On-line Opinion Magazine featuring annoyed rumblings from the leading edge of the Baby Boom firmly tied to a reality-based world.
Established: 21 November 2004
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19 comments
My fat black TMF was on his favorite cat bed on his favorite chair, so I just dragged it to face the door. He had a fine time saying hello to all the people who came to the door — he didn’t budge from his cat bed, he just paid attention to them like, “hello, are you here to pet me?” and they were like, “yeah yeah, a black cat on Halloween, gimme the candy”, heh. Very chill kitteh. Not like CC at all :).
I dug up his puppy harness and leash, but there was no need for them. He was fine where he was curled up in his cat bed, and wasn’t going to budge and make a run for the door. He expects people to enter the house and pet him, doing the opposite and going out to *them* would be undignified, heh.
I saw him ensconced on his ‘throne’ at your place. Both of mine hide when people enter, which can be startling as one of their favorite places is on a tall bookcase near the door. I have never been good at socializing my cats.
It’s nice that you actually had t&t’s. I had the annoying “Harvest Festival” at the fundie church again, with the “good Christians” displaying their inability to park a vehicle. The lawn guy kept them off our lawn with sprinklers and yellow tape. They have been dripping oil and anti-freeze on the lawn in prior years and killing grass really annoys him.
I think TMF must have been born in a house with lots of kids and relatives and other pets, because he is a very social cat and I’m not a very social person. My understanding was that his prior owner had to give him up to the Humane Society because they were evicted and became homeless. Sigh.
The neighbor’s elderly Toyota minivan has a bad habit of dripping fluids and they parked it on the lawn once when moving in. The result is a dead patch on the lawn that’s still there a year later. Quite annoying, considering that changing out oil pan and valve cover gaskets is not exactly rocket science. It would take me barely more time than an oil change to do it. Of course, if it’s a main seal that’s where I give up and call in the pros since on a transverse-engine minivan the only real way to access them is to take the hood off , take all the accessories off the engine, break the transaxle off the other side, and then lift it out of the engine bay on an engine hoist. Too much trouble for me to do myself…
Yes, socialization has to take place early or generally it doesn’t take place at all. Hipparchia can verify that numbers don’t always equal friendly or mellow.
I’ve been known to change the oil pan and valve cover gaskets as part of the first oil change with a used car to look for problems and clean out sludge. I lost a couple of cars to lubrication problems because previous owners felt that oil changes were optional and oil channels got blocked. Chilton and I use to spend a lot of quality time together.
That main seal isn’t as bad as the third bolt in the MGB-GT motor mount, which requires removing the body from the frame. The factory obviously didn’t imagine anyone would want to do it. You can get it out, but you can’t reinstall it with the body on the frame.
Of course, then there was my Chevrolet Chevette, which had a leaky oil pan “gasket” (actually, they didn’t use a gasket, they used RTV silicone) that I never did get around fixing because, well, there’s a crossmember under the oil pan and you can’t wiggle the oil pan out unless you take the hood off and lift the engine to give clearance. Sigh. For a car that I paid $850 for, paying someone $300 to do the oil pan wasn’t happenin’. (Needless to say as a poor college student I wasn’t in possession of an engine hoist!).
I didn’t have an engine hoist, but there was a substantial oak in the yard and a block and tackle available that worked just as well for the purpose. In the case of working on the VWs and Corvair, I tended to drop the engine and lift the car.
The people who build cars ignore the needs of the people who have to repair them, unless they are purpose built racing vehicles.
I actually was quite pleased with the ease of repair on my old Jeep TJ Wrangler (the 1996-2006 model year version of it). Everything was out in the open and easy to work on, and where it wasn’t (such as, say, the gas tank sending unit), it was still relatively easy to drop it from under the Jeep and work on it that way.
Alas, more modern Jeeps are far harder to work on… still not in the realm of a transverse-engine Japanese minivan (those are a PITA) but still harder. They’ve become too complicated. Ah well, progress…
The engines are getting bigger while the space under the hood is getting smaller, and the regulation of the engine is all being computerized so you can’t really correct small problems. They keep saying that the newer engines need less routine maintenance, but I’m having a hard time believing it.
Yeah, the old days of working on a straight 6 in a full-size American car are over. It may have needed a lot more care, but the care was easy.
Yah, the old Wrangler had a straight 6. The new one has a V6. And while the straight 6 had the problem that it was hard to reach the rear spark plugs, other than that everything was out in the open and easy to find. The hood on the new one is crammed so tight that you have to take the grill off in order to change the headlight bulbs. (The old one, you just reached inside from the back and twisted them off).
The electronics actually do make it easier to work on the new cars if you have the right diagnostic tools. The code generally tells exactly which component has gone bad. The problem is more that they’ve crammed so much safety gear into the new cars that it’s hard to get to anything. My minivan has more airbags than a frickin’ 747, for cryin’ out loud!
The need for the right cable and software, which can be expensive defeats a lot of people who would work on their cars beyond oil changes.
My Honda has six airbags that I know of, and there may be more. I’m not going to be a happy camper if they expand the recall to include my Honda because it will take days to replace them. They will do them one at a time when they have a spare moment, because that’s how the Honda dealer works with recalls.
OBDC-II readers cost $60 from Amazon.com and require no software. That’s all that’s required to do most tasks on modern cars. There’s a few tasks that do require additional tools but they’re generally ones that you’ll leave to a specialist anyhow, such as setting the proper pressure in tire low-pressure sensors, which is generally done by tire places when they spool new tires onto wheels. And all that happens if you spoon a tire onto a wheel yourself is that you get an idiot light showing on the dashboard.
An OBDII reader is all that’s needed to diagnose most problems with cars today, and you can get one from Amazon.com for $60. No computer or cable required. There are specialized things, like resetting the airbags, that require special computer software, but you wouldn’t be doing that yourself anyhow, your body shop would be doing it as part of the collision repair, paid for by insurance.
Compared to *anything* with a carburetor, modern cars are a piece of cake to repair. Carburetors were a constant misery of vacuum leaks around random shafts and pressed-in fittings, myriad jets that were constantly getting clogged, automatic chokes that didn’t or did too much, and other such hair-pulling nonsense. Meanwhile, if a fuel injector doesn’t work generally the computer will helpfully tell you so and which one it is, pointing at the exact cylinder, thanks to the oxygen sensors and mass air flow sensors and etc., then you replace it and you’re fine again. Same deal if the sensors fail, they’re redundant and the computer has a “limp mode” until you get it fixed. About the only sensor that will cause my Jeep to come to a grinding halt is the crankshaft position sensor, but we Jeepers deal with that by keeping a spare one in our tool box when we’re offroading…
The spam filter freaked because it looked like you were selling something on your first comment. I obviously got it back. I didn’t realize they had standardized and main-streamed the system. When the computerization started you had multiple access connector types and totally different software required for each manufacturer.
Come on, I wouldn’t have known what to do on Saturday mornings in SoCal if I hadn’t had the SU carbs on the MGB to sync. 😉
Float valves getting stuck open. Now that was my “favorite” carburetor experience, the float deciding it was now a not-float and now I have more gas than oil in my crankcase. Removing the float bowl and finding that the float was full of fuel was always a fun experience. Adjusting the float bowl level after you bought a new float was also fun, though not as fun as sync’ing the four carburetors on an inline 4 Kawasaki motorcycle…
I don’t miss carburetors :).
Oh, you can blame California for the standardization. OBD-II is necessary in order to be certified by California’s emissions board to sell cars in California, and standardizes the connector and the command sets. It works so well at monitoring the internals of cars that in some states they don’t even bother with the tail pipe test for emissions anymore, they just plug into the OBD-II connector, note that no readiness indicators show a problem, and you’re good to go.
Never had a float problem on a car, but plenty on lawn mowers and go karts.
Four carbs?! That doesn’t even bear thinking about…
We must have been posting at the same time, because I missed your OBD-II explanation. It makes sense that California would lead the way and every one else followed. Standards are vital, but it usually takes some outside entity to impose them because the Free Market Fairy doesn’t seem up to the job.
Four carburetors on a classic inline four Japanese bike, yessiree. Side draft Mikunis feeding individual cylinders from the rear while four pipes evacuated the exhaust from the front. They made four-mercury-indicator carburetor sync tools but I never had one of those (for one thing the mercury scared the bleep outta me), I just had the old fashioned dial type tool where you tried to center it at the zero mark for difference in vacuum between two carbs. So it was twiddle twiddle twiddle… move one vacuum hose… tweak tweak tweak… etc. Then repeat at a higher RPM (use a large O-ring from a Caterpillar hydraulic pump shaft to keep the throttle open by rolling it over the crack between the throttle and the bar end). All the while that the bike was being fed by an IV feed of gasoline from a soda bottle, since the gas tank of course had to be removed to get at the carbs.
Now it’s all computer controlled butterfly valves and individual injectors at the cylinders. No synchronization required, it automatically does it based on the oxygen sensors in the exhaust pipes (since it knows which cylinder’s pulse is passing the sensors at any given time) and mass air sensor in the intake (ditto). All the complexity is in the software in the computer, and software doesn’t rust or corrode — if it works now, it’ll keep working until the computer dies.
Nope, I don’t miss carburetors :).
The SU kit for syncing was two rods that went through holes in the top of the carburetors and then you twiddles with the adjustment screws until the engine would continue to run and the rods were at the same point. If they wouldn’t sync you had to pull them apart and see what was wrong. It didn’t take much to gum them up, and I installed a second filter in the fuel line to be sure that the gas had nothing in it. The car had been in Mexico a few times and you could never be absolutely sure of Pemex fuels, even when you added octane booster. Keeping dust out of anything was impossible.
I understand why the computers are better, but I enjoyed solving the mechanical problems of the old systems.