I Bought a Cheap Cadillac Escalade at Auction and Found a GOLD MINE inside the Engine!
Samcrac
If you're lucky, persistent, mechanically savvy, physically flexible, and able to dextrously manipulate strange devices into awkward places blindly, not too bad. The worse part for me was replacing the oil pressure sensor. On the back of the engine, back by the firewall, completely invisible? No, just no. Dynamite the effing car, or pull the body off the frame, or take a chainsaw to the dashboard and cut a hole in the firewall. And just to show you that Samcrac is a better man than you or I will ever be, he pulls out out the new sensor and plugs in an analog gauge. Why not just run a scan tool? You've already in the land of demons, why not go all in?
I also wonder about pulling the cam to check the bearings. You already checked the crank and it's good, and it's certainly more important than the cam. He had to do a whole lot more work to get the cam out. Of course, it might be that he had to pull the intake manifold to change the oil pump. I mean, I wouldn't doubt it. And yes, he's planning on hot-rodding the motor, so he's going to be doing this all over again at least once. And that will probably be the end of this motor and this car.
Samcrac has appeared here before. A little Samcrac goes a long way. I got my fix, I'm happy.
While I was waiting for the flat to be fixed I notice a couple of books in the office. Don't often see books in auto repair joints, or maybe I just never noticed. Anyway, I'm always looking for something new to read, hoping I will find something that will grab me. So I take a couple of pics. It's quicker and easier than writing it down and the camera doesn't forget.
When we got back to the house we checked the pressure in all the tires including the emergency spare. That spare needs to be inflated to 60 PSI and it was only about half that. Start pumping it up, stop and check the pressure and the gauge only goes to 50 PSI. What is this? When did we start cheaping out on tire pressure gauges? I used to have a couple of decent gauges but they got old and quit working, so I bought a new one off of Amazon. It was only $8 for a pair of them. Guess I got what I deserved.
Daughter got a flat tire this morning while she was driving up West Burnside road on the way out of Portland. Hit something hard, probably a pothole. She tried to fix it herself but immediately ran into a problem when she couldn't loosen the wingnut that was securing the jack in the trunk. So I got called to assist. She was right, the wing nut was tight. I couldn't loosen it until I applied some Channellock pliers. I know who the guilty culprit is. He tightens everything super tight. Now we need to get to the lug nuts. The YouTube video she has pulled up has mag wheels while she has steel wheels and hub caps. So the lug nuts are behind the hubcap. Lugnuts revealed, she tries to loosen one. No go. She stands on the end of the wrench. Bounces. Still no go. I stand on the wrench and bounce and my heftier weight (double hers) does the trick. That was the toughest one. Thanks, Costco. She was able to break loose the rest of them.
Got the tire changed and looked around for someplace to get it fixed (it's Sunday) and find J.R. Oregon Tires & Auto Care in Beaverton. It took him maybe 15 minutes to fix the tire and only charged $20. I call it a deal.
Now I'm on Google Maps looking for Streetview images of this place. The one at the top is the first and it doesn't really give a good view of the place.
Switch to 3d view and we get a good, if distorted, overview of the whole place. What isn't shown is the pile of several hundred tires on the far side of the main building.
This is in a small commercial district in fairly unscale neighborhood. The commercial district has been on the skids for while. Half of it has been fenced off and looks like it is going to be demolished. The only remainging businesses there are Harbor Freight and DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles).
I think the last time I changed a flat was on our old Windstar van, and that must have been 20 years ago.
"Sir, Your Parking Brake Exploded" - Fixing a Ford
Watch Wes Work
Jack has been working on making his lathe cut 30 threads per inch. He brought a bunch of pieces to lunch yesterday for show and tell, but he put them away before I managed to take any photos. Probably have to go pay him a visit. He had to make a couple of gears, and to do that he needed a cutter to cut the gear teeth. He tried making his own cutter, but that didn't work out so well. He ended up buying a set of expensive cutters.
Dennis had a slow leak in one of his tires. We were talking about it at lunch yesterday, speculating on what could the problem. I said 'nail', Jack said 'screw', then Dennis goes home and sends us a picture of what he found. I am surprised, I would have thought something like this would result in the tire going flat immediately. It's new-ish car with new-ish tires, can't be more than a couple of weeks / years old. Guess new tires are tougher than they used to be.
I don't understand why I watch some videos and some I quit after a couple of minutes. It's kind of like reading books. Sometimes I'll pick up a book and start reading it and it will just grab me and I can't put it down. More often I will read a bit and get bored and set it down.
I suppose this one sucked me in because we're on the track of a mystery. Near as I can make out, it was running on dirty oil that caused some minor damage that started the bearings down the slippery slope to failure. I wonder if analysis of the old oil might have revealed impending doom. But even if you were alerted, what a pain to pull the engine out of this car. He must have pulled a zillion bolts before he was able to examine the rod bearings.
Remind me never to buy a car with a turbocharger. Nice, fancy jet-age power, but stuffing one under the hood of most any car is going to make any repairs twice as difficult and twice as expensive.
There might be another reason I watched this video and that is I was reading about Ferrari's merchandising business, how they make more off of Ferrari branded T-shirts and jackets than they do from selling cars, which prompted me to go look on E-bay where I typed in Ferrari and I got back a bunch of Ferrari automobiles. I was expecting the usual kind of E-Bay crap like coffee mugs and planters, but no, there were a bunch of Ferraris on there, and there was a very nice looking one in South Carolina for $20K which got me to thinking about buying one. That is a really stupid idea, I hope I don't fall for one of my whims.
Ford Explorer ST Crash Repair | Insane Collision Damage Rebuild
Peter K
I've never been one for doing bodywork. Straight forward mechanical repairs are more my speed. You need to be a special kind of crazy to do bodywork. I am crazy in my own way, but doing bodywork is like an alien religion.
Very tired yesterday afternoon, I was able to watch this straight through. Boy, did it bring back old memories. I hope he didn't have to pay more than a buck-and-a-half for this car, and by a buck-and-a-half I mean spare change, which these days is probably something like $500. I do wonder about the gas tank. I suppose the leak could have been up top, so if you didn't fill the tank more than half way, he would have been fine. Really didn't like the rag for a gas cap, but this was a shoo-string operation. I'm thinking he probably didn't spend more than a couple hundred bucks on this project. Except for gas, gas to drive to Minnesota was likely his biggest expense.
Ford 460 RV Surges, Runs Rough but Nothing's Wrong?
Watch Wes Work
Wes is like the foundation of Western Civilization. I can see replacing an ECM, (Engine Control Module) but pulling it apart and repairing the electronic circuit inside, that's a whole 'nother level. We won't talk about the old video screen sitting on the shelf in my storage room, waiting for me to open it up and look for blown capacitors. Seems to be a common problem with old electronics (see here just after the 21 minute mark). Of course finding blown capacitors opens another can of worms - finding and ordering the parts. Then we get to move on to finding some open space to set up a soldering station, i.e. a table with some open space. We got stuff piled up around our ears here.
I found this video amazing: the bearings failed but the big gears survived. The carrier bearings got spun and the case no longer holds them. It looks like it is going to be straight forward repair, but then he adds up the prices and all of a sudden a used axle out of the junkyard looks like a better deal. Can you imagine a factory that could produce these axles in such volumes that perfectly good ones get sent to the junkyard? Okay, we get an axle from the junkyard and all we have to do is swap out the old one and install the new one. How hard can it be? Well, not too tough, just a whole lot of hammer and tongs.
He does some slight of hand with the video that's amusing and then there's the business of lining up big heavy pieces so they fit together. Wes is frankly amazing. It's too bad that he seems to need a special tool for every stinking step.
Customer States Compilation (The Best of 2022) | Just Rolled In
Just Rolled In
Watching this video, the idea that not everyone is a car guy forces its way into my brain. I have been taking care of cars since forever. Knowing how they work is my second nature, so anytime I see things like this I am dumbfounded that people can be that clueless. Then I remember that my wife can't tell one brand of car from another. I suspect that only about ten percent of the population has the mechanical aptitude for working on cars. I live in a world of aliens. Oh, wait a minute, maybe I am the alien.
Hyundai Mystery Fuel Injector Shutdown - How Can We Fix It if It Won't Stay Broken?
Watch Wes Work
I've been watching a bunch of Watch Wes Workvideos lately. He covers the gamut of automotive repairs, from patching up old rust buckets so they can limp down the road for another year to delving into instructable electronic nightmares, like this one. These kind of videos always remind me of the hangar scene from Star Wars:
People working on complex machinery using more complex instruments. Come to think of it, it's very much like what the maintenance and repair guys do on fighter jets for the military.
Some problems with broken machinery are obvious, something is leaking or something is broken, but some problems, like the one in the video at top can benefit from some analysis. Sometimes a mechanic will just start replacing parts figuring that eventually one of them will fix the problem, but that can get very expensive. Analysis requires an intelligent and functioning brain. When I am sharp and motivated, problems like this are like a good meal: I gobble them up. If I am dragging and foggy, I will be stymied. I suspect this is why repair manuals have gotten so big, wait, what I am talking about? I haven't seen any new repair manuals, they've all been moved to digital versions where they can lay out all the steps required to diagnose the problem. Except they can't foresee every problem, so at some point they will simple direct the mechanic to replace a component.
Common rail direct fuel injection was a new term for me. It was originally used in WWI submarines. Denso pioneered it for use in automotive applications in 1995. It offers certain benefits but the part that struck me is the extraordinary pressures it operates at: 29,000 PSI (pounds per square inch) which is like ten times as much as a typical hydraulic system, which uses 2 or 3,000 PSI.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
If you live the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area, your car has to pass an emissions test before you can renew your vehicle registration (license plates). The DEQ (Oregon Department of Environmental Quality) handles the testing. They are not the same as the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles), who handle the registration.
It used to be that you had to drive to a DEQ test facility and they would inspect and test your car. Back in the bad old days (25 years ago?) it was quite an ordeal. They had rollers embedded in the floor of the test station, kind of like a dynamometer. You drive in until the drive wheels are on the rollers. They would look under the hood and look under the car using a mirror, stick a probe up the tail pipe, then you put the car in drive and step on the gas until the big meter hanging on the wall says 1500 and hold it there for a minute. Then, if your car passed, which most modern cars did, they collected your money, stamped your paperwork, handed over the precious stickers and sent you on your way.
Later, when automakers had gotten the computer controls sorted out, they dispensed with the visual inspections and physical testing and simply plugged their computer into the diagnostic port in your car. The computers did their little robotic handshake / dance and then you went through the paper and payment process as before.
This year we have a new deal: DEQToo. Now you don't have to go to the actual DEQ test facility, you can take your car to your local shop, and if they are connected, they can do the DEQ testright there.
My wife's car needed an oil change, so I took it Clays Auto Service and they ran the test for which they charged me $25. Now all I need to do is go online and I can complete the registration, and here's where things went south.
I go to the website and I pay the DEQ fee (what? Didn't I just pay that? No, silly, that was the other DEQ fee.), then I have to go through this annoying identification procedure with the DMV only to find out that I cannot renew the registration because it is not my car. It's my wife's car. WTF. Fine, get my wife and all her magic numbers, and try again, and now my credit card is declined. Double WTF. Double fine, double trouble, double, bubble, toil and trouble, I'll just write a check and mail in the form. Ha, silly boy, not that simple. To do that you need a DEQ certificate. Great, there is no such animal. Only the great DEQ computer in the sky knows that the car has passed the test, and it isn't telling nobody nothin'.
Stay tuned for part two, wherein this situation is resolved or I am hauled off to the loonie bin.
How to make a rim plate from old MS sheets | Новый ром из старой корабельной тарелки
Pakistani truck
Don't know why but I always enjoy videos of guys working on machinery under primitive conditions. Perhaps because it reminds me of younger days when I was wrenching on machinery.
The floor may be dirt, but they employ some heavy duty machines to get the job done.
The second half of the subtitle is in Russian. Go figure.
Pickup trucks have become much more capable in last 50 years. When I lived on the farm we had a Ford F-150 that had a carrying capacity of 500 pounds. You put three people in the cab and you are full up. Now we've got pickup trucks hauling goose neck trailers carrying backhoes. Apparently we also have pickup trucks doing long distance hauling now.
You wouldn't think that putting a bigger fuel tank in a pickup truck would be such a big deal, I mean they've got all that room underneath the bed. The only thing down there is the driveshaft and the exhaust pipe. Well, there is also the frame, and the frame is what makes it difficult. The frame is the structure that ties everything together. If you were the defense department you could undoubtedly build unibody trucks that could haul a ten ton trailer and have room for a hundred gallon gas tank, but out here in the civilian world where cost matters, it's quicker, easier and cheaper to build a truck using a frame. Squeezing a big gas tank in between the stuff that's already under the bed is a bit of a trick. Evidently there is a big enough demand for this kind of thing the S&B went to the trouble to master the trick.
All the Oddities of Ford's Famous Flathead V8 (Full Engine Build)
The Horsepower Monster
I've been hearing about the Ford flathead V8 since forever, but I was a little confused as to why it was such a big deal. By the time I was old enough to know what a car was, all cars had V8 engines. V8 engines have been around for a long time. They were used to power airplanes during WW1 and Cadillac had one back in 1915, but those were for people with money, not for the common man.
I posted another video of a flathead Ford V8 rebuild a while back, but it was a time lapse and it glossed over all the horrible problems you would encounter when working on this engine. The way the bell housing is cast with the block is an annoyance I could live with, but the business of setting the valve clearance is just nuts! I had a couple of motorcycles that had mechanical lifters. Setting the clearance on them was straightforward, but it was still a pain. A couple of iterations of that was enough to sell me on the infinite superiority of hydraulic lifters.
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