noise."Wednesday, just like Monday · 3:58am Feb 25th, 2021
Oh boy, a new blog post when I still haven’t replied to comments from the last one. What new devilry is this?
Get your favorite beverage, this is gonna be fun!
I’m gonna start us off with a Dodge Promaster. For those of you who don’t know what that is, imagine the love child of a Caravan and a Multipla and then sized up so you can haul more stuff. It got gas, ran bad, and then died. Towed in, I was given the keys and told to find out what’s wrong with it.
The first thing that was wrong is that those weren’t the keys, the customer gave us the wrong one (and the fact that the fob had ‘NO’ written on it was maybe a sign, but I digress).
Armed with the right keys, I got it to start, it ran okay, and it had three codes. One was for the electric vacuum pump which wouldn’t make it run bad, one was for the number four injector which would, and there was a pending code for a misfire on cylinder number four.
I told the boss and then went on to other things and that’s all you’re going to hear about that van for now, but keep it in the back of your mind; it’s still in our parking lot, uglying the place up.
I don’t think I mentioned this one, but a couple weeks ago, I worked on a 2007 Dodge Ram. Had a generic ‘runs bad’ complaint, no check engine light, couldn’t duplicate the symptoms. There were some codes but they weren’t helpful, they could have caused it to run bad or they could have been nothing; sometimes as a tech you’ve really got to see it happen to know for sure if it’s worth chasing or not. I don’t remember the codes, but one had a diagnostic chart that can be summarized as follows:
Is this other symptom present?
Yes: replace instrument panel cluster.
No: Ignore code.
(There was another one for the PCM that was just as helpful; if it also had set a different code, the ABS module was bad, if it hadn’t the PCM was bad . . . I wasn’t going to suggest replacing either on just that, I want to see it malfunction first.)
Anyway, I did also accidentally discover that the brake-to-shift interlock (keeps you from shifting into gear without your foot on the brake) was malfunctioning, and didn’t always let you shift when you were on the brake. Dutifully noted that on the sheet, and ultimately no repairs were made; we couldn’t duplicate the symptoms and the customer didn’t want to throw a lot of money into fixing something that might or might not be a problem. Keys left in it, he’ll pick it up after hours.
Should ought to do some catching up with y’all. That big Ford Dually I put injectors in that still had a misfire after? I wasn’t going to lie to the customer, I told him that I wasn’t convinced that I’d bled the rails properly, and later on we got to talking and he said that he wondered why we hadn’t done a compression test and I told him we didn’t have the proper adapter, that I would have liked to do it.
I didn’t mention that that truck was running off-road diesel. Guy’s a farmer, and maybe he legit only uses that truck on the farm, or maybe he’s sticking it to the taxman. Whatever, I didn’t think it was a fuel quality issue.
I also didn’t update y’all sooner but after a few longish test drives, the truck started better, which further reinforced my belief that the problem might be air trapped in the fuel rail.
He did some of his own internet research and some tinkering after he picked up and did some kind of miracle flush of the fuel system that apparently worked (whether it was the chemical or opening the system up and letting air out, I don’t know), and he said it ran better than it has in years, so that’s a win. He also said he’s got some magical German moly oil he’s going to put in it, and if he gets interesting results from that stuff, I’ll report back.
Also the Equinox. Despite all the glitter in the oil passages, and despite our dumbest employee assisting with disassembly; despite my manager holding out on a tool I needed which he had all along (except it was the wrong tool, it turns out); despite my manager saying he’d look up which oil control solenoid is for the intake and which is for the exhaust and then not doing it for 24 actual hours; despite me forgetting to close the drain valve on the radiator, at the end of the day today I started it, it ran, and there were no horrible noises from within the bowels of the engine, nor were any vital engine fluids vomited onto the shop floor. It’s too early to say it’s for sure fixed, but the fact that it didn’t toss a piston through the block when it was cranked over is a positive sign.
Also also for the sake of completeness, if I ever mentioned that dumb Cadillac (I think I did) it’s still sitting in our parking lot because while it’s as fixed as it’s gonna get, I don’t think the customer actually wants it back, and I honestly can’t blame him.
Also also also, I might have mentioned in the prior blog post we’ve got a Grand Am that belongs in a museum (not the one that got the brake lines). Sooner rather than later. As an aside, DOT numbers on tires include a date code. Until the 2000s, it was three-digit, and sometimes there was a triangle to indicate that 342 meant the 34th week of 92 instead of 82. We don’t see that much any more, ‘cause rubber’s got a lifespan, and they’ve been four-digit codes since 2000.
The Grand Am’s got a tire with a triangle in the DOT number, and it’s old enough it could theoretically be an original tire.
The fact that the car’s got Maypops on it isn’t why it’s annoying me, instead, because it’s in one of our bays. Tuesday morning, I asked the boss if it could be moved, and he said that it was getting tires (yay!). Nobody worked on it on Tuesday.
it’s also getting a radiator hose, and NAPA finally sourced one from a museum (I assume) and delivered it to us, and the car sat in the shop all day today and the most progress which was made on it was the hood latch was released.
I suppose as a collectable, its value increases just sitting there, right?
Source
(also, legit, anybody knows where I can get a concerned horse to add to my collection, hit me up)
Remember that Ram we left the keys in? Customer went to pick it up on the coldest day of the year, and surprise, it wouldn’t shift into gear. Manager went ballistic on me, and I told him that I knew about it, it was on the inspection sheet. I didn’t tell him, but heavily implied that it wasn’t my fault he hadn’t sold the repair to the customer. My job is to find out what’s wrong and fix whatever the customer wants fixed.
A new shift cable was ordered, Dodge has a weird arrangement (Dodge always has a weird arrangement), and this morning I installed it and followed the instructions to calibrate it, and it didn’t work. I tried to adjust it again and it didn’t work and I won’t bore you with details, but the manager suggested that I try a test that would prove nothing. He also mentioned that the third brake light (also known as the CHMSTL or the high-mount) didn’t work, and I gently reminded him that I’d already told him that days ago, when I was diagnosing the faulty BTSI switch.
The third try was the charm, and the shift interlock worked as designed, and I reassembled the truck and off it went.
Third brake light isn’t fixed, BTW.
I also got to put the harmonic balancer on the Mountaineer. All other repairs declined . . . guess despite the boss’s admonitions, the customer really doesn’t want to fix it all the way.
I should mention that this Mountaineer has been gently rolled; the left side mirror is improvised, there’s body damage all along the left, one window is now Lexan, the fan shroud is broken. I shoulda taken a picture so you could appreciate it. At least it’s not catastrophic rust.
As I was pulling the partially-disintegrated harmonic balancer off it, my manager looked at what was left and claimed that I’d never told him that the outer ring had come off. It’s true, I didn’t literally say those words as far as I can recall, but if you remember my last blog post, I told him three times that it was broken, and since all his attention was focused on the grainy pictures on the monitor of nobody depositing a truck topper in the communal dumpster corral, I didn’t go into exacting detail about how it was broken. “Part’s bad, needs a new one,” is a good first step, and if all he’s going to do is ignore me, why should I go into further detail? I’ve got better things to do than write a novel.
On said Mountaineer, I mentioned finding broken insulation on the fan speed wires, I think. I also found more while I was replacing the harmonic balancer; those were on the Mass Airflow Sensor and if the bare wires touched I bet there would be a really interesting drivability problem. I thought about mentioning it, but since apparently the customer doesn’t care about bare wires and corroded wires on the left side of the engine, he surely won’t care about the ones on the right side either.
Remember that Promaster? No cheating and scrolling up.
Tuesday night, I parked it against the shop so it’d be out of the way. Manager started it to warm it up while I was stringing a shift cable on the Dodge Ram, and as I was buttoning up the Ram he hollered that I needed to come out with the scan tool. Apparently he forgot how to use it?
I did. The Promaster was billowing smoke out the tailpipe, and it reeked of unburned fuel. Since I’d already seen the codes and reported on them, I had a good idea what was wrong, but I dutifully checked them again, nothing new. And then I looked through the scan data. Chrysler’s gotten weird lately, they don’t report injector on-time in milliseconds any more, now they use nanoseconds. And they use PSI for atmosphere instead of inHg; I think where I live 14.1 PSI is reasonable baro. Overfuelling can be caused by temperature sensors reporting too cold a temperature, or a barometric pressure which is denser than actual (i.e., a vehicle at 1000 feet about sea level thinking it’s 2000 feet below; denser air needs more fuel). Or thinking that there’s more alcohol in the fuel than there is, which we’ve talked about before.
I tell him that it’s got the same codes as it did yesterday, and the only PID I’m really curious about is the throttle blade temperature, that’s -83F which is colder than it really is. But I don’t know what that value means, and since it hasn’t got a code for it, and since the ambient air temperature sensor, intake air temperature sensor, oil temperature sensor, and coolant temperature sensor all look reasonable, I’m not going to call it as being a likely problem, especially since we’ve got a known issue which I’ve already found.
You remember that from the first section of blog, don’t you? Remember what I said about the Promaster?
My manager sure didn’t, and I guess he figured out how to use the scan tool or something, ‘cause as I was buttoning up the Dodge Ram, he laid into me about how I had brought up the throttle blade temperature PID but had failed to mention that it had set a circuit code for the number four injector (which I suspect is sometimes stuck wide open and pouring in fuel like a madman).
I calmly informed him that I had told him about that yesterday, and again today, and I had also written that down on the inspection sheet. I didn’t tell him that the scan tool would also show him that I’d seen that code yesterday (well, it doesn’t prove that I read the screen, but it shows I scanned for codes and that code was one the vehicle had yesterday), but given that he stormed off to the office and didn’t get in my face again about the Promaster, I’d assume he realized.
This feels like the kind of a blog post were there ought to be a lesson at the end.
One lesson might be when you work with a certain type of person, document everything. That’s good advice.
But what do you do when your manager doesn’t listen to you, even if you tell him the same thing three times?
I don’t know.
Back when I wrote Golden Prize, I mentioned that it was inspired by me putting a sheet of paper in front of my manager—literally between his hands—and them him losing it minutes later. I bought a ream of pink paper to stand out and that hadn’t worked, either, and I’m legit at a loss. I can write it down, and he doesn’t read it, or he does and forgets. I can tell him face-to-face, and he nods in the right places and I think he processed the information but apparently not.
I’m willing to spend my own money on a solution (I bought pink paper on my own dime, after all), and I’m actually considering Post-It notes I can stick to him. Won’t prove he read them, but if they’re gone later, that’ll at least prove that he interacted with them.
_(29392161886).jpg){kind=link}
Nother Bat Pone in the photos, Fav Songs playing on shuffle, reading Admiral Biscuit deal with cars with problems that aren‘t always easy to fix. I‘m surprisingly not bored tonight so I am a bit too happy.
Also, Apogee is a cute pone.
Can you just disconnect the wire to the #4 injector and see if it suddenly stops dumping fuel like crazy? (Note: I have no real idea what a fuel injector is other than it has something to do with fuel, it injects it somewhere, and it's most likely too expensive and too complicated for me to do anything with other than wave my checkbook at our local mechanic if one goes wrong in my car.)
One of my goofball customers has a 76 Jeep CJ. I suppose you might call it a farm truck, but it's mostly just used as a snow plow on his property. He bought it new in 1976 for that purpose, and that's all it's ever done. It's also been outdoors for *counts* 45 years, and it looks like it. It was in the shop recently, the mechanical fuel pump had finally taken a dump. He wanted an electric replacement and I advised him which one to buy, so he did and brought it with. I had it running in short order. Anyway, my point... it has the original tires on it! They're some kind of off-road or mud/snow tires. They look their age, lol. I'm pretty sure they're bias ply's, too. It also has the original AMC branded spark plug wires. Not the plugs, though, I changed those a few years back.
It's funny because the owner always tells me it has the original tires on it, and he's so goofily proud of it. I suppose they must be good to last this long.
So true my friend, VERY true if anyone here has ever been on a Navy ship.
Honestly, I don't know how you deal with such a manager and keep your sanity intact.
That Equinox rant had me
...Get a new manager? Or just make him... disappear.
Documenting the information itself is half the battle, but the other half is documenting the delivery of information (anyone who's ever dealt with IT security classes can tell you about this neat concept called non-repudiation - AKA how to stop people from just claiming, "I never sent that," "It never arrived," and so forth). I don't really know what you can do, because it probably depends a lot on your situation. If you have a way to text or IM him through a service that shows when someone has received and read their messages, that's one option, I guess?
Still doesn't solve what seems to be the core problem of goldfish-memory-syndrome, though. I'm sure there's some sort of Pavlovian shock conditioning for that, but the ethics are, uh, dubious. Maybe don't do that one.
5461029
Fuel injectors succeeded carburetors, which were responsible for giving the combustion chamber the ideal stoichiometric ratio. Those sucked air and fuel in at a specific flow rate to achieve the right mixture.
A fuel injector uses an atomizer nozzle (that's really what it's called), which is the same kind of nozzle used in aerosol cans. It does the same thing to fuel as spray paint nozzles do to paint, which is simpler and more effective than a carburetor.
5461121
My Unc got hit so often by this, he carries two video cameras and a dictophone with him, on person, never mind that in the car as well.
People who dont want to be found out hate when you have to announce you are recording them before interacting, but they hate it even more if you dont say and the footage etc is permissable.
Of course, then you have rules that say any secret footage is illegal and so inadmissable, but then, whats the point of random suprise inpections?
"CHMSTL"
...What does that stand for?
Good luck with your manager!
Sorry I don't seem to have any ideas for that at the moment.
Dude, I shudder with poorly repressed memories as I read this.
The pink paper is a good start... I used neon green. Then followed that with 48 point font or Texta (Sharpie for those over there) for hand written stuff. Next they were magnetically attached to his metal door over the handle or taped to his monitor. I was at that point accused of “taking the piss” but I pointed out that he still claimed not to have seen paperwork so my tactics were just an ongoing experiment to see what it took to actually get his attention. Important boxes of equipment were stacked on his chair or in front of his desk... same reason.
Eventually he was promoted to a position where his uselessness was less intrusive.
I would say find a better employer but in these times and over there I imagine it is not an easy task.
Usually have to look up most of the vehicles that you mention as they are not sold over here and looking up that Promaster made me happy to know something that ugly isn’t on our roads.
5461029
Fuel injectors (now I will say the only knowledge I have on this is an ~75 yr old book so things can change)* are linked directly to the crank shaft in order to keep time with the engine, this means they are not readily disconnected from power.
*The specific book is Fundamentals of Diesel Engines US Navy Navpers 16178.
https://archive.org/details/FundamentalsOfDieselEngines16178 You can get a pdf of it here.
5461162
Possibly, something like: Central High Mounted STopLight?
Dodge Promaster
Turns out it's a Fiat that's sold in the US by Ram. Your description of it being a Fiat/Dodge hybrid was even more on the money that it seemed.
5461121
Working in IT, one of my longest-standing best-practice principles is that I not only document everything, but I communicate everything via email whenever possible. Even when there's a phone call, I'll generally follow it up with an email summarizing the conversation. That way if a manager tells me that I didn't tell them something, or that they never said something, or that they shouldn't be expected to know something (all of which happens a lot), I can pull up the email, attach it to a new email, and show them exactly where and when and what I told them. Then they complain that they're too busy to read all their emails and everything is still my fault; but that's another issue.
Naturally, some managers try to avoid having me send them emails, and insist that everything be done by phone, so that they can maintain that plausible deniability, and more easily push the blame for their incompetence off onto their underlings and never actually have to take responsibility for their own failures.
Have you considered wearing a GoPro during all of your interactions with him?
5461336
I was once in an email chain in which someone demanded to know why we were sending emails out about this, when it could have simply been handled with a phone call. I replied (to all) that I HAD had a phone call about it the previous week, and I'd been told that WAS handled, but as it HADN'T been, I was returning to an email chain.
They never responded; i suspect because I was too far down, and to the side of their authority.
Does your manager have a manager? If so, have you spoken to his manager? I'm fairly certain your manager is not qualified to manage anyone.
I suppose your boss would have a hissy fit if you demanded a receipt for the diagnostic you handed him... ("Sign here, press hard, five copies...")
Have you tried getting him to sign each of your reports, acknowledging that he has received them?
5461008
I see a lot of Gordon Lightfoot right up front and I totally approve. You might give Harry Chapin a listen, too, if you haven’t.
She really is.
5462182
I‘ve got one of his in there, prolly should look into more but YT is unreliable on that front.
5461029
In theory, yes; in practice, not easily. Plus, it’s intermittent, so that adds to the fun. My thought is that the insulation’s gone off the ground wire, possibly due to a mouse, and sometimes it touches metal and holds the injector open. But since it doesn’t do it all the time, the only way to know is to look at it, and to do that I have to pull the intake off.
The other, less-likely possibility, is that the driver in the PCM is bad and sometimes sticks on. That’s unlikely for a injector driver, they don’t have much electrical load, but I’ve seen it happen with coil drivers before.
It’s basically a little atomizer (like a perfume bottle or a windex bottle or what have you) run by electricity on demand. It gives a little spurt of fuel when the engine wants it; how much (the on-time) is based on a number of calculations (temperature, air volume, engine RPM, engine load, etc.).
howacarworks.com/illustration/1596/an-electronic-injector.png
In DI (direct injection) they’re often Pizeo instead of electromagnetic, ‘cause you need more oomph to open an injector when there’s thousands of PSI of fuel behind it instead of the tens of PSI normal injectors get.
5461035
When I was at Firestone in Kalamzoo, we had a regular customer who had an early 80s S-10 he bought as a plow truck and used it for his own driveway and not much else. It had under 20k miles on it, I think, and was pretty much all original. It came in for an annual oil change.
I also put new tires on a 76 C-10 that had its original tires on it. Some oddball bias ply size, I can’t even remember what they were (something like G78-15). That one was also fairly low-mileage and mostly original, but the previous owner parked by feel, judging by the bodywork.
One day, they’re just going to burst due to rubber degradation. I’ve seen tires old enough that the weather cracking on the sidewalls is deeper than the tread.
Still, as long as he doesn’t drive it on the highway where they’re gonna get hot and probably come apart, good on him for keeping them as long as he has.
5461042
Write angry blogs and cute pony stories, mostly. That helps a lot
It was all true!
I drove it ten or so miles today and it didn’t make weird noises or blow up, so it’s okay for now. Maybe the new oil filter will catch all the extra metal in the engine and it won’t do any further damage.
5461064
Well, he has unknowingly starred in three pony stories, and in one of them he was disappeared by a unicorn.
5461121
That’s the hard part. I can write it up, I can put it on his desk or in his hands, and then when he doesn’t read it? I’ve kept my own copies of some things just in case, but it’s not worth my time to write out the same inspection form twice.
And honestly, aside from frustration on my end, there’s no consequences for me if he forgets I told him. I’ve made a point sometimes when he asks me for mileage off a car that I know I got and put on his desk, instead of going out to the parking lot and getting it, walking up to his desk, picking up the form, and reading it to him.
Yeah, that’s a path I probably shouldn’t go down.
5461131
I bolded the important parts . . . still occasionally deal with old-timers who whine about how carburetors were better, how they were simpler, and they’re idiots. Carburetors have a bajillion sensitive moving parts and cams and springs and the hope that the right amount of fuel goes where it’s supposed to as the air rushes by. Fuel injectors are stupidly simple by comparison, just a spring and a coil of wire, and they can inject however much fuel they want whenever they want.
Plus, it’s fairly trivial engineering to program the computer to check the circuit, verify by the coil collapse that the injector fired (electrically, anyway), and in the case of a dead cylinder, turn off the injector to the affected cylinder while leaving the other however many cylinders working perfectly fine. Can’t do that with a carb.
And now with direct injection, you can fire the injector up to five times on each combustion event if you want to, and you can shape the flame for cylinder cooling and economy reasons. Can’t do that with a carb, either.
5461157
In a small operation like ours, that’s less of an issue, luckily. In corporate culture (or legal culture), yeah, always keep backups so that someone on a power trip can’t backstab you.
5461162
5461191nailed it, it’s the Central High Mount Stop Light. If you’re in the US, practically every car and light-duty truck has been required to have them since the 90s (just checked, they were required on cars in 86 and light trucks in 94)
If you’re really bored, here’s a link to a NHSTA report on their effectiveness at preventing rear-end collisions. I haven’t personally read it.
Heh, thanks!
I also don’t have any good ideas, besides his shenanigans being a good subject for entertaining blog posts.
5461165
I have left things on the keyboard for the same reason, if he moved it to use the keyboard he must have seen it and known it was there. Hadn’t considered Sharpie but that’s a decent idea.
The one advantage I hoped the pink paper would have was that it might be an affront to his toxic masculinity, and he’d quickly read it and then shuffle the papers off somewhere else so nobody would see a pink paper on his desk, and that wasn’t as successful as I’d hoped.
I might try pink ink. One of my co-workers would always forget his pen at our training classes, so one time I loaned him a pink pen and after that he never asked me for a pen again.
In my field, it’s actually not all that hard, but with where I live, odds are it would require a decent commute both ways, whereas now I live about three minutes from work. I can roll out of bed ten minutes before I need to be at work and make it on time.
Plus, I get paid hourly plus overtime, which isn’t that common for mechanics. Mostly they get paid flat rate, which means that any delays in the process come out of my paycheck. Here, I make the same if I’m working or waiting for him to get around to looking up a torque spec I need.
Well, when Fiat and Chrysler get in bed together, you know they’re going to come up with something special.
Also, regarding ugliness:
d3lp4xedbqa8a5.cloudfront.net/s3/digital-cougar-assets/wheels/2017/12/01/Misc/Ugliest-cars-Mitsubishi-Colt-Cabriolet.jpg
Explain this.
5461186
Things have changed; they’re electrically-controlled (by the PCM) to fire whenever the PCM wants them to and for however long they need to be.
I’ve never seen a mechanical fuel injector, although I am aware they were a thing back in the day.
5462235
That... almost looks as though the canopy was shifted, and the trunk and front profile switched around.
In my head, making those changes in reverse gives it the silhouette of a Volkswagen, sort of.
Either way, super cursed.
5461272
I knew exactly who collabed to come up with it.
And now Chrysler’s jumping in bed with the French, too, so one can only imagine the horrors to come. They’ll be getting the designers who came up with this:
d3lp4xedbqa8a5.cloudfront.net/imagegen/max/ccr/1023/-/s3/digital-cougar-assets/motor/2016/08/17/72885/Peugeot-205-T16-for-sale-cover.jpg
And in case you were wondering if instead of just the back hatch opening, everything behind the B-pillar did, Peugeot didn’t disappoint.
d3lp4xedbqa8a5.cloudfront.net/s3/digital-cougar-assets/motor-media/3761078/peugeot-205-t16-side.jpg
5462237
Oh fun, so back in Ye Old Days of the 1940‘s and 50‘s everything was speed controlled directly or indirectly from the crankshaft, and mechanical fuel injectors timing was based on a specifically timed cam, much of the design has stayed the same cept that a lot of the electrical part were mechanical, the book I linked has some real good info on engines from that time, I‘m prolly gonna read the physical copy I have at home again at some point but with mechanical system you just need to replace the proben parts and not worry about electronics acting up.
5461336
One of the things I’ve done is when he yells at me to get the mileage off a car where I know I wrote it down and gave it to him, I’ll go into the office, sort through the papers until I find the right work order, then read the mileage off for him.
He hates that.
5461714
A Go-Pro, no, but I did consider an audio recording device and then I could play him back on an as-needed basis, but that honestly felt like too much work. Especially since I can just rant about it in a blog post.
If it was a job security issue, that would be one thing, but it isn’t. It’s just an annoyance and sometimes the opportunity for a shouting match between us, and sometimes things not going as smoothly as they ought to.
5461752
Yes, he does, the owner. And I could complain (and have, a couple times) but nothing’s really come of it. And in the back of my mind, I also know that if he were to leave, I’d be stuck with managing the shop and I don’t want that. There’s a lot of stuff that I’m happy is his problem and not my problem.
5461911
Yeah, he probably would.
That’s okay, I get paid by the hour, if I have to write out the same list of codes a second time, I’m getting paid while I’m doing it. If I have to stand around polishing my wrenches while I wait for him to give me a torque spec I need, I’m getting paid for it. Heck, today I got paid to listen to him rant on about how Joe Biden caused the price of plywood to go up. I’m not sure how Biden managed that, and he isn’t either, but he heard from a guy, and that then transitioned into how the Dutch are buying farmland in Ohio to build wind turbines and pretty soon we’ll all be wearing wooden shoes I guess.
5462111
No, and I don’t think that would help to be honest.
It’s likely an unsolvable problem, but for y’all it means that you get ranty blog posts with cute pony pictures, and sometimes even a story—Golden Prize was inspired by him losing an inspection form I set between his hands.
Also, Fishing was inspired by something he said as well.
5462202
Cute ponies do make for wonderful therapy haah
And I do enjoy your content so, win for stress?
"I’ve got better things to do than write a novel."
I sure hope you don't. Or at least write that novel here and have cute little ponys in it.
5462245
It looks like a discount budget version of the Back to the Future car. I don't see how that back hatch could possibly be reliable without being overengineered.
5461191
Ah, thanks!
5462218
And thanks!
And, hah, thanks for the link, but yeah, I've got other things to do. :D
:)
Hah, yes, there's that, at least! :D
5462309
They do. That’s legit how I wound up here.
Yay!
5462501
I suppose I could have clarified that I have better things to do than write a novel about needed car repairs, but these last two blog posts clocked in at over four thousand words (not counting the mezzanine) . . .
Good news, soon(ish) y’all’ll get a shiny new pony novella with trains!
5462598
It looks like a discount budget version of the Back to the Future car.
Funnily enough, I’m not sure it was budget at all. I don’t know what either of those cars sold for originally, but some quick googling suggests you can get a DeLorean for $40k, vs. about 175k for the Peugeot.
It’s French, so I guarantee it’s overengineered.
It’s French, so no promises of reliability.
5462246
Both of my diesels are old enough to have mechanical injection (80s designs), indirect off the camshaft (high pressure fuel pump). One of the other important things with that design is that all the fuel lines from the pump to the injector be exactly the right length, or else it won’t run right. I think I looked up the price once ‘cause I was curious, and the injector pump on my 6.2 is about $1500 for a reman unit, and it’s not serviceable using normal tools/skills.
Yeah, in fact a lot of the principles and theories of operation of internal combustion haven’t changed that much from the late 1800s, but what we can do with them has. An old engine has fixed valve timing, for example, whereas a modern engine can vary valve timing as needed for power or efficiency. Fiat’s multiair engines don’t even have one set of valves actually connected to the cam, so they can be opened however far for however long, whenever.
In my own opinion, electronics are far more reliable. Most modern cars have one coil per spark plug, which can fire with whatever timing and duration the automaker desires, and can (to an extent) self-diagnose. Whereas my 1984 S-10 had a more traditional distributor, with centrifugal advance and vacuum advance controlled by two thermal delay valves. You had to contend with spring tension, centrifugal pivots, wear on the distributor gear and distributor bushings, vacuum leaks, faulty thermal delay valves, and none of those systems could do any self-diagnosis. Not to mention carbon-tracking and corrosion in the distributor cap. . . .
5464151
Maintenance will always be a nightmare, but hey, at least you haven‘t had to tear down and rebuild a triple-expansion steam engine. My grandpa did that volunteered to do that and it took a week to do the maintenance.
5464153
This is true.
And I’ll admit that when it’s old and mechanical, it’s more intuitive then some of the eighties mechanical stuff, or the electronic stuff, and I’ll also admit that you’ve got a better chance improvising a repair on something old and simple than you do on a modern computer-controlled car.
But from my view as a professional tech, I prefer generally easy to diagnose systems to hellishly complex mechanical systems.
5464164
Your the professional mechanic, I‘m not, I‘ll take your word on that fact.
5464168
