repair

Today I managed a successful test drive of my pickup after reinstallation of the aft fuel tank, in which I have replaced the broken rubber pickup with a short piece of Gates multi-fuel compatible fuel line (3/8" ID.) This time I made it to town and back without mishap. It was actually fairly amazing how quickly the truck started up; I didn't do any air bleeding until after I got back.

The wacky axle I've got on my F250 is apparently a super duty axle. If I install one ton springs and a class V hitch then I have all the equipment (but not the legal weight rating) of an F350, and then some. My rear springs need replacing anyway, and the ideal would be to find super duty springs, but I assume they're in short supply. The alternative seems to be to get rear lift springs, which is a somewhat spendy proposition; indeed, they are almost as expensive as the rest of the lift put together!

Yesterday I reinstalled my drive shaft. The carrier shaft center bearing had failed, and sidelined the Ford until I got it replaced. This is a non-trivial job that often requires the loving touch of a driveline shop; on some vehicles the bearing can be trivially replaced, but on most (including this one) it must be pressed on and off.

On my way up Cobb Mountain I started hearing and feeling click/thump noises from somewhere in the middle of the truck. It turned out that the carrier shaft bearing's rubber isolator had failed, probably because of added vibration because a bolt was falling out. I was lucky enough to have an appropriate wrench handy, and made it home; as long as you are very gentle on the accelerator you can even go up hills with the isolator broken, but jam that pedal and THUMP THUMP THUMP as the bearing bounces around in the bracket.

While I was gone, Rob was trying to use my truck to haul other trucks, with my permission of course. Unfortunately, every time he tried to take it out, it had some kind of problem. Notably, a bad ground produced smoke during an attempt to start, and the radiator failed around the cap neck. Luckily, at this time he had a parts truck, and so he replaced the ground and also set aside a radiator for me (as well as a winch mount bumper and a new tow hitch which isn't unusually long.) Yesterday I did this radiator swap.

As I may have mentioned previously, my 1993 Subaru Impreza LS has a faulty throttle position sensor. I diagnosed it using a non-autoranging digital multimeter on the megohms setting. A better solution is to use an analog ohmmeter, or to follow the factory test procedure and connect a voltmeter to some of the pins on the ECU. So far so good. I ordered a cheap Delphi replacement part from autopartswarehouse.com, and the fun began.

As you may already know, I am the owner of a 1993 Subaru Impreza LS (GC5). While returning from a trip to San Francisco to attend the Power to the Peaceful festival (which was extremely underwhelming this year) in celebration of the three-year anniversary of my relationship with my lady Anna-Maria, a loud clicking noise was to be heard while accelerating and turning left. I easily identified this problem as a failure of the left front axle (I could tell by feeling the vibrations as much as by hearing the sound in this rather small car) and proceeded to research the issue of repair.

These days it seems like there's an infinite number of laptop brands to choose from - perhaps staffed by an infinitude of monkeys. Actually, based on my experiences with laptops and the lack of quality of their hardware, this seems like a fairly generous estimate - I would actually place the average engineer somewhere down around slime molds. Having now owned and worked on laptops from most major vendors (and a number of minor ones) I have a few observations to offer - especially in light of today's labor.

In the continued saga of my 1993 Impreza LS, the fuel pump crapped out for real this morning (cycling the key on and off repeatedly did nothing) so I ended up having to swap it. I haven't fastened down the carpet since the last time I looked at it, so it was a fifteen minute job or so. The replacement is from a 1995 (IIRC) Legacy, but pretty much all Subarus use the little JECS canister pump also used by Nissans and such and only earlier, FWD Subarus have less displacement (and thus presumably less fuel delivery) than my '93 LS. This swap is even easier than on (for example) the 240SX because Subaru uses a slick connector for the fuel pump and sender. This connector, which is male on the outside, also has two male connectors on the inside, into which the sender and pump plug separately.

The day before yesterday, I replaced the thermostat on my 300SD.

Every time I work on this vehicle I have it shoved in my face that it's meant to be serviced on a lift, and only on a lift. I actually went and bought ramps for this job, which only works because my driveway slants down, and I put the ramps there, somewhat leveling the vehicle (it was still down slightly in front.)