Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad

Took a... something to the left front on Moxie.

The 'T' part was encased in rubber that fell apart while I was pulling it out of the tire.

Update: Reader Red's Woodsman appears to have ID'd it.  The metal parts of a bicycle brake pad. 

Sadly, the plugs don't appear to have taken and the hole still leaks.  Time to take it to the local ma & pa tire place for a patch.  Update: Ma & Pa tire place charged me the princely sum of $25 to put a patch over the hole that the plug failed to seal.

The back-up camera on Moxie was a blurry mess.  $25 plus tax replacement from Amazon and it's crisp and sharp!  It's amazingly good now!

Got the oil and filter changed on my father in law's truck.  We'd missed the scheduled window because...  I was convinced he'd taken it to a shop to have the oil done.

He hadn't.  But since we used the extended miles synthetic stuff, prolly no harm. 

All Lubed Up

Today was lubrication day for Alice and The Beast.

Both also got a new rubber gasket on the drain plugs.

The Beast's was very flat and showing signs of seepage. 

Update:  Today is a sad day.  My grease gun has given up the ghost.  Only had it 30 years.  Sadly, there don't appear to be repair kits for them anymore thanks to Chinese manufacturing making a complete replacement cheaper. 

Temps

The other day I had transmission temps between 82°C (179.6°F) and 79°C (174.2°F).

Yesterday, Marv's 2011 PPV was running temps around 59°C (138.2°F).

Several sites say the ideal temp range is 175°F (79.4°C) to 200°F (93.3°C). 

Looking around I discovered that the 2011 doesn't have the "thermal bypass" block like the 2012+ does.  This is a thermostat that controls when fluid is allowed into the transmission cooler.

The day was hotter and it wasn't raining when I made my measurements.

More Space

DerpyPuter has shed the 500gb drive that came with her and now has a 1tb drive that used to house Win7 on Crispy I.

Special thanks to JT for figuring out a configuration issue.

Happy dance to go from 321 to 821 free gigs of space. 

Slushbox Baby

Got the deep transmission pan mod done on The Beast.  My buddy, JT's place of work has a lift and he generously allowed me to use it.

New pan on the left.  Just a bit of a difference.

It really doesn't affect the ground clearance at all:

The fill procedure is idiotic because they don't give you a dipstick.  So you take a pump and fill it through the hole that should have, and is in fact designed to have, a dipstick in it.

Actually, you overfill it.

Then you get the trans up to temperature by alternating between reverse and drive 15 seconds at a time.  Then you crawl under the car and remove what looks like a drain plug.  It isn't.  Inside the pan is a tube that is level with the top of the correct fluid level and when it stops pouring out the hole with the engine running and trans at temperature, you're good.

I'm good!

It got to a peak of 82°C (179.6°F) on the way home and averaged 79°C (174.2°F).  I'm happy with these temps in 86°F (30°C) high humidity weather.  I can't find where I wrote down what I was getting for temps last year when I took the time to log them.

The old fluid was a bit on the brown side, but still letting light pass through it.  No burnt smells.  A "normal" amount of stuff stuck to the pan magnet for 168k miles.

I suspect that the fluid has been changed before.  It looked too good for 168k miles and a cop car. 

I Hope He's Wrong But Fear He's Right

 

But he's dead on about investment places ruining a brand.

What A Difference

Got the agitator dogs replaced in the Kenmore today.

What a difference!

The Boy's bed linens actually smell clean now.

I rewashed a load of my own clothes and the water was very gray during agitation.

I think it's safe to say that the washer ain't been washin' very well for a while.  I have no idea how long the dogs were not ratcheting.

Also the new clutch lets the drum really spin, so the clothes are coming out drier before they go into the dryer.

Clutches And Dogs

The washing machine was making a screeching noise in spin cycle.

No es bueno.

We hired the local appliance place to come diagnose and repair it.

It was very close to the same price as getting a different washer, but we LIKE our old Kenmore direct drive.

They're serviceable.

Repairable.

Nigh immortal.

The part that needed replaced was the clutch for the drum.

The repair guy mentioned our agitator dogs were out too, cheap fix and simple to perform.  He even said, "I can see your tool box, you can do this!"

That made me feel good.

He might even have seen me changing the hatch struts on Alice too. 

Easy Fix

The Father In Law's tailgate refused to open today.

Troubleshooting was complicated by a tonneau cover.

We could tell that the passenger side was unlatching, but the driver's wasn't.

Happily we figured out how to get past the cover and get it out the way without breaking anything.

Four screws to get the latch plate off and get at the guts.

What had failed was the little plastic retainer that holds the latch-rod to the latch, allowing said rod to fall off and not be actuated by the latch.

Marv had donated a spare latch back when he had the same model truck, so we swiped a retainer from that latch to replace the broken one and all is now well.

Half the time working with The FiL's truck I come back in cussing and Harvey was very confused that I was back in the house ten minutes after starting the project and all done without even screaming.

I think you can buy the little plastic retainers at AutoZone, but I've tasked Bubba to do it.

Signal Strength

We've been watching hockey via one of the secondary broadcast channels on the back porch.

Which is fine as long as the weather cooperates.

Lately, though, reception has been a bit choppy and we have neighbors who turn up their music too loud.

So I ordered a bigger antenna!

I clamped it to the mount that used to hold our abandoned in place Dish Network dish.

There was some bother with aiming because my phone's compass wasn't calibrated properly.  I was off like 13° south of where the transmitters were!

Bonus: since we were using abandoned Dish Network stuff anyways, we now have broadcast TV in the living room too!

It just took me a bit to find which of the coax cables in the attic led to the wall-jack nearest to the TV.

I owe Marv dinner for his help.
 

Measure Once Cut Twice!

Or is it cut then measure?

At any rate, I keep cutting and it's still too short.

GRIN

Just to be paranoid, I checked the torque of the lug nuts.

Still at 140 ft-lb.

That's an insane value, but that's what the book says.

I didn't go that far on Moxie once and ended up with finger loose lugs and clunking coming from a wheel.

Coming home from the grocery store today sure underscored how "accustomed" to the vibration I'd become.  I goosed it to 45 and was already bracing... for something that didn't happen.

I think I have PTSD.

66.9mm

The hub-centric rings arrived today!

I learned two things.

First, my hubs are definitely 66.9mm.

Second, my rims have a 66.9mm center bore.

The place I'd measured 2-7/8" was a generous taper down to the requisite 66.9mm and not a bore of 73.1mm.

The centric rings did not fit at all, so I popped off the center cap, torqued the lug nuts and stuck a feeler gauge down there between the bore and the hub.  Just barely a race-fit!

With the front right foot in the air I checked to see if there was a high spot.  Nope.

It's been the damn tires all along and procrastinators are people who are WAY more ambitious than me about fixing things.

Again, I was able to put it off for so long by sticking to the back roads and not going very far from home.

I am so damned happy with the car now, it's indescribable!
 

Lug Nut Day Take Two

In July, 2024 I replaced the factory lug nuts with fancy chrome ones.

A trip to Daytona in August that year convinced me there was something wrong with them because the car was shaking violently at interstate speeds.

I commented to Harvey that something was definitely wrong, maybe tires...

Changing the lug nuts back to the factory version seemed to fix much of the problem.

I discovered that by rotating a wheel by a lug would cause the vibration to lessen significantly.

Knowing I had two tires out of round, that meant I'd managed to get them in phase with each other.

Well, new tires has eliminated the vibration, so I decided to see if the chrome lug nuts would change anything for the worse.

Please excuse the brake dust, I'm doing an experiment with the pads.

A quick jaunt, with The Boy, proves the lug nuts had nothing to do with the vibration two years ago!

Huzzah! 

 

Out Of Round

Some things move slowly at Casa McThag.

Take tires for The Beast; I originally got them back in April 2022, almost 32 thousand miles ago.  I tossed four, apparently, good tires because I had a bad vibration at interstate speeds.  I blamed the balance and the previous owner's notorious tendency to buy cheap tires.

It was not the tires.

I spent the next two years and 16 thousand miles replacing front suspension parts in the most commonly to be the problem to least likely to be the problem.  It was the left front control arms.  The design of the control arms makes diagnosing them difficult because they don't get hand-wobbly when they're loaded-wobbly.

One reason that it took so long to fix is that the vibration didn't really happen at speeds around town, and I don't really go on long trips much any more.  Vibration at interstate speeds?  Stay off the interstate!  Problem successfully ignored!

Oh, and drive Moxie more...

I discovered, sadly, that replacing the offending suspension components did not completely cure the vibration in the steering wheel, but now it was cyclic.  Every minute or so on the interstate it'd shake and every minute or so would stop.

When I got the Camaro rims, the road-force balancing discovered two of my tires were out of round.

That made sense.  The suspension shake was rather violent, it could have damaged the tires.  Another clue is I can mitigate the cycle somewhat by rotating a wheel a lug or two.

Here's hoping that new tires cures this! 

That's A Decent Deal

USAA has membership perks.

I normally ignore the emails reminding of them because they trend towards vacation packages at places I can't afford.

But I clicked to see this time and saw they have a 25% off on Goodyear tires.

That's a four tires for the price of three!

The Beast is needing tires, so we plunked down for some Eagle F1 All Seasons.

Something else new is the mobile installer.

That's kinda cool.

I have not been rolling on Goodyears since the Eagle GT II's I had on The Biscayne SS in 2004 when I replaced the 15" rims with Impala SS 17" rims.

I used to buy Goodyear exclusively before then.

I guess, technically, I was running Goodyears when I bought The Precious, but I chucked the run-flats at 16k miles because they really rode poorly. 

This is the second time I've been offered a deal on Goodyears, and the first time I've taken advantage of it.  A while back, one of you generous readers gave me a code for your employee discount that I promptly forgot about until today.  I still appreciated that, even if we didn't use it. 

Cautious Optimism

Moxie is back!

She's perky compared to how she drove before.

The problem appears to have been the VVT solenoids.

OEM solenoids die in a way that shorts them to ground and that sets off the code associated with them.

Aftermarket solenoids mostly die the same way, but occasionally will fail mechanically so the computer will think they are working and notice it's getting out of range information from other sensors.

They don't fail all the way, so you get a long time of spurious and intermittent fails.

That's our story and we're sticking to it!

The shop put 20 miles into a test drive.  I just did 10 running around.

Related:  All three cars have new wiper blades.  My house is also out of equity from buying them...

Moxie Repairs

While we feared the fuel pump or the fuel pressure control module, it looks like it might be chewed wiring from a rodent's nest and bad cam timing solenoids.

The mechanic is reasonably confident this will take care of it.

Eyes crossed.

The sad thing is I'd replaced the solenoids six years and 13k miles ago.  Mutter mutter mutter.

At least this time we'll have a warranty!

Swappin'

Noxious had relatively new tires on her.

Moxie's were definitely in need of being replaced on the front, and all four TPMS sensors were dead.

So Marv and I swapped the wheels and tires from Moxie to Noxious and now Moxie has working TPMS again!

The battery for my sensor activator was mostly dead and the spare had the same expiration date, but I got lucky and got them programmed.  Every car has a sweet spot for this tool and it's against the sidewall near the stem on these sensors.

We're going to swap anything that's better on Noxious to Moxie this weekend and the off to the "we buy any car!" place.

The Equinox Is Dead Long Live The Equinox

Noxious, a 2013 Equinox has been replaced with Alice the White Horse, a 2013 Equinox LT.

Harvey is extremely happy with spending $400 a month paying it off for the next year.

It's lower miles, in better condition and not falling apart.

Noxious has a myriad of issues.

Paint is coming off the top surfaces.

Hatch seal is chewed from constant ham-fisted Father-In-Law "assistance" with MIL's wheel chair.

AC clutch is dying on a good compressor.

The electronic brake control module has 90% failed.

But the real reason to bail is the excessive blow-by has blown the crank seal.

The LEA engine is known for this and you either have the bad rings, or you don't.

Moxie has the good rings.  Noxious doesn't.  Alice seems to have the good rings.  The 2013 I looked at Saturday definitely had the bad ones, worse than Noxious, but it had not clogged the PCV and blown the crank seal... yet.

We're confident we got a car that someone loved and took care of.

That Time Of Year

 

Today is the Equinox, and I will be working on an Equinox...