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.