut the wires to conduct that test, so now I need to reconnect them. I found these little lever action connectors on Amazon. They worked very well. They are just a little over an inch long, so they fit in the available space.

Mounting Screws

The two screws that were holding the actuator in place had gone missing, so I looked through my collection of screws and found a couple that seemed to be just right, except they were just a fraction of an inch two long. I used a couple of nuts as spacers and they worked fine.

The screws are like sheet metal screws, so anything that was approximately the same size would of worked, except one of the screws was buried way back in the dash so getting any kind of driver in there was difficult. So I wanted a screw that was as near to correct as I could find.

Right side underdash panel

The actuator wasn't hard to get to in spite of being buried in the dashboard. Just pull out the glove box which is held in place with four screws that are easy to get to. I ran into a little problem when I was putting in the screws holding the actuator. I was using a little screwdriver bit about two inches long to get one of the screws started and I dropped it and it disappears. Bah. There is a panel on the underside of the dash that is held in place with another four screws. Take those out, the panel comes out and there's my screwdriver bit. Get the actuator installed and now we have to put that underdash panel back in. This is a real struggle. With the panel in place you can't see where the screws go, and I can't get my head in the footwell far enough to see anything. I probably spent an hour getting those four screws into their holes.

Expenses:

Date	Item	Vendor	Amount
Nov. 22, 2023	Control Panel	Ebay	125.00
Nov. 22, 2023	Control Panel	Ebay	68.99
Dec 4, 2023	Actuator	Puente Hills Mitsubishi	141.45
Jan 19, 2024	Actuator	Amazon	24.99
Feb 5, 2024	Test Leads	Amazon	20.99
Mar 2, 2024	Connectors	Amazon	9.99
Mar 8, 2024	Paint	Amazon	15.49
	Total		406.90

I could have returned some of those parts, but I fumbled around and now it's probably too late.

I also paid the mechanic $300, but he did some other work, so maybe $100 went to investigating the heater problem. It was kind of a drag spending $400 on stuff I didn't need, but I was able to put off buying a new car for at least a year. Maybe ten. We won't count all the time it was out of service. Fortunately the Hyundai had returned so we still had two working vehicles.

Notes: 

• I started this post on March 15, 2024. Then I got distracted, but now I've finished it.
• I've tried several different ways of including a table in a blog post but none of them worked very well. Today I thought I would just try copying the data from the spreadsheet and pasting them here and it worked very well. Just highlight the rectangular area you want and press Control-C to copy it, move over to the blog and press Control-V. Worked very well.

Mitsubishi Rainstick Update

Clogged Heater Core Replacement
EZElookout
This video is just for reference.

CRAFTSMAN Craftsman 3 Ton Garage Jack

After the first go round with this problem, I decided I needed to get the car up high enough to really get under it. Driving up on a couple of blocks helped, but it wasn't enough, so I bought a floor jack. I used to have one I got from Costco, but I sold it a few years when I decided I wasn't going to be working on cars anymore. However, getting this problem fixed at a repair shop is liable to run $1,000. (See above video to get an idea of the scope of the work involved.) If I can unplug the drain, then I can avoid the thousand dollar repair bill, for a while anyway.

I took one stab at it, but I wasn't able to access the drain. The photo in the last post is like the drain for the drain. The real drain is hidden. Today, I got Osmany to give me a hand. He is a talented guy. If anyone can fish a wire into the drain, he can. I don't whether he did or not, but we didn't get any water out of the drain. But we haven't heard anymore water noises since the last go round either. The weather has been a little cooler, but still, we should be getting some condensation. Our best guess is that draining the water out through the blower dislodged whatever was clogging the drain and everything is working properly now.

We took out the glovebox and removed the side panels off the center console, but all that did was show us how far the A/C box was buried in the dash. I did find a description of how to remove it, but it's like the instructions for replacing the heater core in our old Ford Fairmont. Step 1: Remove the dashboard. I did that once and I don't relish doing it again.

More photos here.

Mitsubishi Rainstick

Rainsticks - Sound of the RAIN in one instrument
Workshop Medieval

A couple of weeks ago we started hearing this rainstick noise coming from under right hand side of the dashboard whenever we made a left hand turn. There is a known problem with one of the flaps inside the heater duct, and I figured it had broken loose and whenever we turned a corner, it would flop over and rub against the fan. But it sure sounded like running water. There was no leak inside the car, so it was baffling.

Blower with motor cooling duct popped open

Finally decided to take the glove box out yesterday to see if I could locate the problem. Along the way I found that the blower is easily accessible from the passenger footwell. Seemed to be a little wetness there, and when I popped open the hatch on the blower's cooling ducts I found signs of rust. So there's been water in here.

A little Googling turns up a likely culprit: the drain hole for the air conditioning evaporator. (That's the small radiator that sits inside the ductwork inside the passenger compartment. It doesn't really radiate anything, it's more of an anti-radiator.) Okay, that's enough for today, I'll finish this tomorrow.

This morning I've got an appointment first thing and at the first corner I turn, a pint of water comes out of the hole where the blower was and dumps in the passenger footwell. More water comes out every time I turn left. The water had stopped coming out by the time I got home.

I tried locating the drain hole yesterday, but I'm too thick to slide under the car, and the driver's side was too close to the wall to allow easy access, so today I moved the car to the center of the garage and drove up on a couple of wood blocks.

Looking straight up from the ground. Firewall at the top, engine bay at the bottom. A/C drain hole is small, rusty slot in the upper left, just below the black smudge marks.

Now I can slide underneath and I am able to locate the drain hole. It's not very big, maybe a sixteenth of an inch by about half an inch. I stick a thin metal stick up there and root around. The stick can go in an inch or two before it runs into a solid barrier. Nothing comes out, but it seems like it might be little clearer.

Now I can put the blower back in. It was no problem getting it out, a Torx T-25 screwdriver worked just fine, but now I'm trying to put it back and things aren't going well. One of the things I've heard about Torx is that they aren't too particular about size. A driver for one size should work with screws that are a little bigger or a little smaller. Didn't work in this case. The T-25 had a hard time staying engaged. The T-15 worked until I started to apply some torque and then it slipped. Fine. The screws are also slotted, so with a straight bladed screwdriver I was able to get them tight.

I probably have a T-20 bit somewhere, but looking for it is an iffy proposition. It might be here, in which case I should be able to find it, but it might be on the moon in which case looking for it will be a waste of time. And looking for it means climbing up and down the stairs to the basement and I'm already feeling the strain of this operation. I pressed on with what I had.

The insulation on the underdash sound barrier and the passenger floor mat were pretty well soaked, so they are drying in the sun. It's kind of cool today, so it may be a while before we find out if I actually fixed the problem.

This wasn't a big project. There are six screws holding the underdash panel and just three holding the blower, but they were under the dash, so I'm down on my knees with my head and arms stuck in the footwell trying to turn screws, screws that I can just barely see. It's awkward in the extreme. An electric screwdriver might have come in handy, if it was small enough to get in there. Plus I would have needed the correct Torx bit (see above). Anyway, it was exhausting. On the plus side I got a good nap and now I feel like I've put in a hard days work.

Mitsubishi

I had a dream this morning that included a longish, jumbled preamble that I don't remember very clearly, but now I'm riding shotgun in my wife's Mitsubishi Endeavor. My dad, who has been dead for ten years or so, is driving. We're on our way to the automobile dealer's service department. We aren't going to the same place that I went to in the jumbled preamble, this time we are going to the actual service department. We pull into a large white prefab metal building. The interior is laid out like a parking lot with spaces for fifty to a hundred cars or so. Nobody is working on cars here, this is just the holding area, the actual work is being done in an adjacent area. My dad talks to the service writer and parks the car. I get out and see the service writer heading towards the door. I intercept him and start telling him about the car's problems, which include a screwed up window regulator in the front passenger side door and a seriously malfunctioning right front brake. In my mind these were real problems that happened about a year ago. They were caused by a damaged body control module located somewhere under the front passenger seat. But now I'm telling the service writer that these problems have gone away and he's asking me why I am telling him about them now if they aren't problems anymore. I don't have an answer for that, and now I am wondering where I got the idea that these problems were real. I'm awake now and I still have the feeling that those were real problems, but I know they aren't problems now, and I have no recollection of how they got fixed, which means they were imaginary problems, but man, the memory sure felt real. Never mind that there is no computer module where my memory was telling me it was.

Tire Wear Bars
Yes, that's about what my tires looked like.

Back to real life. It's spring and that means it's time to change the oil in the cars. I took the car to Clays a couple of weeks ago and because it's time to renew the license plates, I had them run the DEQ (Department of Environmental Quality) emissions test as well. They changed oil and ran the test no problem, but they noticed a few things that could stand to be replaced, like the tires, rear brakes and battery. Hmm. They told me the same thing six months ago. At that time the brakes were down to 4mm (millimeters) but now they are down to 2mm so maybe it is time to replace them. The wear bars in the tires are definitely showing and the battery is over four years old, so maybe it's time to take it to Les Schwab. 

Low Tire Pressure Indicator

The low-tire-pressure indicator has been on almost constantly for years, and the TPMS (Tire Pressure Monitoring System) indicator (which is just the four letter acronym) has been lighting up the last year or two or five, I don't recall. Clays wants $150 to diagnose the TPMS system. $150 to plug in your diagnostic computer and tell me that the system is broken? I don't think so. I do a little checking and it turns out that the tire pressure sensors on this Mitsubishi have batteries that are supposed to last ten years. The car is 15 years old. Think maybe the batteries have died? So I go looking for batteries. 

Tire Pressure Sensor

Turns out the batteries are not replaceable, you simply replace the entire sensor which is an assembly that includes the valve stem. Since it is time for tires, probably ought to get those sensors replaced as well. Funny no one has recommended replacing those sensors before, or maybe I just don't remember. Tires last for years now. Sensors can be had for around $20 a piece, but Les only installs parts they supply and they want $70 each. Still, if this turns off the warning lights and without having to pay a diagnostic fee it will be worth it. (This a pretty sad state of affairs, paying $300 to turn off a couple indicator lights. Gawd I hate his safety shit.)

I take the car to Les, they keep it for a day and a half, and they care of all the problems except the battery, which is fine because I think the battery has at least another six months of life left. I base this on the fact that batteries seem to last about five years now. Used to be, back in good old days, batteries would fail slowly. They'd lose their charge, you could get a boost and now and again and maybe get a few more days,(weeks, months?) out of them. Now they die and that's it. One minute they are fine and the next minute, boom, they're dead. If you can predict their failure and replace the battery before it dies, you can avoid having a pissed off spouse, so I'm living dangerously.

The prices at Les Schwab were kind of interesting. The tires and brake pads were surprisingly low. The price for the rear shocks and installation struck me as excessively high. I suppose if they are giving away brake pads they need to make up for it somewhere else. Anyway, it was a one stop shop and I didn't have to lift a finger other to pull out my credit card, which was declined because the credit card company had sent me a new one even though this one wasn't expired. It still works everywhere else, but apparently only for penny-ante transactions.

P.S. I mailed in the license renewal form two weeks ago. I just called to check on it and the robo-cop tells me 'don't even think about calling back for four months'.

Oil Leak

Title Screen from Timing Belt Change Removal and Installation on Mitsubishi Endeavor video

Started watching the linked video to see what we were getting into, stayed for the music, which is pretty good. I think it is all instrumental, no singing. The video can't be played from here, you have to go to YouTube to watch it.

Our 2006 Mitsubishi Endeavor has developed a small oil leak. Right now it's just an annoyance but I thought I should look into fixing it. Took it to a local auto repair shop, they wanted to to run a dye test for something like $200. I said no to that. I don't care where the oil is coming from, $200 could get you half way to getting it fixed.

Osmany and I crawled underneath the other day and from what we could see it looked like the rear valve cover might be leaking. Today we did some exploratory surgery. We pulled off the right front wheel, the splash shield from the wheel well, and the upper part of the timing belt cover. That was enough that could get a better look and now it looks like it is the rear camshaft seal that is leaking. Bah, bah and humbug.

Replacing that seal means pulling the timing belt and removing the cog wheel from the camshaft. It's almost as bad as having to replace the timing belt, which is what led us to the above video. I had the timing belt replaced about a year ago, er five years ago, and it cost around $1000. I wouldn't be surprised if just replacing this one cam seal would cost half of that.

Replacing the timing belt is a fairly straight forward operation, hampered of course by the tight quarters imposed by the transverse engine mounting, but this engine has a peculiar belt tensioning system that looks to be a real pain in the neck to set correctly (at the 15 mark in the above video).

Car Wash Troubles

Car Wash from Far Side artist Gary Larson

When I was kid, I thought the automated, drive thru car washes were the cat's pajamas. We probably only went once, they cost money you know, but evidently it made an impression. Since I got married, and appearances are important to SWMBO, and I had more than two nickels to rub together, I started using the local car wash, which made my inner ten-year-old very happy. Not so my daughter. Girl can travel the world without having to call home, but can't go to the car wash without her pappy. Now I know why.

I've never been very good about keeping my cars clean. As long as they ran, that was enough. I did thoroughly clean a few cars, but that was usually because I was putting them up for sale.

Anyway, I seem to have had more than my fair share of problems with Kaddy Car Washes. I took our SUV there a few years ago and once I got fully into the car wash tunnel, water started pouring in. What the heck? Seems that somebody closed the sunshade but had forgotten to close the sunroof all the way. The wet interior was the least of my problems. Seems that sunroof mechanism is kind of delicate, and it wasn't up to the task of closing while the overhead brushes are beating on it. It closed, but something in the mechanism broke and now it won't close completely anymore. I have it propped up with a couple of wood blocks.

A few months ago I took my car to the car wash. I heard a bang, it seemed to come from the car in front of me, a late model Toyota Prius. They stopped the car wash to fix the problem, and then they restarted it. A few seconds later my car is where the previous bang came from and now something is beating the tar out of the side of my car. Seems a big rotating brush had snagged the side view mirror of the car in front of me and ripped it clean off. When my car got to that brush, the mirror assembly was still caught in the brush so every time it went around, my car got beat.

Kaady did right by me, they paid to have the body shop fix it and paid for a rental car for me to use while mine was in the shop. Cost them $2,000. They also gave me a bunch of passes for free car washes.

2016 Mazda 3 Roof Trim

Yesterday, my daughter comes by and she wants to get her car washed. Usually her husband washes it by hand, but he is tied up with work, so she's going to help him out. So we go to the car wash. Halfway through there is a big bang. We look at the car afterwards and don't see anything. Once she gets home her husband takes one look and notices that one of the trim strips that line the edge of the roof is gone. I managed to retrieve the trim strip from the car wash. It is a piece of aluminum with some plastic clips to hold it in place and at least one of those clips is broken / missing. So we are going to have to find a new way to attach it. I think a generous application of silicon sealer will do the trick.

I could holler at Mazda and Kaady, but being as the damage easily can be repaired, it's probably not worth the hassle. Mazda and Toyota may want to try making their cars more car wash resistant. I mean, a car wash brush shouldn't be able to rip things off of your car. Or maybe Kaady needs find some snag free brushes. Or they need to ban me from their car wash.

Holiday Inn Sioux City Iowa

Portable HD Video & Audio Recorder

About half way from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to Sioux City, Iowa, a distance of about 80 miles, we stopped for gas. As we are leaving the gas station I decide to stop and make sure I got the gas cap back on. We left my wife's favorite pillow at the hotel in Rapid City, South Dakota, this morning, and I don't want to make another stupid mistake.
    The gas cap is in place, but as I walk back to the driver's door, I notice the rear passenger window is open. What's going on? Did I push the button by mistake? No, the mechanism is broken. Pushing the button has no effect. I can slide the window closed and it stays that way until we hit the first bump on the highway. Now it is open again, and at 80 MPH the wind noise is deafening. My wife crawls in the back seat and holds the window closed until we get to Sioux City. We go directly to the Walgreens across the street from the Holiday Inn and buy a roll of duct tape and tape the window closed.
     Later on that evening we go back to Walgreens to get some essential supplies and I notice this video recorder for sale for $40. When I bought my first video cam-corder 25 years ago it cost $1600 and it stored the video on a VHS tape, which has what? A quarter of the lines of resolution that an HD video has? It won't be too long before they are giving them away in Cracker Jack boxes.

Mitsubishi Timing Belt

Mitsubishi 3.8 Liter DOHC V-6 Timing Belt. You cannot see the whole thing when the engine is in the car. Once you have removed a couple dozen bits and pieces, you can see part from above. To see the lower end, you need to take off the right front wheel and the splash shield. Nice that someone pulled their engine out just so we could see this.

I just realized our Mitsubishi Endeavor was overdue for a timing belt. The factory maintenance schedule calls for replacement at 105,000 miles and we are at 113,000. Not something you want to stall on as failure of this $2 part will destroy your $5,000 engine, so belly up to the bar and flex your credit card or prepare for two days of hard labor.
    It probably costs more than $2, but it doesn't really matter how much it costs because the big pain is the time and effort needed to do the work. The Endeavor, like most modern cars has the engine mounted transversely, which means the front of the engine (where all the belts are) is pushed up against the right front fender. A whole boat load of stuff has to come off before you can even see the timing belt, much less get to it. A shop will charge 5 or $600 just for the labor.
    Since you are going to all this trouble, it might be a good idea to replace some other items that are in there as well, like the water pump, tension rollers and a couple of seals. I had Accurate Auto do the work. The bill was just a shade over $1,000. The engine might still blow up, but it won't be because I neglected some important maintenance.
     Accurate Auto used to be in an old, converted gas station downtown that didn't have hardly any parking. Then I started going to Eric Heaton's on 25th. Eric lost a technician and now he has a backlog of work as long as your arm. I didn't want to wait on this deal, so I called Accurate and found that they had moved to a spacious facility next to Hale's restaurant on TV Highway.

Iowa

My wife and I got home Saturday night after ten days and 3600 miles on the road. We drove to Sioux City, Iowa to visit her father at the Holy Spirit retirement center. Usually when she goes, she flies, but this time she thought she might want to bring some stuff back, so we took her car, a 2006 Mitsubishi Endeavor.

Decker Truck on the way to Iowa.

   On the way there, not far out of Portland, I spotted a semi-truck from the Decker Trucking Company in Fort Dodge, Iowa. Fort Dodge is only about 20 miles from Rockwell City, my wife's home town. We used to fly into the small airport there. So right off the bat we know we're on the right road. We saw the same truck several times over the next couple of days. I'm pretty sure it was the same truck. We saw another one on the trip home. This one had a shinier trailer, and once again we saw it several times over the three days it took it us to get home.
    Eastern Washington is the most desolate looking place on Earth. Nothing but dry, brown scrub as far the eye can see. Once we got to Idaho things turned green. It was nice. Not much to see but grass and cows, but at least the grass was green. Much more pleasant than Eastern Washington.

Harleys parked in front of the Holiday Inn in Sioux City

    We got to Sioux City on Saturday evening, a week ago. There is major road construction going on downtown, so getting to the hotel required some wandering around. Just when we think we've got things sorted out we find our way blocked by the biggest gang of bikers you ever saw. News reports put the total at 25,000. I know we saw thousands of motorcycles parked in the street. Getting to the hotel required more deviations. Sioux City isn't that big, downtown is maybe ten blocks square, and our hotel and the biker party were both there. These weren't your regular bikers, they had filled the hotels. There were probably a hundred Harley's parked at the Holiday Inn where we were staying.

Sioux City, the morning after

    After the big biker brawl in Waco (Warning: CNN takes forever and a day to load, not as bad as some others) earlier this year, and seeing that Iowa does not require helmets, I was expecting a blood bath. I got up early the next morning to look for evidence, but the street cleaners beat me to it. All the evidence had been washed away.
    Rockwell City is still hanging on. Grandpa was selling his cars to the local dealer, so we paid him a visit to take care of business. I was surprised to see that he had a lot full of new cars for sale. There must have been a hundred, this in a town of maybe 1500 souls. He seems to be doing okay. Matter of fact, the whole area seems to be doing okay. I suspect things have consolidated some and now there is enough business to support the reduced population.

    We covered 3600 miles, burned 140 gallons of gas, which works out to about 25 miles per gallon, which is pretty durn good considering we were cruising at 80 MPH for most of the way. South Dakota had the highest speed limit at 80 MPH. Normally I set the cruise control to 10 MPH over the limit, but 90 was a little unsettling. The car handled it fine, but there was something in the back of my brain telling me we were in dangerous territory. There wasn't much traffic, but there were still occasional incidents of people not paying strict attention. Besides, the little computer display claimed our mileage had dropped to 15 MPG, the lowest I had ever seen it.
    The trip cost a little over two grand, hotels were almost half of that. We ate in 'nice' restaurants mostly, so our food (and beverage) bill was a little more than the gasoline. Premium gas (required by our high performance utility vehicle) averaged $3.29 a gallon, but we saw places where it was only $2.65. We only ran into one place that did not have premium, but there was another station a mile up the freeway that did, so it wasn't a problem.
     We saw a lot of Minervas. We ate at the one in Rapid City twice, and also at the one in Sioux Falls.

Suburbia

Kaady Car Wash has upped their price again. An economy wash now costs $7. "Seven dollars for a car wash!?!" I scream to myself, and then I remember it's not that people are raising prices in order to gouge you, it's just that the dollar is worth less every day.
    A while back, a few years maybe, I was seeing articles regularly bemoaning the short-sighted approach to business of the bean counters who were harping about quarterly returns and if they weren't high enough you should abandon ship, or bring out the lash and start beating your employees more.
    Problem wasn't that the bean counters were being short sighted. Problem was that the value of the dollar was plumetting. If you weren't getting a return of at least 15%, you were sliding toward the abyss. If you make any money then the government is going to want a third of it, and a third of 15% is 5%. Inflation is running right around 5%. Five and five makes ten, take ten from fifteen and you are left with five. So your vaunted 15% ROI is actually only worth about 5% in real money. So, yes, you better be making your quarterly benchmarks or you might as well be packing your bags.

    I checked the sunroof on the SUV before I went to the carwash and I noticed that the back edge had dropped down about a quarter of an inch which was disturbing because I thought I had fixed this problem, so I checked the blocks I had wedged under the rear corners of the sunroof and sure enough one of them had fallen over. I shoved it back into position. It did it's job, no water came in around the sunroof when I went through the car wash. Well, a few drops may have come in but they were caught by the gutter, so it works as well as it ever did.
    I took a photo of the blocks thinking I would post them here, but when I got home I discovered that the memory card in my Lumix waterproof camera was not properly seated and there were no photographs to be had. Hmmph. Never happened with my Canon Sureshot. Lens is still clear of dust. However I have found the upper left corner of a number of images obscured by some black blob - the tip of my finger. Comes from having the lens in the upper left corner of the camera. I try and remember that but sometimes I forget. Grrrrr.

Sunroof Fixit

A while back I took my wife's car (2006 Mitsubishi Endeavor) through the drive thru car wash and was shocked and dismayed when soapy water started running into the passenger compartment and all over me. Bah! Some nitwit left the sunroof open! Aside from being a knucklehead, I will attempt to excuse myself by noting that there is a retractable sunshade under the sunroof, it is totally opaque and it was deployed (is "deployed" the opposite of retracted?). Also the roof of the car is right at or even slightly above my eye level, so I would have not been able to see it when walking up to the car. And the car wash guys didn't warn me! Not my fault! Waaaa!
    This would not have been such a big deal, I mean there was a bit of a mess to clean up, but no permanent damage, or was there? Next time I went to the car wash I got a little bit of water dripping on the inside. I had made sure the sunroof was closed, so it looks like I have some kind of real problem. The Google warns me about plugged drain tubes connected to the mysterious inner channels of the sunroof. Cleaned them out, no help. But now there is also this annoying wind noise that we never used to have. Consult with Eric, and finally step up on the door sill and examine the outside and I can see that the back edge of the sunroof is sitting about a quarter of an inch lower than it should be.
    Can it be fixed? Well, yes it can, if you are willing to fork out a thousand dollars. Seems car washes break the mechanism (see above), and the sunroof and mechanism are one big assembly, called a cassette. Pulling it out means first removing the inner roof liner to gain access. Then there is the non-repairable cassette. It is non-repairable because anybody who is going to go to the trouble to replace it is not going to want to do it again because the repair to the sunroof mechanism failed.
   Eric's solution was to silicon seal the sunroof closed. It would be a little ugly from the outside because, well, silicon sealant. Not that you would ever see it, but it would still be tacky. So I delayed and stalled and my wife finally hit me with her rhythm stick and I went and cut a couple of short wood blocks from a piece of one by two and wedged them between the back corners of the glass and the rails of the mechanism. Took it for a drive and the wind noise seems to be gone and the blocks didn't fall out. The big test will be whether it makes it through the car wash without dripping.
    The weirdest part of all this is that for weeks I have had in mind a block I had used to wrap some string around and it turned out to be exactly the right size. Fortunately I had more of the same stock so I didn't have to find a new spindle for my bit of string.
    I've always liked convertibles, or maybe just the idea of a convertible. I have never owned one. I've seen too many that became ragtops because the owner wasn't willing to shell out the umpteen hundreds of dollars needed to keep it in good repair. Still like the way they look. My wife's car came with the sunroof. It wasn't a big selling point, it was more of a "oh nice, look, it's got a sunroof" kind of deal. I don't think we ever noticed it after that. Okay, maybe a couple of times when we had the whole family in the car and we were someplace new and different, we may have opened the sunroof for a minute, but it's really pretty useless. It isn't that big, so no matter what you want to see, you are pretty much guaranteed that you won't be able to see it. So, cute, but expensive and basically useless. Not for me.

P.S. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to find a decent picture of a girl in a convertible. I must of spent hours looking for the just the right one. Oh, how I suffer for my readers. Along the way I found some interesting websites:

• Internet Movie Cars Database. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, I mean after all we've got IMDB.com (the Internet Movie Database) and IMFDB.org (the Internet Movie Firearms Database). Why shouldn't we have one for cars?
• Vintage Classic Cars and Girls which is where I got the picture.
• ZZ Top's I Gotsta Get Paid music video on YouTube. Looks like maybe they've changed their tune in more ways than one. Newish, doesn't sound like their old stuff. Video has hot rods and pretty girls.

Colored Lights

Boeing B-52 Cockpit

At night the military uses red light to illuminate instruments on all kinds of equipment: aircraft, ships, vehicles, radar, what-have-you, the reason being that it has the least effect on your night vision. When we got our 2006 Mitsubishi Endeavor, I was disappointed to find that it had blue indicator lights on the dash. I suppose that was the fashion back then, and I guess it doesn't matter so much in a car, after all you've nice bright halogen bulbs to illuminate the road, so your night vision's probably worth shit anyway, so the color of the indicator lights isn't going to make any difference.

Audi S4 Cockpit

    Tonight I got a ride in a new Audi S4 and it had red marker lights all over the dash. They were not the kind of subdued red you see in military equipment, it was more of a a candy-apple, in-your-face, high fashion kind of red. Can't really tell from the difference from these pictures since they have been translated to bits and then reconstituted using the RGB pixels in your monitor. The original colors in the Audi are probably not even really red, probably made of ultraviolet crossed with infrared to give the illusion of red. The fashion in dashboard lights has changed. Imagine that.
    Recently someone was trying to justify using blue lights in the instruments. Our eyes have two kinds of cells that detect light: rods and cones. Cones are used for normal, daylight color vision. Rods are used for black and white, low light (nighttime) vision. Rods are sensitive to blue light, but insensitive to red light. So blue will work at night, and you should be able to get by with much dimmer blue lights than if you used red, but using red lights will not impact your night vision.

Car Talk

If I was going to buy a car, this is the kind of car I would want, except I would want a real one, not a model. Ah well, just as well, probably couldn't afford the model, much less a real one. Found on Strange World Studio, via Concept Vehicles.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my siblings are talking about buying new cars, so I chime in with my priceless pearls of wisdom:

    We bought both of our current cars new. These are the only cars we have bought new. I bought my 99 truck in the summer of 99 when they were closing out the 99's to make room for the new models in the fall. There was an ad in the paper that sounded good. Turns out the only trucks the sale price applied to were the sport models with stick shifts and crank windows. The dealer screwed around for an hour until I got tired of waiting and then they retired for ten minutes and came back with a price about 10% off of list.
    I think we bought the 2006 Mitsubishi in January of 2007. The manufacturer was offering a $5,000 discount (I think), which brought it down to the low 20's, about the same as the truck.
Know what you want and what you want to pay. Find the car and make an offer. Give them no more than five minutes to decide whether they want to sell it for that amount of not. If not, walk away. You don't have to be rude, just smile, say thank you and good bye. If you are feeling obligated, tell them you have an appointment with your shrink.
    The whole ploy of dealers is to wear you down, drag it out, make you suffer. Remember, the salesman's commission is measured in hundred's of dollars, not thousands. If he can squeeze an extra couple hundred bucks out of you by making you sit there all day long, he will, and he won't even be the least bit sorry about it.
    Don't worry about a good price. Whatever deal you get, somebody else will have gotten a better deal and will make a point of telling you all about it. Figure out what you are willing to pay and what you want. If the price you are willing to pay is retail, well, make some salesman a happy guy and pay retail.

Update: Michigan Mike chimes in with his two cents.

I don't think there is appreciable ground to be gained negotiating on terms. I think a better bet is to walk in on the last day of the month at the last hour (monthly numbers), in the dark, in the rain, when even a car salesman has some creeping doubts that he needs new tires for HIS car. Get them when they are weak. Negotiating for terms takes extra time,and the salesman will have to bring donuts for the finance guy next week, because the finance guy is salary and he ain't gonna stay late to do the paperwork for a salesman who will probably snort up the commission anyhow. He's got a decent book to read and some crispy snacks waiting for him at his condo. 

Cheap Disks

Took the Mitsubishi in to have the brakes checked. The front pads were worn out, which isn't surprising since it has 75,000 miles. The shop claimed the rotors were warped, so they replaced them as well. That's the third brake job I've had them do in the last few years where they replaced the rotors. On one hand it makes me a little suspicious, on the other hand the bill was only $24 (I divide all prices by ten in order to get something that looks reasonable. The dollar just isn't worth what it used to be.). Used to be brake shops would turn the rotors (machine a new, smooth face on them) whenever they replaced the pads. They would only replace the rotors if they were so badly worn that there wasn't enough metal left to reface the rotor and leave it strong enough to do it's job, but that was back when rotors cost $100 a piece. I checked rotor prices on the internet last time this happened and they were amazingly cheap, like $20, which I suspect is less than it costs to turn them. So I think what is happening is the shop has given up on turning the rotors and in the interest of speed, gone to just replacing them. Which would be okay if it only happened every 75,000 miles or so.

I had the front brakes done on my truck for the first time a couple of years ago when it had 95,000 miles on it. Rear brakes were fine. In the last year or so it developed this lumpiness in the brakes. I think it was the rear brakes, and I suspect it was a patch of rust. Comes from not being used as much, maybe. A couple of months ago I was looking at driving to Colorado and I decided that I had had enough of this lumpiness, and took it to the shop. They turned the rear drums and replaced the front rotors. I really thought the problem was confined to the rear brakes, but I asked them to fix it, and fix it they did. The lumpiness was all gone and the bill was only $200. They resurfaced the pads, but they did not replace them, or the shoes, either. There might have been rust on the rotors as well. I had the same problem with the Sebring a few years ago. So maybe this is just a feature of newer brakes: if you live someplace where it rains nine months of the year and you don't drive your car every day, your brakes will develop rusty patches that will make them lumpy.

Maintenance

I took Momma's car (2006 Mitsubishi Endeavor) into Eric's for an oil change today. It took me maybe an hour all told, from the time I left the house until I got back. It cost me $30. It would have cost me just as much and probably taken me longer to do it myself, not to mention still having to dispose of the oil.

While I was waiting I looked through the maintenance section in the owners manual. The car has 60,000 miles on it and I don't think it has ever had any maintenance done besides oil and filter changes. Is there anything else that should be done? Well, it could use a new air filter and the coolant (anti-freeze) should be changed, but other than that, no, not really.

The timing belt does not need to be replaced till we reach 105,000 miles.

The spark plugs need to changed occasionally, but how often depends on what kind of spark plugs you have. Are they regular, super (platinum tipped), or extra crispy (iridium! Shades of Toolmaker Koan)? How do you tell? I think I'll just wait until someone complains. Who will it be? Momma, or the DEQ (Department of Environmental Quality)?

The intake valves on some engines need to be adjusted. Which engines? The 4G6-MIVEC and the 6G7-MIVEC. What kind of engine is in our car?

 

Okay, that's as clear as mud. AG7B maybe? If I am really bored I might call Mitsubishi tomorrow and ask.

I finish looking through the maintenance schedule and I realize I did not see anything about the automatic transmission. For all the cars I have ever dealt with before, checking the transmission fluid level was a regular deal, and changing it was something that needed doing ever few years. What's going on? I look through the schedule again and there are all kinds of things you are supposed to check like hoses and belts and brakes and boots, but I can find nothing about the transmission. I finally find an entry, but it is in the severe service list, so it is not like I am blind.

Now I am curious, so I look under the hood. Usually the handle to the dipstick for the automatic transmission is some bright colored piece of plastic sticking out in plain sight. I look and look but I do not see it. I do notice this odd little cap on a piece of hose. See the white number 10?

Wait, what's that down in the shadows?

Could that be the transmission dipstick?

I do believe it is! Yes, you can see it quite plainly if the light is right, but it would still take some some doing to get your hand down there and actually get a hold of it. The maintenance schedule goes to 150,000 miles. I guess that by opening the cap on the magic box, even to just check the fluid level, you risk contaminating its' precious bodily fluids.  I suppose that means you just drive it until it grenades, and then buy a new one. Car or transmission, your choice.

New Tires & Battery

Friday I got an email from TireRack saying my tires had been delivered to H-M Motorsports. Cool. Friday goes by and no phone call. That's okay, I'm busy. Monday morning I give H-M a call, and, wait a minute, let me check, um, we have two tires with your name on them. Not cool. Call TireRack, put on hold, thank modern life I have a speaker phone. I don't know why, but it doesn't seem nearly as obnoxious to listen to endless whatever-you-get-when-you-are-on-hold if it is coming over a speaker phone. If I have to use a handset it drives me batty. Whatever. Two minutes go by and the woman who answers the phone knows my name! No miracle, right? Everybody and their mother has caller ID now, right? Well except for the phone company and the internet company. The two outfits who you would think would be up on technology don't seem to be able to find . . . , never mind, we won't go there, it's not nice to pick on the handicapped.

Anyway, the nice lady at TireRack figured out what the problem was and dispatched a electonic ass boot to get things corrected in less time than it took me to tell you about it. Later that afternoon I got a call from H-M, they have the tires and they would be happy to put them on tomorrow morning. Got the tires mounted no sweat. Noticed a little later that a couple of tires had much bigger wheel weights than the old ones. Two tires got by with little weights, but two got big honking weights. Weird.

This morning my wife calls from downtown Portland and her car, the car with brand new tires mind you, is dead. No lights, no indicators, no motor, no nothin'. What's gone wrong? Car is five years old - Voila! The battery has died. Stuff a double handful of tools in my bag, head over to Batteries Plus in Beaverton (my new favorite store), pick up a new Ray-O-Vac battery, and head downtown. (When did Ray-O-Vac get into the car battery business? I always liked the name, I don't know why they couldn't compete with the likes of Everyready and Duracell.)

Get there, open the hood and something is ticking away. It sounds exactly like a time bomb from a movie. What the heck? I open the fuse comparment and locate the offending relay and pull it out. Now the big red ECM module (why does a car have an Electronic Counter Measures module?) starts making clackety noises. I'm starting to worry now. I pull it out and finally we have silence. So what's going on? Have I got some kind of inscrutable electrical malfunction? All this stress is making me hungry. I decide I need a coffee and some breakfast. I find The Sultan cafe nearby. They have a nice selection of standard breakfast pastries. I have a Danish. In a Turkish cafe.

The Sultan Cafe at Quimby & 18th
The sun kind of spoiled the picture. Bad sun.

Refreshed, I realize all the clicking and clacking may just be a side effect of the dead battery and decide to go ahead and replace it. All it takes one 10 mm wrench. Same size wrench for the battery terminals and the battery hold down bolts. Only odd thing is that the battery is wrapped in some kind of blanket. I cannot imagine what purpose it would serve. No matter, new battery fixes all problems, we are good to go.

Now to deliver the car to my wife. She is taking a class at 23rd & Vaughn. 23-something-er-other. I am expecting to see a school, or a school administration building, along with a parking lot with a hundred cars. Nothing there. The North side of Vaughn is industrial establishments and the freeway. The South side is trendy little stores and peoples homes. Where could she be hiding? I drive around for at least an hour, exploring all the by-ways and back streets in the area. It's not bad, I don't have any place I have to be, and there is lot's of cool stuff around here, so I don't mind, but after awhile it's starting to bug me.

Finally I pull into a Kobos coffee store and ask the people there if they have any ideas. One guy suggests the Holiday Inn next door. Could it be? I walk over, walk through the lobby and open the door to the first conference room I come to and there she is!

Why didn't I think of this? I saw the Holiday Inn, but some reason I just blocked it out of my mind. Teachers wouldn't be having a class in a Holiday Inn, that just smacks of extravagance, something school administrators are loath be connected with.

So it all worked out OK.

Here's some pics of some of interesting stuff I saw while I was wandering around.

Sculpture put up by Esco, one of the big industrial establishments North of Vaughn

Royal Enfield Motorcycles For Sale

St. Patricks Church. It's a little odd. There is a symbol on the tower that looks like a US Bank emblem of some sort.

The Peculiarium, housed in a fine family building. There is a similar sized building in Grand Rapids with our family name on it, built by my grandfather.

Conway Trucking World Headquarters
They have a big presence here.

I also ran across a place called Sniff. It's a dog hotel. Very fancy. I took one pic, but it didn't come out.