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Events of Grandeur

Well, not so much.

I was invited to another poker night with some friends last week...turns out I only knew one person there, but whatever. Two of the people claimed to play regularly online, but whatever. My beginner's luck continued, and I won. :-D Unfortunately the rules for the night were that the top 3 positions were paid, so I only took home about half as much as I could have. That, and we weren't able to get 8 players, only 6. Had a good time though!

The joy that goes with working on cars didn't go unnoticed this weekend, oh no. Err, wait, perhaps it did. One thing went perfect, and that was replacing a trim piece on the passenger side grab handle in my car. :-P

First up, gasket between header and cat. Old one comes out ok, new one goes in, all is right with the world. Or not. When I eventually started up the car later that day, the exhaust sounded exactly as bad as it did before. So it seems that the gasket probably isn't the issue, but the header and cat are both enjoying the feel of a brand new $15+ gasket, I'm sure. Worse though, is my guess that the header has a crack in it somewhere near that flange, and if that's the case, then it has had a crack in it all this time! It always made a bit of noise, but it wasn't too bad until recently. I'll try to find a place that maybe can fix it, I don't know. I didn't really want to buy a shiny new SMSP header right now, but if I have to...

Next, clutch slave cylinder on the Integra. It wasn't too big a deal to replace this, but for some reason we (Evan had shown up by this point) must have been idiots when it came to bleeding the thing. It just wouldn't work for a while, then all of the sudden it worked. Fantastic. So that feels a little better, but I think the clutch really suffered hauling Teresa's stuff up the mountains to ABQ. :-\

Radiator hoses. Easy, right? Not when oem hoses seem WAY too small to actually fit. Woo. Oh, and I find out that my radiator cap is in about 6 pieces (which wasn't the case just a couple weeks earlier). Off to the dealership to see if they have another one. How about I drive the Neon over there? Sure! Add some coolant since I still hadn't replaced the slowly leaking coolant tank, and off we go. Driving, driving...temperature needle just goes up up up. Shut the car down right in front of the Acura dealer. Pop the hood, and coolant is bubbling out of the hose that goes to the heater core. Great. Keep in mind that the Acura dealer is less than a mile from my apartment. Evan has AAA, so he calls them up and they send out a tow truck to get it back to my place. Fortunately the Acura dealer was right there, and while the parts counter was closed, the refridgerator was not. :-D So it was a good place to hang out while waiting for the tow truck.

Back to the apartment. Push the Neon back in the garage, hop in the Camaro to pick up a cap from Autozone so that I at least have one working car. Replace that, then it's time to figure out what to do with the Neon. Out comes the airbox, as it's just in the way. I notice that the hose clamp for the line to the heater core really isn't all that tight. I knew the hose was too big (by a whopping 1mm), but I thought tightening it down sufficiently would be fine. Apparently it wasn't tight enough...of course, this is all assuming that the actual pipe into the heater core isn't cracked. Which would be wonderful, you know.

While the airbox is out, it's a good time to replace that coolant tank. Need to remove two nuts to take it out. First one? Lost. Second one? Fell to a visible but inaccessible place in the engine bay, and I don't have a magnet on a stick. Great. It looked oddly damaged though, so I may just be buying a couple of those.

So that's it for the weekend. Still have to go get the exhaust issue fixed on the Integra, and address the Neon issues. All sorts of fun. :-P

Posted by Ben at July 5, 2005 08:49 AM