Putting your best face forward

Finally managed to pull the flex plate from the Gremlin today.  This was after a discovery last night, where it became clear to me that someone (presumably a very crafty burglar) had carefully unbolted the cat from the downpipe flange and cut said flange and the cat's exit pipe with a small reciprocating saw, leaving me to do a parts store run or two and a trip to my friend's house across town with no muffler.  The sound was pretty awesome.

Exhaust repair was the name of the game prior to this evening, as well as driveline greasing at the slip yoke and ujoints in the hopes of correcting a hard shudder from the rear on acceleration.  I'd share any pictures or lessons learned if I had any, but the closest I can muster is "don't do exhaust work on a car on the ground when it's hailing outside.  It sucks."  Since I guess you're supposed to keep rolling when the dice are hot, I trucked on over to the shop after Eagle maintenance and found that it was a damn good thing I decided the flexplate had to go.

In case my crude attempts at making things clear isn't successful, let me clarify by saying that the crack I had noticed was accompanied by three more that I hadn't.  Really, it looks like this fella would've kept working just long enough to give me a reeeeeeeeally bad time. 

Getting the plate out wasn't as easy as I would've liked, mostly because of where the crossbar that my lift is designed to use comes across right behind the transmission bellhouse.  This left me with just barely enough room to fit a socket and ratchet in, and not a bit more than what I needed.

All the same, it really wasn't too bad.  I think the real challenge will be torquing the bolts to spec once installation time comes.  I probably would've had an easier time with the whole thing if I'd used jack stands, but that would've entailed a whole other kind of mess I'm happy to not deal with.

Once I rejoined the surface world, i compared the old flexplate to the older flexplate.  Everything lined up, neither of them had holes where the other didn't, and they we're both made of metal.  Looks good to me.  If I end up having any problems with the replacement plate, I'll likely get the 4.0l plate and starter, which will do me favors as far as parts-availability goes.

I have an update that I'll post as soon as I'm sitting still in a place where I have a WiFi connection for long enough to write it up.  It's concerning the transmission fluid & filter change/low band adjustment I did for Eagle a couple of days ago, so isn't terribly amazing, but does have a few surprises.  Until next time, if it takes me a while to post an update, it's probably because I'm either hard at work or dead.

Go to hell, air compressor.

No updates for Gremlin- yet.  I expect that we should see some developments really soon, though.  If you actually manage to read this with any regularity. . . Well, keep doing that, I guess.  Something's rew bound to happen at some point.  I can be sure of that much.

This isn't to say that car stuff hasn't been getting done, though.  Eagle's been getting a fair degree of attention lately, though I admit the inspiration hasn't been without fear that it's going to die horribly in some way.

There's been a really crappy-sounding clatter coming from the engine bay for quite some time (about a year, I guess?) that has been a pain to diagnose through and around.  My guess was a bad clutch on the AC compressor, since a stethoscope allowed me to trace the source to that part.  I know that it's not difficult to test to see if a compressor clutch is screwed up, but I've had a mental block in the way when it came to actually doing it.  See, by my thinking, doing that work would be either troubleshooting the AC system I could care less about, or chasing after a sound I was pretty sure I'd already tracked down.  In so many words, I'd be needlessly pissing away time I don't have.

Since I've never had a need, want, nor desire for AC up here, all the compressor represented to me was a big, heavy pain in the ass that ate my gasoline and got in the way every time I had to do anything in the right half of the engine bay.  I figured I could cut it out of the belt configuration and then pull the damn thing out when I felt like it.  The only caveat was the fact that the alternator is indirectly driven by the crank pulley via the compressor pulley, so I got a dual slot pulley I pulled off an old yard Ford some time back and a new belt (the one that eventually fit is Duralast part number number 17403), and set to confirming my suspicions and increasing my mileage.

Things have been working fine since doing the bypass the other night, though at the expense of 10 hours overnight in the Asbestos Caverns.  The modification isn't really that difficult, mind, it's just that it was one of those "the impossible becomes the standard in pursuit of all wrong things coming to occur."  In other words, it was a hellish night of me being tormented by circumstance, my own stupidity, and constant sabotage and interference on the part of that goddamned compressor.

You might think I'm being melodramatic by accusing a broken inanimate object of having and leveraging independent agency to the end of purposefully subverting my mundane efforts to maintain a vehicle.  In my defense, I ask you to consider whether you've ever encountered an object that was as directly antagonistic and rude as this:

Since then, the sound has been gone and the alternator seems to be charging just fine.  With some luck, that'll be the new normal.

Driving myself crazy, refueling often

Eagle was thirsty.  All the time.  I've been getting 9mpg since the winter gas change over, so Eagle's been seeing me after class for a while so we could work on bringing this average up.

After changing my motor oil, being vigilant about checking air pressure of my tires, cleaning spark plugs, checking timing, voodoo, hoodoo, begging, adjusting my carb mixture, giving up, and so on, I had one of those "should've been one of the first things to change" revelations: maybe I should quit using Safeway gas.

I didn't use their gas with the expectation of it being high quality.  It was on my shop route and easier to get to than other places.  Laziness and the illusion of saving money.  I decided to fill up with Shell over a week ago, then decided to fill up last night when I was on the way to the house but not wanting to get back to the house yet.  In other words, I filled up 3 days later than usual because I felt like it, not because I needed to.

The result?  I'm now getting 12.43mpg city, as opposed to the slightly under 9mpg I got from the last Safeway tank.  Keep in mind that this is with slightly saggy tires, a dirty air filter, winter gas, and a few hundred pounds of weight (probably about 600lbs, including the dead weight behind the wheel).  I've got to admit, I didn't expect that dramatic a change for an extra .20/gal. 

I also didn't expect to find I was paying so much more for shitty fuel.  For $4 more per tank, I get 70 more miles of travel.  That's a ludicrous difference!

    Shell: $64/20gal tank (248.6mi)

    Safeway: $82.86/27.62gal (amount needed to travel equal distance at a mileage rate of 9mpg)

So I've been paying about $20 every time I try to save $4.  Anyone need a financial advisor?

George Washington's transmission (of Theseus)

My buddy has a 1996 Explorer with a 4R55E automatic transmission.  With around 140k on it and shifting issues that required a full rebuild far less than 2k miles ago, it's back in the shop after we did a hall Mary fluid change yesterday.

See, it's throwing a code and failing to engage 4th gear, presumably due to a faulty solenoid, PCM, harness, gear goblin, or incorrect incantation and burnt offering combination being presented to the machine.  Who the hell really knows?  The reason I'm sharing this is because it seems like people have forgotten what the words "robust", "quality", or "good" can appropriately be used to describe.

When I read that the 4R55E is any of these things, it's quickly followed by a litany of caveats: "as long as the PCM/ECM don't fuck things up," "just make sure you fill it with distilled liquid gold, or Mobil 1 synthetic ATF," "leaving aside the phonebook-thick stack of service bulletin revisions that have to be made to make it operable," and so on.

Don't take this the wrong way - Ford is far from the only manufacturer that has this kind of thought surrounding a product they've brought to market.  To bring this a little closer to home, we can look squarely at the Grand Cherokee and the electronically-controlled TorqueFlite that has been the source of many a pedal turned back and a dollar burned at the altar of Mopar, despite the TorqueFlite being an awesome automatic transmission platform.  God knows I've put eagle's through hell, and it always has bounced back (clutch packs seized? Put that fucker in reverse and bash shit back in line!).  The reason for this, though, is because it's hydraulically-controlled, not electronically-controlled.  Eagle's transmission would've been toast long ago if it were one of the Jeep variants referred to above.

The technology at the heart of the A998 is all built on old, well-tested mechanical engineering principles of leveraging physical properties of fluids, abrasives, and gearing to perform a certain set of functions.  Electronic controllers, while somewhat more mature now than what was used in 1996, are fragile, opaque, deeply abstract in operation, and better suited for use in iPods and throwaway consumer goods than in a machine that weighs a ton or more and is capable of moving fast enough to make an unidentifiable mess of man and raccoon alike.  What's more, they often subvert the appropriate action of those mechanical components that they've been put in charge of.

The point of my meandering complaining here is not that "computer is bad" (though it really is), but that a system isn't worth shit when the subsystems and components it directly relies on in the performance of its functions are temperamental garbage.  In other words, no, the 4R55E is not tough, robust, or even good, because all of the caveats that you tack on after are things that you can't take away and still have an operating transmission.

Hopefully I'll get old enough one day to actually warrant having hard-headed, anachronistic opinions.

Baby turtles and alligators

Once I've committed to something, a short period of time is all that's needed to see it increase its mass fivefold, leaving me stuck having to feed it (if you've ever met my toilet, you know why just flushing isn't an option).  Luckily, I'm not in this latest mess alone.

See, my friend and I have been working to pick up odd jobs lately to carry me over the remaining bit of work left with the Gremlin and put some cash in his pocket.  The first gig we took on was clearing the overgrowth on about 60 square feet of land, followed by building a fence.  To clarify: I don't mean that as a euphemism - we're literally going to be constructing a physical barrier around a piece of privately-owned property.

We went into this thinking that we'd have the overgrowth cleared within a couple days, totally failing to account for the 15' tall holly trees that were part of the 700lbs (and counting, based on the scales at the dump) of plant matter that was slated for eviction.  Long/short, we've been hacking away at this mess for a while and I've not made a lick of progress on the Gremlin.  We got a trailer, though!

After grinding through ad after overpriced ad, we finally found a trailer for a reasonable price, and the owner actually had a title!  See, Washington has to do everything backasswards, which means you have to have a title and register trailers in this state.  Despite this being a strict legal requirement, it seems that people register their trailers, use them twice, leave them to sit and rot for a couple years, then post them on Craigslist for about twice the price that they'd fetch in most other places in the country.

Regardless, we got our trailer, which is a homebrewed number comprised of a 60's Ford truck bed on a frame of unknown origins.  The lights weren't operational at all, but we did a driveway fix (connected the ground) that resulted in rear lights on both sides, brake light on the left, right turn signal, and left turn signal (but not on the left. It activated the right side turn signal light as well).  We made it two houses down the road before passing two parked cops that were facing down the dead end road we were coming out of.  After reaching the stop sign, we decided it was best to turn right.

After a series of right turns through a town neither of us had ever been to, we stopped in what turned out to be the filthiest 711 parking lot I've ever had the pleasure to visit and proceeded to rewire the trailer with materials harvested from a cheap ass (totally inadequate) magnetic trailer light setup.  As I laid on my back in the lot water, running the wiring, I noticed that there was a lot of bailing wire ties securing the bed to the frame, but not any obvious welds or fasteners.  That was Sunday night, and we've still yet to find any.

It's perfect.