Yukon Mystery

 

GM 5.3 Liter V8 EcoTec3 L83 Engine

The power steering on Jack's new GMC Yukon quit on him yesterday, so we opened the hood to see what we could see. Not much as you might expect, mostly acres of black plastic panels but there were a few openings where you could catch a glimpse of some metal things. Could not find the power steering pump or even the cap to the power steering reservoir. I mean you should at least be able to see the cap, how else are you going to check the fluid level? Hmm, maybe it doesn't have hydraulic power steering, it might very well have electric power steering.

But then I am looking at the belts. It has a serpentine belt that drives most all of the accessories like the air conditioning compressor, the alternator and the water pump, but then it also has a V-belt that is driving one pulley on the lower left of the engine. You can see it at the bottom center of the above picture. What the heck is that thing it's driving? It looks sort of like a pump, but there is no reservoir. The one hose fitting there connects to the vacuum line that goes to the power brake booster. Could it be a vacuum pump? That's just weird, man. 

Normally the power brake booster uses vacuum from the intake manifold, a design that has worked wonderfully for the last half century. Of course, that only works when the throttle is closed. It doesn't work so well when the throttle is wide open. But you wouldn't be stepping on the throttle at the same time as you are stepping on the brakes, would you? No, you wouldn't, but being as these new fangled cars are all drive-by-wire, you may not actually have control over the throttle anymore. The computer has control. 

I suspect this vacuum pump is there so you have a chance to win a fight with the computer should you ever have a disagreement over whether you should go faster or stop. That's kind of fucked up. They  replace the hydraulic power steering with an electric system to make the engine more fuel efficient, but then they add a vacuum pump to avoid a possible lawsuit the next time somebody dies in a fiery crash due to a stuck throttle, a throttle controlled by HAL, the evil master computer. Welcome to the modern world, and what a fucked up place it is.

As for Jack's problem, it went away the next time he started the car. There also appears to be a massive recall regarding this apparently common problem. No word on lawsuits about this issue have reached my desk, but that's not surprising what with all the worthless crap that has been flooding the internet this year.

P.S. The water pump has been moved away from it's traditional position on the front of the engine off to the side. I don't like it because it's different. Water pumps have always been mounted to the front of the engine. I suspect a commie plot. This might make it easier to change, except it won't because of all the other rigamarole you'll have to go through because of the electric-plastic bullshit you'll need to deal with.

Hyundai Alternator, Again

Cutaway drawing of Alternator

It appears that the alternator has crapped out on the Hyundai again. It failed several years ago. They warned me at the time that there was an oil leak right above the alternator that I should probably get fixed. Not too long ago I took the car in for an oil change and ended up with half of an engine overhaul. One of the things they were going to fix was this oil leak. Didn't. Couple of weeks go by and it's pretty obvious from the smell and from the fresh oil covering the alternator that they hadn't fixed the leak. Turns out the valve cover was cracked. The car was in a front end accident before I got it, so the valve cover might have gotten hit in the accident, and gotten hit hard enough to start a crack that has gradually grown until it has become a real problem.  Or it might have been a flaw in the casting that was there from the beginning.

Whatever. They Fed-Ex'd a new valve cover in and replaced it, so the oil leak is fixed. However, it appears that the spirit of the alternator has gone to alternator heaven and its earthly remains will have to be removed and a new, live, alternator installed in its place.

Which got me thinking about tow trucks. (Cars break down and sometimes when than happens you are left stuck and you have to call a tow truck.) When I was younger, say 40 or 50 years ago, nobody ever called a tow truck. Nobody's car ever broke down, or if it did, you fixed it yourself, you didn't call for a tow truck, those things cost money! Nowadays I don't hear people complaining about the cost of a tow truck. My last run-in a couple of months ago cost about $100, which is chunk out of my weekly allowance, but not all that bad.

So what I am wondering is - have people in general quit complaining about the price of tow trucks, or do people still complain about the price but I just don't hear about it because I don't hang around with those folks (because I'm old)?

Update: next morning. Just started the car to take it to the shop and the red battery indicator was out. Checked the voltage at the battery and it was 13 point something, so the alternator is back on the job. The check engine light is still on, so something is not right. The Hyundai expert at my local repair shop had a heart attack last week, so they aren't going to be able to look at it till Monday. I guess I'll keep driving it and pray it doesn't die and leave me stranded and looking for a tow truck.

The $2500 Oil Change

Hyundai V-6 with Timing and Valve Covers removed

Took the Hyundai in for an oil change and to have someone look at the brakes. Picked it up this afternoon. The bill came to $2500. Seems there were a couple of silent problems hiding under the hood.

We'll start with the usual suspects. The brakes were making funny noises a couple of days ago. They were making the screechy sound you get when the disk brake pads have reached the end of their life, but it was kind of random, it wasn't happening just when I stepped on the brakes. It would start and then I would turn the steering wheel a fraction and it would stop. Then I would turn it the other way and it would start up again, and then it just quit. That would have been the end of it, but it pulled exactly the same stunt a month ago, and now it's due for an oil change, so let's take a look.

Turns out the brake pads had reached the end of their life so they get replaced, and since there's a factory in Asia churning out new rotors for a buck and half a piece, the rotors get replaced as well. Used to be standard practice to turn them on a brake lathe, but that was then and this is now and I don't know if anyone turns brake rotors anymore.

Then there was the leaking valve cover. This leak is probably what killed the alternator a couple of years ago, and that cost 7 or 8 hundred dollars to fix. We don't want to have to do that again, so let's get this leak fixed. While they are in there poking around they discover that the timing cover gasket is also leaking. Fixing it requires disassembling half of the  car. That was what jacked up the price. Since we are inside the timing cover, they also replaced the water pump because that is where water pumps live now. The car has 100,000 miles on it and while the water pump might last the life of the car, it might not, and it's the cheapest part of this deal, so they replace it as well.

So, lots of new stuff:

• oil & filter
• brake pads and rotors all around
• water pump
• spark plugs
• engine air filter
• cabin air filter
• valve cover gasket
• timing cover gasket

There were probably some other new bits in there as well. The car has 110K miles on it, which is pretty low for being 10 years old. I got a new set of tires for it earlier this year, so it ought to good for another five years or maybe even ten. I hope.

The Biggest Aspidistra In The World

Gracie Fields The Biggest Aspidistra In The World 1938
Marcel got me started with this quote from Fake News by Richard Fernandez on PJ Media:

The reason why Allied deception operations were so effective against Hitler was because Goebbels had reduced German reporting to a lie machine, thereby destroying its credibility. Allied news, even Allied deception was more believable by comparison.

Cool, we're talking about veracity here, always an interesting topic. I want to read more. Starting from the top, Richard talks about the transmitter the Brits were using to pump propaganda across the channel:

It was not long before the British were running their own fake news operation against Nazi Germany under the 20 Committee. In this they were materially aided by the power of American technology. Rowen notes "If you ever listen to radio these days, you’ve probably heard “50,000 watts clear channel”. Today, as in the 1940s, it is still the maximum power allowed a US radio station. But in 1941, the RCA Corporation in New Jersey built for WJZ a transmitter 10 times more powerful. When the Federal Communication Commission refused to lift its ceiling of 50,000 watts, the WJZ 500,000 watt transmitter was briefly orphaned. Until the British heard about it. The transmitter was crated up, shipped to the UK and installed in bombproof headquarters in Sussex. They named it after a song sung by the English music hall entertainer, Gracie Fields: The Biggest Aspidistra in the World!"

That's how we got the video at the top. Gracie was a big deal back in the 1930s.

Now I go looking for information about the transmitter, and I'm not really finding much.

Water Cooled Vacuum Tubes for the Aspidistra transmitter

But then I stumble over the Alexanderson alternator: 50 tons of steampunk radio transmitter. This might be what prompted Gracie to sing her song.

Alexnderson Alternator

 An Alexanderson alternator is a rotating machine invented by Ernst Alexanderson in 1904 for the generation of high-frequency alternating current for use as a radio transmitter. It was one of the first devices capable of generating the continuous radio waves needed for transmission of amplitude modulation (sound) by radio. It was used from about 1910 in a few "superpower" longwave radiotelegraphy stations to transmit transoceanic message traffic by Morse code to similar stations all over the world. Although obsolete by the early 1920s due to the development of vacuum-tube transmitters, the Alexanderson alternator continued to be used until World War 2. It is on the list of IEEE Milestones as a key achievement in electrical engineering. - Wikipedia

Alexanderson Alternator Rotor

The rotor is five feet in diameter and turns at 2100 RPM.

Alexanderson Alternator Rotor

There is still one machine is Sweden. They fire it up a couple of times a year just so they can prove that it still works.

Merry Christmas in Morse Code
You can see the code just above the letters.

Update July 2021 replaced missing video.

2008 Hyundai Sonata

Difference in paint is almost undetectable

Difference in paint is obvious. Yes, it's the same car.

I didn't notice the difference in the paint until I started comparing this picture with the other two.

Bought this car so my daughter would have a way to get back and forth to work. She started making payments, but then she ran off to Argentina. That meant I had two too many cars. If you are driving old cars, a spare is a good thing to have, but one spare is fine, I don't need two. So I unloaded Chrysler Sebring, the infamous. It had developed several minor but annoying problems, plus I could sit up straight in the Hyundai.
    The Hyundai was rebuilt from a wreck. I bought it from my mechanic. He tells me it was rebuilt from a parking lot crunch. Hard to believe that a parking lot crunch would result in a car being declared a total loss by the insurance company, but then insurance companies have their own skewed way of looking at the world.
    The car looks fine except if you look at it at the right angle, you can see that the paint on the front of the car is slightly different than the paint on the rear. It's really kind of weird, but it only shows up at the right angle, and even then the difference is slight. But it makes me wonder. If this was just a parking lot crunch, how come they had to paint the whole front half of the car?
    The dashboard makes little creaking noises every now and again which makes me wonder if something got screwed up in the wreck and now the bits don't fit together quite right or something. But it might just be the nature of plastic dashboards in Hyundais. Hasn't gotten any worse and it still rides very smoothly, so I'm not worried about it.
    The car has been pretty reliable, except for that episode with alternator. When I picked the car up from the repair shop in Seattle they mentioned that one of the valve covers had a slight leak, oil from this leak was dripping on the alternator and this might have contributed to the alternator failing. I wondered why they hadn't fixed the leak since they were working on the car anyway, but they don't seem too concerned about it and I had a long drive ahead of me, so I took off.
    When I got home I took it to my mechanic. His verdict was that the leak was too small to worry about right now, but when the car gets to 100,000 miles, it is going to be time to replace the spark plugs, and since you have to pull the intake manifold (!?!?) to do that, then would be a good time to fix the leaking valve cover. So replacing the plugs, which I used to be able to do myself for $10 in parts and an hour of my time, is probably going to run $500.  Fortunately, it only needs to be done once every ten years or so.
    It has a Kenwood stereo with a removable faceplate. The audio is okay, I guess, but the controls suck big time. The power button is just underneath the faceplate-release-button. You have to be careful turning it off or on or you are liable to have the faceplate in your hand. The other controls on the faceplate are useless for me. There is one big knob that also works like a joystick and half a dozen buttons. I tried to figure them out once or twice, but then I found that there are controls for the radio on the steering wheel. The controls on the steering wheel allow you to control the volume and the tuning. That's all I really need. They are very simple to use. There are six buttons and they each have their own function. They are easy to tell apart because they all have little features that allow you to identify them by touch. There is no night light on the radio, or it's not hooked up, so at night you can't see where the power button is, which can be problematic, as mentioned.
    I don't know what is with the front door, but it seems to be the wrong size or the wrong shape or something. You want to swing the door out of the way when you are getting out, but if you push it open as far as you can easily reach, it isn't open enough, and if you give it a push so it opens all the way, it's too far. Maybe the doom-a-flatcher that regulates the door is too long, or the detents are in the wrong place or something. Or maybe I'm just old and fat.
    The car has a sunroof. I doubt I will ever use it. After my experience with the Endeavor I am seriously considering disabling it. Actually, the car manufacturers should put in a switch that automatically closes the sunroof if you close the sunshade. What happens is that you're driving along on a nice sunny day and you want to enjoy the sunshine, so you open the sunroof. After a while you start to get hot, so you close the sunshade, but you forget about the sunroof. Then you decide to go to the carwash and when water starts pouring into the passenger compartment you try and close the sunroof. Due to Murphy's law, this usually happens just when the big overhead rotary brush is scrubbing the roof. The little wheels and levers that allow the sunroof to slide back and forth are relatively delicate and not up to repelling the big, strong brush, so they break and now the sunroof won't properly close. The problem is worse with the Endeavor because it is tall enough that you can't see the sunroof when you are standing next to the car.
    The neatest thing about the Hyundai is that the speedometer goes to 160 MPH. I doubt whether I will ever see the North side of 100, but it's kind of neat that Hyundai would put a speedometer with numbers that big in this car.
    I picked up daring daughter, O-man and their six suitcases (2 small, 4 big fat ones) from the airport Tuesday, and we all fit in the car, though one of suitcases had to sit in the back seat. Now that diligent daughter is home from her sojourn in Argentina, it looks like I will be back to driving my gas guzzling truck again.

Car Dream

Commonaro. This is not the car in my dream, it's just the most outlandish one I found in my search for a pic.

Dreamt that my cousin had acquired a cool 6 wheel sports car. It looked something like an Aston Martin DB-5, just a little longer with six wheels. The three axles were evenly spaced. The engine sat between the first and second axle, and the passenger cabin sat between the second and third.
    It was painted gray. It looked kind of like wrinkle finish paint, but it was smooth, not wrinkled. It was like a whole mess of small random patches of paint that all fit together seamlessly. Some of the patches were a little lighter, some were a little darker. They all had a sort of grain that you see in crystals, and the orientation was random, just like the shapes and sizes.
    There were about 50 of these things made and he had gotten a deal on it. We had to replace the alternator (where have I heard that before? Many places, but most recently here.) and it was a piece of cake because there was like a separate finished compartment for the alternator inside the engine bay.

Compartment

LOT-EK's proposed shipping container shopping mall for NYC.

The idea of controlling your house with your smart phone got me to thinking. How about we build an apartment using all the latest technology? No light switches or thermostat, they would be replaced by wireless servos controlled by your smart phone. Use LED's instead of incandescent light bulbs. If we eliminated power outlets, we could reduce the wiring to simple bell wire instead of the heavy duty copper cored romex we use now. Add an exercise bike connected to an alternator and you might not need to even be connected to the grid. Cooking and cleaning would still need substantial power, but they could be co-located, we wouldn't need to supply the whole house/apartment with that kind of power.

Professor Dumpster is working on some modular apartments that look kind of interesting.

Kasita's Modular Housing Project in Austin

I'm not keen on new and modern, I look old, worn and comfortable, mostly because they want big money for the new, fancy stuff and you can usually get the old stuff cheaper. That's not really true. Real estate value depends on location, and the old stuff is usually located in better locations, which makes it more expensive. New stuff is on the outskirts, and some of the newer construction techniques are better than the old ones.
    Living in this big house has led me to realize that I don't really need all this space. By myself I could probably get by with 500 square feet. Smaller houses require less cleaning and less energy. The big advantage though is they won't hold as much stuff, so you don't accumulate as much baggage. I could probably use another 500 square feet for a shop that would have room for my tools and space to work, but I don't do much in that line anymore. And keeping a 500 square foot shop to maintain a 500 square foot house seems like a bit of overkill.

The $800 Alternator

2008 Hyundai Sonata

Last weekend darling daughter took the Hyundai and drove to Seattle for a friend's wedding. She took a girlfriend with her so we weren't worried. As they were leaving their hotel in Bellevue (home of Microsoft), the car lost power and all the lights on the dash started flashing, so naturally enough she called home. Mom got her the number of a towing service. The tow truck, with a woman driver, appeared directly and took the car to a repair shop. The girls called Uber and got a ride to the wedding. They missed the ceremony, but they got there in plenty of time for the reception.
    Sunday they caught the Bolt Bus to Portland, and girlfriend's boyfriend gave them a ride home. That was a pleasant surprise. I fully expected that we were going to have to drive to Seattle to rescue her, but no need. I guess my little girl is all grown up. Mostly, anyway.
    Monday I call the automobile repair shop (dutiful daughter brought me a business card). Yes, they have the car, and if I agree to a diagnostic charge of $150, they will take a look at it. $150 might be seem a bit steep, but since I was able to deal with this from 200 miles away and I didn't so much as have to open the hood, it sounds like a deal. It didn't hurt that Jason, the man on the phone, sounded organized, competent and knew which side his manners were buttered on.
    Tuesday I get the diagnosis. The alternator is kaput. They can replace it. The total bill will be $700 and change, which includes the charge for the tow. Once again the bill seems a bit steep, but this is the first time that this car has needed a repair. Besides, it's in Seattle, what am I gonna do? Drive up there and work on the car in their parking lot? Just the thought of driving to Seattle squashes that notion. We won't mention that the repair shop would probably not look kindly on my working on my car in their parking lot, nor will we  mention that it's a friggin' front wheel drive car with a V-6 engine, which means removal and replacement of the alternator will probably require the skills of Houdini. So, yes, go ahead on, fix the car and I will pay the bill.

    Now I need to start formulating how I am going to retrieve the car. One of the girls could drive to Seattle with me and drop me off, but that seems like a big waste of effort. Besides, they have plans, and driving to Seattle is not in them. That leaves public transportation. Flying would be like $200 and I still need ground transport on both ends. Amtrak has a business class seat for $80-odd, or I could take the Bolt Bus for $30. We're already into this debacle for a small fortune, let's see if we can minimise the damage. Bolt Bus it is.
    Wednesday I have things to do, Thursday I'm too frazzled to handle an expedition, so Friday it is. There is a bus at 8:30 in the morning, but because I have stalled and delayed, that one is sold out. The next bus is at 11:30. That's better, lets me take my time getting ready.

Bolt Bus

    At 9:30am daring daughter gives me a ride to the local Max Station. I arrive at the Bolt Bus stop in downtown Portland at 10:30am. There are already a dozen people lining the wall of the faceless building on Salmon between 5th and 6th. I stop in at Jimmy John's, buy an ice tea and read my book for half an hour, then I go back and join the group on the corner waiting for the bus. Buses come and go, but most of them are city buses and none of them are Bolt Buses until we get one about 10 minutes after 11, but it doesn't stop. Hey, bus! Where you going?
    This drags me out from around the corner and now I see a line of people stretching all the way down the block. Starting to get a little antsy. Where's the friggin' bus? And then it shows up. It stops right by the A-frame sign sitting on the sidewalk and does that little kneeling trick where it lowers the front step down to curb level. A man dressed in gray appears in my field of vision (where'd he come from?), walks up to the bus, the door opens and he talks to the driver.
    Okay, time to start loading. The man in gray opens the doors to the luggage compartment. There is something wrong with the first door, it doesn't want to stay open. He fiddles with it. The driver has come out on the sidewalk. He makes an announcement, but he isn't loud enough to be heard, so everyone converges on him. All the A ticket holders get on first, then the B's, and lastly the C's. That's me, tail end Charlie. I get on the bus and I see that there are plenty of seats available near the front, which surprised me. They are all aisle seats and the adjacent window seats are occupied by women. There is a black woman in the seat right behind the driver, I could have sat there but I am befuddled. It takes me a couple of seconds to choose. I find one a couple of rows back next to petite, middle aged white woman. Should be safe enough. I sit down.
   The bus has Wifi and the woman next to me made full use of it. The driver made several announcements during the trip and surprisingly he was very clear. Every other time I've been on a bus, the driver has sounded like a graduate from the mumble bumble school of enunciation, i.e. totally incomprehensible.
    I do believe the bus is roomier than a Boeing Dreamliner. Perhaps because I was only on it for four hours instead of a 9, but I was able to easily get stuff out of my backpack that was sitting on floor. I tried to catch some Z's. The seats recline, but when they recline my head tilts back at an uncomfortable angle. With the seat upright I could rest my head against the headrest comfortably. I slept a couple of times. Both times I woke myself up with a snore. Nobody beat me.
    I chatted with my seatmate briefly. She was going to visit her boyfriend. They are both divorced, both were married for about 15 years, and they have 7 children between them. They were going to visit his father and I joked that it must be getting serious.
    You'd think that Washington, being a biggish state, with a big, important city like Seattle, would have a bunch of roads, but it doesn't. Our route took us up Interstate-5 which runs through Olympia and Tacoma. Between these two cities I-5 is hemmed in on the south side by JBLM (Joint Base McCord-Lewis, a giant military base) and Puget Sound on the north side. It is effectively the only road so everyone uses it, which means it is totally jammed all the time.
    In Seattle, the bus dropped us at city-bus-central in downtown. My plan says take the 554 Issaquah express to Bellevue. I look around and see a sign for Bellevue that points down the stairs. There are two sets of stairs, one on either side of a central pit full of buses and trains. You don't want to go down the wrong stairs. I find the bus to Bellevue, but it's the 550, not the 554. The 550 driver tells me I need to go back upstairs. I do and I eventually find the sign for the 554, about 50 feet along the sidewalk from where I started.
    Buses come and buses go and here's a bus extending a wheelchair lift that was concealed under the front steps. It deposited a tiny misshapen woman wrapped in a puffy green parka. She managed the joystick on her chair well enough and was soon rolling down the sidewalk.
    Now I hear someone hollering off in the distance. It sounds like "no". I look around but see no sign of trouble, but the hollering continues a couple of times a minute. Eventually the perpetrator comes into view. He stops and looks at a sign on a post and hollers "no". He wanders along and stops at a scraggling looking bush and hollers "yes". Okay, we've got some variety now. This continues on. Nobody pays him any mind, and he doesn't appear to be bothering anybody, other than with his hollering. It takes him a long time to get out of earshot. Or maybe the bus rescued us.
    The Seattle Transit System web site said the fare would be $5, the sign at the stop says $2.50. I offer the driver a $5 and a $1 to take me to Bellevue. Eastgate?, he asks, when I agree, he asks for a dollar, which I dutifully feed to the machine.

SounderBruce/Flickr

    It's a bendy bus and it's full, so I'm standing. When the bus goes around the corner something weird happens to my feet and I realize I am standing right on the joint in the middle of the bus so when the bus bends, my heel and toes go in opposite directions.
    The bus immediately gets on I-90 eastbound and my stop is the second one. I am the third one off the bus. Turns out half the people on the bus are also getting off here. 'Here' is at the top of an exit ramp where it meets an overpass. The bus crosses the intersection and heads back onto the freeway. We wait for the light to change and then start the march to the parking garage and transit center on the north side of the freeway. Everyone except me takes the catwalk to the garage and the stairs four stories down to ground level. I keep going up the hill and then down and around and in 30 minutes I am at A & M Auto Repair, there's my car, and there's Jason. Big sigh of relief.
    Not relishing getting into the rush hour traffic heading south on I-5, I ask Jason if there is another route and he tells me about highway 18, about 20 minutes east of here. I've accomplished my mission, I'm not on a schedule, let's go for a drive, so I head east.
    The Cascade mountains start immediately. Traffic is heavy, but flowing steadily. I see signs for some towns I've never heard of, but nothing about highway 18. Not to worry, it appears at the appointed time along with a line of cars stopped in the right hand lane, and we are still a mile from the exit. Well, I'm not doing that. As I drive by the exit I can see highway 18. It heads south in a straight line and it is packed with cars all the way to the horizon. I might have to drive to Spokane, but at least I'll be alive, not dying in some god forsaken arterial clog.
    I press on east. Now we are really getting into the mountains. They have really gone to a great deal of trouble to put this road through here. There is one place where the westbound lanes are separated from me by a good quarter mile. They go along the base of near vertical cliff face that has shed big pile of rubble that covers the bottom part. The eastbound highway is built on pillars that are planted in this rubble. It looks like the most unstable kind of construction, I mean standing concrete pillars on rubble you found lying at the base of a cliff? I supposed they know what they are doing, and besides, each of the those pieces of gravel probably weighs five tons. They aren't going anywhere.

Keechelus Lake, Snoqualmie Pass area.  I-90 in the foreground.

    The road heads up to Snoqualmie Pass, a name I remember from my childhood in Seattle. We used to go up there all the time, at least in my ten year old mind, which means we probably went at least twice. The interstate wasn't there then, so it was no doubt an arduous trek.
I stop in Easton for a cold drink. They have a map on the wall, but it only shows the immediate area, and nothing that looks like an escape route.
    I push on. As I approach Ellensburg I notice a sign for the highway patrol. Now, typically, I did not plan my return trip, much less an alternate route. I don't have a map or a cell phone. If one of the girls was with me I would have a smart phone and a someone to operate it, but I don't, and given that maps are almost impossible to come by these days I think I'll just ask the guys who know, hence the highway patrol. Besides, they are right here. I pull into the lot and as I am walking up to the door, a highway patrol car pulls up and the driver roles down his window. He gets out and tells me this office is unattended, but he has the key and lets us in. He rummages around and finds a map. It's old. One of the creases splits when he unfolds it, but it's all there and it's just what I need. Looks like I'm going to Yakima. There simply aren't any roads that run north-south through the Cascades.
    After Ellensburg the traffic dries up and so does the ground. I saw giant stacks of giant hay bales in Ellensberg, but after that the ground turns brown. No more mountains but big foothills. The road south from Yakima goes through Indian territory and is pretty flat. A few miles south of Goldendale we go ever the edge and start our descent into the Columbia River Gorge. Driving on I-84 along the river, the hills on either side look big. Driving down that hill you realized how big it is. It's BIG.
     I am following a pickup truck with a flashing yellow light towards the Sam Hill Memorial Bridge. When he gets to the bridge, he stops and starts to unlimber his lane closing crew and equipment.  What can I say? My timing is spot on. The bridge was redecked a few years ago, but now it looks like they are working on the steel superstructure. It's all encased in scaffolds and draped with tarps. Sandblasting and painting perhaps?
     After that it was just a couple more hours to Portland and home. The trip took me 13 hours. I drove 350 miles and spent almost $900. No expense for food 'cause diligent daughter packed me some snacks.
      Drivers in Oregon give me the impression of older and slower and maybe not so quick witted. Washington drivers seem to be more crazed and aggressive. Of course, it's only the odd ones that stick out, and being outbound from Seattle on a Friday night and inbound to Portland may have skewed my experience.

Machine

2015 Mazda Miata Chassis. Click to embiggenate.

Just because it's a cool picture of the inner workings of a cool machine. The black tubes attached to the left side of the engine (this side) are not exhaust pipes, they are part of the tuned intake manifold. The throttle body is right above the alternator. That girder connecting the transmission to the differential will help make the chassis stiffer but it won't do anything for twisting forces. For that you will need to rely on the body. autoevolution has some more detail photos. I also found a bunch of photos of this chassis that were taken at auto shows that had a red and black background. While at first glance they looked cooler (more dramatic maybe?), closer inspection revealed that they were lacking in detail. Of course to really get a good look at this machine, this picture would need to be ten thousand pixels wide, and ain't nobody got time for that.

Supercharged Corvette

C7 Z06 COTA 2:17s PDR Laps
Adam Tobolowsky
I am a little bit impressed that big stodgy old GM produced this (or will. It might not be until next year.).  I hate to admit it but it was a spam comment that turned me on to this, and this:

The 2015 Corvette Z06 features an all-new LT4 engine. The supercharged, 6.2L V-8 will deliver more than 625 horsepower, and 635 lb-ft of torque.

600 horsepower!?! That's insane! I wonder how long the transmissions will last. They must be making them out of titanium.

    You will notice that there are two serpentine belts on this engine. One goes around the front of the crankshaft pulley, over to the left side of the engine (right side of the picture) , around two idler pulleys, back to the center, around two more idler pulleys and then up to a single small pulley by the throttle body (the brass colored round opening in the center) that drives the supercharger. Note the difference in size of the crankshaft pulley and the supercharger pulley. The engine redlines at 6,500 RPM. The supercharger turns at 20,000 RPM, much faster than any I have encountered before.

    The other serpentine belt goes off to the right side of the engine (left side of the picture) and drives all your conventional accessories (from top to bottom: alternator, power steering pump (I presume) and the A/C compressor).

P.S. The only reason I can think of that would explain why they used four idler pulleys on the drive belt for the supercharger instead of just one is that they must of had some kind of resonant vibration problem. The other belt that drives the accessories is traveling just as fast, being as it is driven by the same diameter pulley on the crank, and it spans longer gaps between pulleys, so maybe that isn't the problem. I'm baffled.
    Then there's the question of why they didn't use just one belt instead of two, but that could be explained by (1) the power requirements of the supercharger (it needs one belt all to itself), or (2) most engines are built without a supercharger, and this makes it a bolt-on installation instead of a built-in one. Never mind that the internals of the supercharged engine are almost certainly different than the standard engine.

Update October 2016 replaced missing video (Chevrolet Corvette PDR (Performance Data Recorder) playback.) with something similar.

Update February 2021 replaced missing video with something similar.

Disaster

The Chrysler Sebring, the one my son and I spent the summer overhauling, has blown up. Coming up grapevine hill after lunch yesterday I gave it the beans and in response got a loud noise. It made it to the top of the hill but as soon I shifted into neutral the engine died. I pulled over and called for a tow.

Up till then there was no indication that there was anything seriously wrong. There were a few minor problems, like the clunk in the suspension, the whine from the alternator, something snapping down by the fan belt,  and steering wheel was on crosswise. But no indication of a real problem. Except for maybe the heat. Drive across town and the motor gets warm, as it should, but open the hood, and it seems really hot, like an oven, or an overheated motor. But we never got any of the conventional indications of an overheating motor. It didn't boil over, it wasn't loosing coolant, and the temperature gauge never got above the half-way mark.

So I don't know what went wrong. Maybe the block and heads were not flat enough. Maybe the head bolts should have been replaced. There was one funny thing, and that was when we filled the radiator with coolant it did not take nearly as much as I expected it too. So maybe there is something plugging the cooling system. But if that's the case, what's the deal with the temperature gauge? I don't know what went wrong, but things have definitely gone South and I am very unhappy.

To assauge my suffering I sit down to watch an old episode of Top Gear and they are doing a retrospective on the Rover V-8. This is interesting and a little painful. My first car was a 1963 Buick Special that I bought from my father for its' trade in value of $150. It had an aluminum V-8, the same engine that a couple of years later would become the Rover V-8, which would be used in a variety of British cars for the next 40 years.

Cars powered by the Rover V8 engine

Top Gear collected an entire fleet of cars powered by this engine for this picture. In the three years that General Motors produced this engine, they built 750,000 of them, which is more than the British built in the next 40 years*. General Motors quit building the engine because there were too many problems with the corrosion in the cooling system, due to customers using the wrong coolant in the aluminum engine.

Huh. Imagine that. Cooling problems with an aluminum engine. In case you didn't know, the engine in the Sebring is aluminum. Something is rotten in my garage and I want to find out what it is. Whether I will or not is another matter.

* Autocar has an interesting story about the Rover V-8.

Update August 2023 replaced missing picture and added YouTube link.

Chrysler Sebring, Day 9

Haven't made much progress this week, but today we removed the:

• wiring harness, 
• exhaust pipes,
• exhaust manifold and
• intake manifold.

The engine itself may be well designed, but all the stuff that goes in around it is just a mess. You can't disconnect the wiring harness from the starter until you remove the heat shield over the starter, and you can't remove the bolts that hold the heat shield on until you remove the exhaust pipe. Well, it might be possible, but it would certainly be a royal pain: the last bolt is obscured by the exhaust pipe. You could probably reach it from underneath with a box wrench, but it would slow going getting it out. Likewise in order to disconnect the wiring harness from the A/C compressor, you need to remove the alternator. To disconnect the wiring harness from the fuel injectors, you need to remove the intake manifold. The whole thing is like this, heat shields and brackets on brackets on brackets. I wonder what it would be like if somebody spent the time and effort to design this stuff to fit together instead of just tacking one thing on top of another.

The car spent a couple of years in Iowa before it came West, so the exhaust pipes are all solidly rusted together. Once we got the engine out I was able to get a real wrench on the bolts holding the exhaust pipe flange to the header pipe. They turned easily enough: they snapped right off, so we get to drill out the old ones, and if we are lucky, retap the holes. Might have to use nuts, which will make it difficult, or buy a new pipe, which will be another expense.

Dodge Dakota Serpentine Belt Tensioner

Notice the very slight difference in angle between the arm that holds the pulley and the pin directly to the left of the mounting stud. Not much, maybe 10 or 15 degrees.

About a week ago I was giving John a ride to school in the truck. It started squealing shortly after we left the house. It sounded like a bearing going bad, but it's had squeaking problems before, so I drove on thinking it would stop in a bit. It didn't. It squealed all the way (12 miles) to school and all the way back. I was saying my prayers that it wasn't going to blow up and leave me stranded.

Got home and took a look and the belt is loose. All the pulleys and bearings seem to be in good shape, just the tensioner has lost its' spring. I might have been able to save myself a little trouble if I had only taken the tensioner itself off, but the bolt that holds it in place is obscured by the supporting bracket, and the three bolts that hold the bracket in place are in plain sight.

However one of the these three bolts is behind the dipstick tube, which means taking the tube loose from the alternator, which wasn't too bad, but putting it back in was a real trick. I mean it's in plain sight, but you cannot get your hand in there to put the bolt it. It took some real finagling to get it in the hole.

Tensioner support bracket mounting holes.

Taking the nut off of the tensioner itself might have been slow (it's a long bolt), but I don't think it would have required the dexterity of Houdini to get it back in.

Hooking wrenches together to
get more leverage.

Putting the belt back on required compressing the spring, and these springs are strong. I put the box end of a combination wrench on the bolt holding the pulley on, and then put the loop at the end of the handle of an adjustable wrench over one of the claws. That gave me a lever that was long enough to make it easy to compress the spring. (This is a picture I found of a similar arrangement.) It works in most cases, though if the bolt is really stuck, and you apply enough torque you can bend the claw of the combination wrench.

Update February 2017 replaced missing pictures.

Automobile Repair Stories

Today at lunch we were swapping tales of woe.

Dennis told us about the time he had to replace the alternator on his Subaru. He's reading the repair manual and the instructions have a long list of steps that involved removing various components in order to get to the alternator: 1) remove the radiator, 2) remove the manifold, etc. etc. Then he finally gets to the end and it says: "Or, remove from underneath."

1982 Ford Fairmont

I had a heater core go bad in an old Ford Fairmont. I glanced at the shop manual and instructions are short, there are only four steps, so I think I can do this, it will be a piece of cake. So come Saturday I am ready to undertake this project and I take another look at the instructions. The first step is "remove the dashboard".

Once upon a time somebody gave Marc a car. It wasn't running, the problem unknown, but it was free, and it was near identical to another car he had, so if nothing else it would at least be good for parts. He tows it home and looks under the hood, opens the radiator cap and notices the radiator is dry. So he gets a hose and starts filling the radiator. Shortly there after he notices water running out from under the engine, running out as fast as he is putting it in. He can't see where the water is coming from, maybe a freeze plug has popped loose, so he reaches up in there to see if he can find the problem with his hand. So gropes around and eventually finds something loose. Hmmm, that's not right, have to tighten that up, but just what is it? Wait, I know what that shape is, it's a piston.

Update November 2015 replaced missing picture with different one.

Elephant Wrench

Friday Johnny and I replaced the leaking heater hose in the van (1995 Windstar). To get to it, we had to remove the alternator. To do that, we needed to get the serpentine belt off the alternator pulley. Well, it was not really necessary to unship the belt first. I think it would have come loose when we got the alternator loose. But how do you get it back on afterwards? I tried an adjustable wrench, but I could not pull it quite far enough to get enough slack in the belt to shift it off of the pulley. Then I remembered I had a large pipe wrench, and I thought it might work. So I got down my box of big, ugly iron tools, and lo and behold! An elephant wrench! Just what the doctor ordered! Put it on the tensioner, pulled, and the belt came off the pulley easy as pie. And what, you may ask, is an elephant wrench? Well, there are guns, and then there are elephant guns. This wrench is a large adjustable wrench. Johnny named it. It must be 18 inches long, and the head must be five inches in diameter. Andy gave it to me. He used to use it for fixing forklifts. I have had it for years, and I think this is the first time I have used it. Only problem was that after I got the belt off the alternator pulley, and I relaxed the pressure on the wrench, when it went back, it ran into the edge of the engine compartment, so I couldn't get it off the bolt. Fortunately, it wasn't in our way. It also means that if I had just dumped the belt off the pulley when I took out the alternator, I probably wouldn't be able to get the wrench on the tensioner at an angle that would allow me to compress it enough to get the belt back on. Oh well, no point in worrying about that now. So we got the alternator out of the way. Now to take the hose loose. The right hand (as you look at the engine) end of the hose is relatively easy to get off. It has a spring clamp holding it in place, and there is room to get to it with a pair of pliers. It is simply a matter of wrestling with it until it comes free. Well, maybe not that simple. I resort to cutting the hose to make it easier. The other end of the hose requires a decision. The hose connects to a Y-pipe that connects to the water pump and to another hose that runs off in back of the engine. It might be wise to replace the whole thing, but only this one piece is leaking and I want to finish this today, not in six months. So I decide to only replace the section of hose that is leaking and not the entire two hose and Y-pipe assembly. This requires cutting the crimp ring that secures the hose to the Y-pipe. It is aluminum, it is in the open, so it is easy enough to cut with a hacksaw. Well, at least most of it. Get down to the bitter end and the full hacksaw can't get to it. Pull the blade out of the saw, wrap a rag around one end for a handle and manage to get through the last little bit of the ring. A screwdriver works well to pry the ring open. The hose slides right off. Now it is off to the local NAPA auto parts store for a piece of hose and a couple of clamps. $7 and change. Sliding new hoses over fittings works better if there is some lubrication. Spit works well for this, though it grosses Johnny out. I can get the hose started on the one fitting, but it won't slide all the way on. Fuss and fume and finally go dig out some old spark-plug-wire-pulling pliers, they work surprisingly well. Now I am fussing with the other end, and I push down on the hose, which pushes down on a hard plastic vacuum line and snaps it in two. Bah! Now I have to replace it as well. We have the water hose on, so we postpone the vacuum hose till tomorrow. Saturday Johnny and I eventually get back to the auto parts store. The guy trys to find some fittings that will work but he is not having any luck. I finally ask for a generic PCV valve and some hose. This he manages to deliver. Meanwhile Johnny has found a package of magnetic tipped screwdrivers. I find magnetic tips more annoying than useful, but I do have one on my electric screwdriver. Johnny wants them for working on computers and he has money so we get them. The PVC valve is a valve, where as the old fitting is just that, it has no innards. So it behooves me to gut the PVC valve before using it. Clamp it gently in the vise and saw around the bottom with a hacksaw, very gently. The top end is plastic and we don't want to break it. Manage to get the end off and the guts out. File the burrs away and plug it into the valve cover. Fits fine. When I pulled the old fitting out a small pile of rust fell out. Can't imagine where it came from. Tried to use the old fitting, but ended up destroying it while trying to get the old vacuum line off. I think the tube was shrunk onto the fitting. The other end of the old tube plugs into a hole in the intake system. The new hose needs a fitting, so I end up using a short piece of the old vacuum line to adapt the new hose to the intake. Now for the alternator. Johnny manages to pinch his finger under the alternator while putting it back in. Other than that it goes in easy enough. Tighten the bolts, pull on the elephant wrench and slip the belt back on. Connect the wires to the alternator and battery, add some antifreeze to the overflow tank and we're done.