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22 Eargesplitten posted:Has anyone ever transported glass on top of a roof? I say rent the pickup, your $50 table-and-chairs becomes a $70 table-and-chairs with a boring story attached ("I rented a truck"). The alternative is your $50 table-and-chairs becomes a $50 set of chairs plus an empty table frame and a pile of shattered glass. Oh, and you'll be digging tiny pieces of glass out of every possible crevice of your car for the rest of the car's life. But you'll also have a more interesting story.
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Nov 6, 2018 16:06
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 03:12 |
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wesleywillis posted:I mentioned in the tools thread a while ago that my nephew got a truck a while back, and one of the things I mentioned I was going to get was some sand bags for the back of it. I'm giving them to him this weekend. Nobody else address this and I'm also interested. My take is directly over the axle, or even further back, to provide maximum weight on the rear axle. Like you said, the front axle has the weight of the engine and most of the rest of the heavier parts of a car and some rearward downforce is nice to have in a RWD vehicle.
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Nov 19, 2018 00:00
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My car is dead, but I have a forlorn, silly hope. I'm in Australia if that matters. 2002 Honda CR-V "Sport" (KA24A1 2.4L I4 petrol). Owned for about 16 months with no serious issues. Last week, it overheated suddenly - having no history that we know about - and limped to a mechanic. They diagnosed a blown head gasket (chocolate milk under the rad cap) and severe sludging in the engine cooling system as well as warped heads. The upshot was: "you need a new engine". This is at the local combined Honda and Nissan dealership, where I assume they have lots of experience with cars like mine. It sounds like the water passages in the engine have become clogged with a non-water-soluble mix of gross crap & engine oil. Besides the warped heads and need for a new head gasket (assuming the heads could be machined for a non-silly cost), is there any way to save this engine? The really annoying thing - besides having a suddenly and surprisingly killed car - is the amount of money I've spent on this car in the last few months. In May it got new front brakes (rotors & pads) and a new tire, and just two weeks ago it got its every-two-years safety inspection which resulted in a new front-passenger seatbelt, for $700. Annual rego and "green slip" compulsory insurance just went through, too (literally the Friday before the Monday it overheated), though that ~$900 is partly refundable once the license plates come off. The car cost us $5000 in February of last year, and we've put about $2000 into it in various other smaller repairs before May of this year. At a guess, if it hadn't cooked its engine it might be worth $4000. There are the usual collection of non-engine niggling issues and looming expenses (clutch, tires, a few worrying creaks from the suspension) that also contribute heavily to the "It's dead, Jim" decision. We drove the car home - less than a kilometre from the dealership - to clean all of our stuff out of it and make decisions. My wife and I have pretty much settled on calling the local junkyard and having it go away later this week, but I thought I'd ask the SA Hive Mind, just for shits and giggles. What say you, goons, would you do some weird heroic effort to save this car? Besides keeping up with coolant flushes (GET YOUR COOLING SYSTEM FLUSHED), what would you do to prevent this kind of thing in future? Also, which thread should I post in for goon-arguments to reinforce my wife's eye-rolling against my stupid desires for a stupid replacement car? Is there still a BFC thread to talk about car-money? \/\/\/ sorry, forgot to mention the mechanic ballparked "a couple of thousand" for a replacement engine, sourced from a junkyard. I do not have the capacity to do the work at home so labour would be a big part of the cost of a replacement engine. ExecuDork fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Aug 3, 2020 |
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Aug 3, 2020 03:04
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Hmmm... this is leading to an awkward conversation with my wife, who believes we have already decided to kill the car - the last thing left to come out of it is the head unit I installed last year, then it's a phone call to the wreckers. The money in the car is spent, I'm well aware of my own tendencies regarding the sunk-cost fallacy. We are going to tell the junkyard what the various newer parts are and hope they give us a bit more. We might keep the newest tires and throw them up on Facebook marketplace, but we're not going to part it out on the driveway. We took it to the dealership because that's where it got the safety inspection, the independent-ish (chain) shop it had been to in May didn't pick up the phone when I called on Monday following the breakdown. We're always wary of dealerships for the reasons already stated, but so far our luck with the non-dealership shops around here has been disappointing. Long boring story aside, we haven't found anybody we're willing to really trust, yet. Which is frustrating. On the plus side for the dealership, they didn't charge us at all for the diagnosis and keeping the car in their shop for a week while we went on a long-prior-planned trip in a rented car. The dealership is also 3 blocks away, making it easy to walk home from a drop-off. The current plan is to kill the CRV and borrow a colleague's* old Ford Laser that her sons learned to drive on. The rego is expired but she offered it to us months ago when we moved to a house further from the university, so I could have a commuter until I sort out a more permanent daily-commute option (COVID-19 restrictions have been relatively light here in regional NSW). Basically, we can get it on the road for the cost of safety inspection, whatever turns up in the inspection, registration, and insurance (keeping in mind I expect to get almost all of the CRV's rego + insurance refunded). This is either much less than an engine replacement on the CRV or it's not worth it (i.e. large expense required to pass inspection) and we come up with a new plan. New plan is likely to be "no car" for a few months while we work out our finances. Not that our finances are particularly dire, just we're trying very hard to avoid running up any new debt while we're still paying down (successfully!) old debt. We liked the CRV but we have medium- and long-term plans that do not necessarily involve a car of that type. A big feature we're looking for in the next really-ours car (not the Laser, it's a stop-gap) is reliability and NOT having it break down on some random trip across town. Obviously, newer is better so I've been pondering cars that are not old enough to hit the bars. *she's kinda my boss, but we have a very good working relationship and I'll probably call her a friend if/when I end up in a different job. I do not anticipate any awkwardness spilling over into work from any issues surrounding this Ford Laser. On our trip we had a chance to discuss car ideas and plans. When my wife asked me: "what car would you buy if you had the money?" I blurted out "BMW M3 Convertible" which did not make her happy. "You'd take that on these gravel roads we drive on to go on camping trips!?". I shrugged and said yes, and we'd learn if we could live with a ridiculous non-practical car like that, and yeah, I'm hard on cars. But a clutch is a wear part, isn't it?? Thanks, all. I mostly wanted to make sure I wasn't missing some well-known and cheap technique to wash the crud out of the cooling system.
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Aug 4, 2020 01:44
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1998 Saab 900 S Convertible Welp, it had to happen sooner or later - problems with the convertible's roof. It cannot completely close, and it cannot completely open. We can help it (push/pull on parts that don't want to move at first) get to completely open but an internal something doesn't happen so the car thinks the roof is half-closed and throws lots of "CHECK LATCHES" errors (with loud beeps) onto the info screen. Going the other way, the last thing that happens to close the roof is the rear window descends and latches into place on top of the tonneau cover, and even pushing down on it won't bring it closer than about 2 inches. If the roof is anything other than all the way open or all the way closed, various things don't work, such as the trunk release button in the driver's door. This combined with a jammed keyhole meant we couldn't even get into the trunk to see what's happening, which is where the various concerning clicking noises are coming from. We think - and a local auto electrical specialist agrees - that one or more motors is slipping when it encounters excessive load. So, either a gear system is worn/stripped, or something is jamming a mechanism somewhere. We found some small strips of cloth jammed into a hinge during our first investigations, and it's a 24-year-old car so that kind of dirt build-up seems likely. This morning a locksmith cleared the jammed lock (the dust cover had slipped) and my plan for the weekend is to remove the rest of the fabric liner in the trunk and have a look at the roof mechanisms. All I've been able to find on-line so far are people saying things like "it's a delicate and complicated dance" and that the system is fairly complex. There is a manual handle to close the roof in the case of total power failure but that last bit of rear-window movement and latching is driven by the electrical motors only, you don't need to seal it up for a tow-truck to take it away. The electrical shop can't get us in for another look until mid-February so I figure poking around myself won't do any real harm. And, maybe I'll need to order a part from the other side of the world that will take 2 months to get here anyways. Anybody else had problems with their convertible roof? Or found weirdness when poking around little-investigated regions?
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Jan 14, 2022 03:04
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Messed around in the Saab convertible's trunk and managed to break something - the little flaps that move out of the way when the tonneau cover moves. One snapped off, the other badly cracked. But! I also burned out the motor that was clicking and failing to get things into position, so now the roof hardly moves at all - stuck with the rear window vertical but the rest of the roof in its closed position, including the tonneau cover. So it's basically driveable, though not in rain and not for longer than a trip to a mechanic who can work on it. Anyway, I managed to get a few pictures of the motor. This one shows the label on the back, which isn't getting me very far.  Convertible roof motor by ExecuDork, on FlickrI found one Spanish-language Saab forum where somebody describes a very similar problem in a very similar car, but that thread from 2014 did not end with "buy this part" or anything else I could use. My next idea is to pull that motor out (I *might* be able to accomplish this) and take it to the local auto electrician to have it tested. I think it's dead, but maybe it stopped trying to move for a different reason. I can find no fuses for the roof motors but I assume there are circuit protectors of some kind built into the system and maybe that's what's happened.
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Jan 17, 2022 01:20
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1998 Saab 900 S (2.3L I4, manual, convertible). About 120 000 km. I'm in Australia, if that matters. There is a long epic saga I'll one day write up about this car, but today's chapter is, I hope, less dramatic. The car has a rough idle. The most recent work it's had was a transmission replacement with an entire transmission from a wrecker, completed about 2 weeks ago. It had a rough idle with the old transmission (which was incapable of going into reverse, hence the replacement) but it seems to be worse now. The car has been mostly sitting still since late September. Everything else seems to work fine. It starts fine, but the idle speed will wobble around from about 500 up to as high as 1500 rpm when it surges. After a few minutes it will sort-of stabilise at about where it should be, 800 rpm or so. But it sounds rough. It's uneven, and chugs out some low notes more or less constantly, though without a consistent rhythm. When driving, the power delivery is fine and the engine actually sounds really good (to my ear) under moderate load, such as accelerating gently from stopped to 50 km/h and shifting up through 1-2-3. I haven't taken it onto faster roads so I don't know how it behaves in 4th or 5th. When slowing, as I approach an intersection, for example, the revs will drop to under 1000 and if I try to accelerate again, there's a delay of maybe a second before I get good power delivery, like the engine is barely running. Also, at those low revs the brake booster seems not to work (not enough vacuum getting pulled by the motor?) and the brake pedal goes very stiff as I slow down under about 15 km/h. This engine, the Saab B234, has a timing chain rather than a timing belt so I'm guessing the chain is slightly misaligned, resulting in a timing problem. I've had a look for any vacuum leaks but I can't see anything likely - the hoses under the bonnet seem to be intact and connected reasonably well, but I haven't done a thorough investigation. The oil level is OK and the oil doesn't look terrible - I don't know when it last had an oil change but I think it's been less than 5000 km. I'll be calling the mechanic who did the transmission swap (they treated us well and are familiar with the car at this point) in any case, but I'm hoping you fine folks can give me some suggestions, especially other symptoms to look for.
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Jan 27, 2023 03:49
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 03:12 |
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Thanks for the suggestions re: air leak. That seems to make sense as a starting point. That also sounds cheaper than digging all the way in to the timing chain. I brought up the timing chain because years ago I had a car (1990 Dodge Grand Caravan 3.6L V6) that suddenly developed terrible fuel economy. My mechanic at the time assumed someone was stealing gas from me, until I had the emissions checked and we discovered large amounts of unburned fuel in the exhaust. The timing chain was misaligned or otherwise not in spec. Most other cars I've had have had timing belts which I am generally paranoid about because of their failure consequences in interference engines.
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Jan 28, 2023 04:19
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