car

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 a veteran owner of used vehicles, I am more than a little used to encountering automotive problems. When my Ford's charging system idiot light began to flash at low RPMs, I knew I had a serious problem coming my way. When it picked up to doing it on a regular basis, I realized that the problem had arrived, and unless I wanted to be buying a pair of deep-cycle batteries, I should find a solution, probably in the form of an alternator replacement. After doing a little research, I decided to install a later-model Ford alternator.

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.