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when it rains

The general thought about car failures is that two unrelated systems never fail at the same time. The chances of one system failing are very low in the first place, so the chances of two systems going are much much lower. Typically this is also thought of related systems as well… if two related systems appear to be failed it’s probably some more basic system that the two share.


So my radiator and my starter both went yesterday. Started up just fine in the morning. got into the silly little yellow car just like any other day and put-putted on my way to do some car work on Sabrina’s Sentra with Andrew. Fine. Cool. Yay. Car work that’s not mine for a change. On the way up I noticed my heat was spiking. I could get it to go back down with a little automotive wizardry, but it was very obviously starving for coolant. I can smell a very slight odor of coolant in the cabin as well. When I get there I pop the hood and see a little fluid on the front crossmember. It felt like oil, but when I touched my fingertip to my tongue it had that unmistakible sickly sweet candy-like flavor. After some hunting I found the pinhole in the radiator. The radiator wasn’t doing terribly well in the first place, so whatever. good excuse to go to the pick-apart.
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I decided while I was in the engine bay that I should tighten up the engine mounts and do another few incantations I had been wanting to perform to try and exorcise the odd noise the engine makes when spinning down from 4500+ RPMs. So I go at the engine mounts, hit this with a hammer, and poke that with a screwdriver. nothing more than a little poking around. I put everything back in the car, and go to take her for a drive. Turn ze key…. nothing. Okaaaay….. again, and…. nothing. Starter motor shit the bed. It’s not even drawing power. James and I went over the electricals going to the starter. Hot wire is hot, it’s still obviouisly grounded to the chassis, and the switched (ground) wire changes voltage when the key is turned (oddly, from 12V down to almost 0V… backwards from what I’d think). So all the wiring is fine. but when I turn the key, the headlights don’t even dim. no whine from the starter… just the puff from the idle air control valve. It’ll pop-start and run just fine. just won’t start under her own power.

So here I am, home from work today.. going to the pick-apart yard to fix two unrelated systems that failed almost simultaneously. Normal people get flat tires. meh, At least I can do the work. Missing one day is better than renting a car for a week while some greasemonkey at a local auto-shop practices his graceless craft all over my poor car. Besides I haven’t been to the pick-apart in a while. maybe there’ll be some good ebay-fodder there. Now if I can just find a hill to park on…..

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  1. November 8th, 2004 at 13:49 | #1

    That really sucks, but at least neither are too labor intensive and you have a light enough car to push easily to jump it if needed. I had a starter problem with my Scirocco for about a month. So I was VERY happy it wasn’t a heavy car.

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