March 03, 2013 @ 20:40 EST

Vehicular Disassembly

This weekend, I knocked out most of my vehicular to-do list.

The tin can got a new antenna grommit, finally silencing the thock-thock-thock rattling from the rear-end that's been going on for at least a year now. But more importantly, I also swapped out the driver's seat belt buckle -- About two weeks ago, it started acting up, requiring a lot of jigglig to latch properly, and even when buckled the car complained thinking I wasn't wearing a seat belt. But these two things were a minor sideshow for the main attraction.

The truck's had air conditioning issues ever since I bought it. Not only does the compressor have a bad (ie very noisy) bearing, but the fan never put out that much volume (and tended to slow down to barely functioning after being on for a little while, if it even started at all. Last June I purchased a new blower motor and blower resistor, and it's taken me this long to do the work simply because it required taking apart the whole damn dashboard to get to the bits in question.

Yeah, despite the fact that the blower motor is partially exposed in the cab, it's mounting bolts are tucked behind sharp-edged steel crossmembers that hold the dashboard together. The blower resistor was similarly afflicted, theoretically accessible behind the glove box unless you had the gall to actually want to remove it.

So, after getting everything taken apart yesterday afternoon, I discovered the new blower resistor I purchased turned out to be the wrong one, and the correct one had to be shipped in. No biggie; I managed to swap out the motor and got things semi-reassembled before calling it quits mid-afternoon.

This morning, I picked up the correct resistor pack, installed it, and proceeded to reassemble the dashboard. After getting it put together enough to reconnect the battery and start testing things out, I discovered that the new motor doesn't work. At all.

After much gnashing of teeth, I reconnected the original motor to the wiring and found it worked, albeit hesitantly and noisily, pointing the finger at the new motor rather than something else I may have done. So, I took apart the dashboard (again), pulled out the new motor, hooked it up manually, and... it worked. It turns out that I hadn't done a good job of mounting the grounding lug to the new fan body.

Back in it went, and a quick test later, It worked! I started re-attaching everything.. until there were eight screws remaining, when I discovered that two of those eight were supposed to be securing the ECU to the body -- behind the dashboard. Cure another round of teeth gnashing, disassembly, and reassembly. I finally finished up around noon or so.

So, the A/C compressor is still noisy and there's still something wrong with one of the vent actuators (one of the defrost vents is always engaged) but otherwise I'm getting a considerable amount more air out of the vents. I'd consider that a success.

All it cost me was most of my weekend, a very sore back and shoulders (steering columns are heavy!) and scraped-to-hell-and-back hands.

I still need to remove the steering wheel to replace the turn signal cancelling cam (when turning left, theturn signal won't disengage automatically), but that's another project for another day.


Posted by Solomon Peachy | Permanent link & Comments | File under: Life and other BS