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I have nothing to add other than "gently caress you E-torx"
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Oct 1, 2016 18:31
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kastein posted:Yeah, XZN is 90 degree points and a cross-flat to cross-point ratio of 1.414 while 12pt is 60 degree points and a ratio of... 1/0.832 I think? Not sure. You will essentially be point loading the bolt with minimal contact and are almost guaranteed to round them off. I know. If it fit better it wouldn't be proper cheating, would it?
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Oct 1, 2016 19:54
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hello doublepost because sucky internet
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Oct 1, 2016 20:00
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That's the great thing about standards, there's so many to choose from.
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Oct 1, 2016 20:08
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Day three: my pound of flesh for Race Truck. Showed up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for my first twelve hour shift at the garage. Nice day outside, had my coffee and can-do attitude so I was ready to hit it. Got to do a full set of tires, how to mount and balance them. The whole process reminded me a lot of mounting bike tires, which I've done, but a whole lot larger and louder. The blast of air needed to get the bead to seal is tremendous, even my rock-and-roll-dulled hearing was having a rough time. Balancing was kind of neat and it turns out that it's not an EXACT science, just a KIND of science. Line up lines, hammer a lead weight into the wheel, blammo, next wheel. Someone had mentioned to me, a long time ago, that tire mounting is a scary thing and that I should avoid it. Not sure what they meant since I was having a pretty okay time doing it, and compared to what the rest of the evening had in store for me, tire mounting was a paradise. I have stumbled upon a Rite of Passage for mechanics at Turbo Tim's: fixing Race Truck. Race Truck is a 1990 Ford F-150 5.0L automatic. Over the years, the wrenchers at TT's have installed:
Once the rusty scrap-heap was up on the lift (after a lot of sweating that the frame was going to break in half), I saw the leaky Pitman shaft seal. The new one arrived and I proceeded to waste 6 hours of my life trying to remove the seal and install the new one in the correct way without ruining it. I lost the new snap ring when it slipped off of the snap ring pliers and flew away so fast I couldn't track it, and the spacer had been originally installed upside down so I had to remove it and reinstall it (AND the arm) four separate times. Snap rings are now my most despised enemy. I can't trust those fuckers. 8PM rolls around, the thing still leaks. I put "recommend replacing steering gearbox" in the notes, sweep up the ATF that's all over the floor (sawdust works so drat well), pound some whiskey, scour my scraped forearms with Bactine, and do some dishes so that I could end the day with a feeling of accomplishment. Woke up three times during the night because of anxiety over not getting the truck fixed and leaving it over the weekend. Emailed Tim the next day with a recap and he's not sweating it at all. Makes me feel a little better. I'm not discouraged, I need to learn stuff, and overpowering, sleep-depriving failure is one stern teacher. No pictures this time around, my phone died and is on its way to Fort Worth, Texas.
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Oct 3, 2016 21:10
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Snap rings can be awful. The little ones fly away and the big ones are bears. Saab b235 engines have the oil pump cover retained by one that's about 4 inches in diameter.
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Oct 3, 2016 23:38
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When I take snap rings off I like to put some kind of blast shield around the area, even if it's just a shop towel held in the general vicinity. At least that will slow the bounce or reduce the number of directions it might go. Hell yeah for breaking your Ford power steering pump virginity.
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Oct 4, 2016 03:43
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Seat Safety Switch posted:When I take snap rings off I like to put some kind of blast shield around the area, even if it's just a shop towel held in the general vicinity. At least that will slow the bounce or reduce the number of directions it might go. But that removes half the fun of waiting for the ping that may or may not come from hitting the ground. We call them jesus clips at my shop. Mostly because you pray it doesn't go catty wampass . And scuz dont worry about getting fooled by a leaky old bricknose. Ford is a lovely power steering system builder. I cant think of one car they made a decent set up. Well i guess all the hydroboost ones but ford didnt design that so..... Either way keep up the good wrenching dude.
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Oct 4, 2016 03:49
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Better pliers help a lot. These are alright: https://www.amazon.com/Channellock-927-8-Inch-Retaining-Plier/dp/B000TG80SY They are angled to better hold the ring and also you change the tips to get the a close fit.
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Oct 4, 2016 04:01
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Appreciate the encouraging words, dudes  NitroSpazzz posted:If my friends Dad who's 6'4" and at least 350 can fit in mine you can fit. Sure you won't be comfortable by any means but you could technically fit. Getting in will be tricky, getting out will be an adventure.  ) but I left the owner a little note on the windshield asking if they could please contact me so that I could try to sit in it. Pretty weird Adiabatic posted:Holy poo poo this. 
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Oct 4, 2016 17:27
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Worth mentioning that you can gain an inch or two of headroom with Scirocco seats since they sat lower to compensate for the lower roof line.
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Oct 4, 2016 17:31
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1500quidporsche posted:Worth mentioning that you can gain an inch or two of headroom with Scirocco seats since they sat lower to compensate for the lower roof line. Or just modify the seats to sit on the floor. If my 6'4" dad can figure out a way to drive a lotus espirit and a bug eye sprite, I'm sure you can find a way to fit into a rabbit pickup. Granted the sprite's seat was welded to the floor as far back as was physically possible and the drivers seat in the lotus had almost no foam in it, but you can make it work!
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Oct 4, 2016 17:43
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Definitely don't use the mk2 seats like I have in my rabbit pickup. They're a few inches taller and I barely have clearance between my legs and the steering wheel. Other than that it's pretty fun with it's ABA bottom end swap and Gti trans.
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Oct 4, 2016 20:43
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kastein posted:Agreed. The only redeeming feature of allen heads is that rounding them out makes a nice shiny spot to strike an arc on with the welder, and if you know what you're up against and bought replacement bolts ahead of time, you can find the smallest Torx bit that won't slide in, hammer the bastard in, and spin the bolt right out. Glad to know this is an accepted practice for allen heads.
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Oct 5, 2016 13:16
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Olympic Mathlete posted:Glad to know this is an accepted practice for allen heads. There's a similar way to take care of lock lug nuts when there's no key. Hammer a not-exactly-large-enough 12-point socket over the bastard and torque away. Day 4 is this evening. Can't wait to hear what happened with Race Truck.
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Oct 5, 2016 13:58
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Olympic Mathlete posted:Glad to know this is an accepted practice for allen heads. 9 times out of 10 it's the only way I get Allen head Ford F-series front hub lockout retention bolts out intact. They're recessed into the (plastic or potmetal) lockout cover, so drilling them out is usually a mistake and you can't really get a pair of pliers on them. The bolt kit is dirt cheap online so if I have to mess with those I simply buy new bolts and then use my lifetime warranty Torx bits as Allen EZ-outs, which they excel at, unlike actual EZ-outs. If you remember to wiggle the Torx bit out of the bolt as soon as you've broken it loose instead of waiting till you have unscrewed it all the way, you can usually even get it back out by hand and do it on the next bolt! 
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Oct 5, 2016 22:02
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Olympic Mathlete posted:Glad to know this is an accepted practice for allen heads. That, or the opposite, with a too-small 12-point socket hammered over the outside of the head.
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Oct 6, 2016 03:22
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jamal posted:That, or the opposite, with a too-small 12-point socket hammered over the outside of the head. This is the only use for those pesky imperial (inches) sockets that always come in your sets.
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Oct 6, 2016 19:41
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I've never had any real issue with hex in head stuff, although admittedly I've always been told that it is a sin against God to use a ball end and the bolt will do its best impression of when they opened the ark in raiders as punishment for your sins if you try to.
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Oct 6, 2016 19:48
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It's even better when the ball end snaps off and jams in the hole. Insert euphemisms here.
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Oct 6, 2016 20:02
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Day four: How I stopped worrying and learned that sometimes poo poo just sucks. The Race Truck was still in the shop and was the first thing I saw, but it was in Tim's station being worked on by Jasper. Below it? A brand-shiny-new power steering gearbox. "Yeah," Tim said. "Swanson put in another new Pitman seal and it blew out right away so they got a new gearbox." My reaction was a real-life, debeaked one of these:  The fucker finally steers, makes no distinctive whining noises, and I realized something that Jasper reinforced: if you've replaced something and it doesn't fix the problem, STOP REPLACING WHATEVER IT IS. I replaced the Pitman seal four times. That's when it clicked: sometimes poo poo just sucks and you gotta come up with the best way to put bad news. Good news: your truck is gonna live. Bad news: you need to give us another $300. First on the list was a 2010 Malibu that had not one but three "New Car Scent" trees hanging by the vents. God, I hate these cars. I haven't once sat in a modern American sedan that I didn't want to then immediately evacuate. Sight lines are garbage, throttle response is "when the engine gets to it," and the interior made me feel like I was wearing a strait jacket. Awful. Anyway, dude needed the TPMS sensors looked at and an oil change. This is the first engine I've worked on where I had to replace those funky oil filters that are just the paper/fabric cylinder and not the can-things. Looked under the car for an embarrassing amount of time before I decided to look it up. Happened to have a 1-1/4" socket to get 'er apart and the rest was pretty simple. Got to use the TPMS tool to diagnose, which was fun. The rear sensors were responding, the front ones were dead, and sure enough, the front tires did NOT match the rears. Customer said he got the tires replaced somewhere (not us) and they likely broke the sensors getting the old tires off. Learned on day three that breaking those sensors is as easy as breaking eggs. Good to know! Dude puttered off in his New Car Cloud, hopefully thinking about trading that bucket in for something not garbage. Second task was a guy and his 2007 Subaru Forester that had irregular tire wear on the driver's side front tire. This was the first time I'd sat in a Forester or any Subaru in a long time, and I gotta say, I was pleasantly surprised. Its owner is about my height and I fit into it without any difficulty at all, including operating the clutch. The whole jalopy was so appealing to me that a Forester might be in my future. I was not used to the short throws of the shifter and the clutch engaged really close to the ground, not sure how normal that is for subies. Got 'er up on the lift and saw that the tire in question had a nice, even taper from outside to inside, all the way down to the cords on the inside. Not a single other tire was nearly this bad. No play in any of the components; dude thought he broke a strut spring or a ball joint or something, but turned out he just needed an alignment and 4 new tires. I told the guy and he was very relieved. Relayed to me that the brake shop (not us) kept telling him "nah, your tires are fine!" Got him a quote for 4 news tires and an alignment and sent him on his way. Felt pretty good. After that it was pretty drama-free. Took one of our loaners, a Mazda 626, for a test drive to see whether anything was wrong with it, which there surprisingly wasn't. The CEL wasn't even lit. Got to spend some time having chin wags with my new co-workers and they're all really cool people. Jasper, turns out, doesn't even like cars. He bikes everywhere he can and doesn't see the point of owning a car. He bought a cherry Toyota Tacoma with a bad engine so that he can swap something into it and flip it. He calls these his "side hustles." Talked about how our schooling didn't get us any further in our chosen careers (he has a tech degree, I have a computer degree), how much crossover there is between IT and cars as far as problems and the mentality of "everything can be fixed; it's just a car/PC." We had our chat over what I later found out was the drive train and suspension components of a Mazda Miata. Turns out Tim's building it into a go-kart; the kit should arrive next month. You will all most certainly be receiving updates on this. Most of the employees that are around at the end of the day have only lived in Our Fair City for no longer than six months. We had a fun time trading stories about restaurants in the area, car problems, all that jazz. Fun group of guys. I find myself restless and bored at my day job. Cars demand my attention and insist on having their problems resolved as fast as possible whereas computers are mostly fine. There are things to work on, but they're long, drawn-out, boring projects that can get started whenever and, at least here and within my responsibilities, don't have to be done before a certain time. I become distracted and disengage quickly from projects, find no motivation to get things done, and most importantly, nothing in my office makes "brap-brap" noises. Photo dump! Race Truck   Subaru's questionable/UNSAFE AS poo poo tire:  Bad photo of a shoppe kitteh:  Proof that I work there: there's a hook with my name on it on which to hang keys for cars:  626 loaner:  "Oh I don't need to shower, I got most of it off" 
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Oct 6, 2016 20:27
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Man, if you'd just realized the ford repair was going to go that way you could have dumped another 50 bucks into a pair of hydraulic lines and they'd have a 100% new power steering system with zero old fluid in it and thus no chance of debris from the old system killing the new parts. Oh well, hindsight's 20/20. Subarus are great if you have a warranty or don't mind doing an engine-out every year or three, in my experience. The middle ground where you have no warranty and it's too new to get parts at the picknpull but you still spent 5k for it because it's reasonably new? Yeah, I try to avoid that subset of subarus...
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Oct 6, 2016 22:06
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kastein posted:Man, if you'd just realized the ford repair was going to go that way you could have dumped another 50 bucks into a pair of hydraulic lines and they'd have a 100% new power steering system with zero old fluid in it and thus no chance of debris from the old system killing the new parts. Oh well, hindsight's 20/20. I don't think I'd get anything newer than a 2008 Forester, I'm not a fan of the newer models because I'm a Luddite.
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Oct 6, 2016 22:18
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A mechanic not liking new cars isn't too far away from the proper use of "Luddite", to be fair.
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Oct 7, 2016 00:04
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scuz posted:First on the list was a 2010 Malibu that had not one but three "New Car Scent" trees hanging by the vents. God, I hate these cars. I haven't once sat in a modern American sedan that I didn't want to then immediately evacuate. Sight lines are garbage, throttle response is "when the engine gets to it," and the interior made me feel like I was wearing a strait jacket. Awful. Anyway, dude needed the TPMS sensors looked at and an oil change. This is the first engine I've worked on where I had to replace those funky oil filters that are just the paper/fabric cylinder and not the can-things. Looked under the car for an embarrassing amount of time before I decided to look it up. Happened to have a 1-1/4" socket to get 'er apart and the rest was pretty simple. Got to use the TPMS tool to diagnose, which was fun. The rear sensors were responding, the front ones were dead, and sure enough, the front tires did NOT match the rears. Customer said he got the tires replaced somewhere (not us) and they likely broke the sensors getting the old tires off. Learned on day three that breaking those sensors is as easy as breaking eggs. Good to know! Dude puttered off in his New Car Cloud, hopefully thinking about trading that bucket in for something not garbage. I had a loaner 2010 Malibu at one point, it didn't seem terrible.  The throttle response was definitely laggy as hell, but once the ECU realized you were shoving the pedal through the firewall, it got out of its own way pretty decently for a 4 cylinder midsize sedan. But the car reeked of old lady perfume. You know the kind, the one you associate with your great grandmother. It's a mix of perfume and diabetic sweat.My Ion uses the same type of oil filter (may even be the same filter). Every time I do an oil change I'm so happy I just have a little cartridge to get rid of and didn't have to get under the car to get to it. Even draining the oil just requires cranking the wheels to the right and reaching a bit past the wheel to the drain plug. It takes me about 10 minutes to change it. It takes me 20 minutes to find the drat socket for the filter housing though. Speaking of, you might want to get that socket. It's less than  and fits under the intake manifold easily. The supercharged version is a bit more cramped, you may have to use an adjustable wrench on those. But you'll only run into those on the Ion Redline and a couple of years of the Cobalt SS (the other SSs had a turbo 2.0 or the n/a 2.4).
randomidiot fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Oct 7, 2016 |
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Oct 7, 2016 04:39
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InitialDave posted:A mechanic not liking new cars isn't too far away from the proper use of "Luddite", to be fair. This is Minneapolis. I own three cars and wrench on them but I commuted 100% via bike. I know people like the mechanic.
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Oct 7, 2016 14:26
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Yu-Gi-Ho! posted:I had a loaner 2010 Malibu at one point, it didn't seem terrible.
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Oct 7, 2016 14:49
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At least with GM, they're specific to the engine family. 
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Oct 8, 2016 00:54
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scuz posted:I'm being slightly hyperbolic about the Malibu, but my ideal car is a street-legal go-kart with a pick-up bed, so my tastes and those of a person who would buy a Malibu by choice are very far apart from each other. Are those filter housings pretty much the same across manufacturers or is that one of those fun "WHY IS THIS DIFFERENT" situations? There is a reason lisle sells a set of the most common 6-7 sizes.
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Oct 8, 2016 09:53
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Seat Safety Switch posted:For the backwards-facing large bolts holding the caliper mounting bracket to the hub spindle, I usually use a conventional box-end wrench and just hit the wrench with a hammer (I prefer a three-pound Home Depot mini-sledge for work inside the wheel-wells) to loosen the bolts. I've never had success with a ratchet. NitroSpazzz posted:If my friends Dad who's 6'4" and at least 350 can fit in mine you can fit. Sure you won't be comfortable by any means but you could technically fit. Getting in will be tricky, getting out will be an adventure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWct_KYGRQo
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Oct 8, 2016 12:28
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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That is me. That is what I look like.
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Oct 8, 2016 14:07
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scuz posted:That is me. That is what I look like. After seeing him in person this post is the 110% accurate. I still don't believe you can drive your golf.
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Oct 8, 2016 16:00
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Days 5 and 6: Wherein I provide anecdotal and photographic evidence of my employer's stratospheric level of automotive insanity. "My butt was on the upright part of the seat and I was shoving the ceiling so that I didn't slide up any further. All 4 of us looked over at the guy in his new Viper. He had the steering wheel in a death grip and was trying to shake it forward and backward and we could see him yelling 'GO, YOU MOTHERFUCKER' at his own car. Unreal poo poo, man." Lars had a sort of far-away look when he was done explaining his and Doyle's latest visit to Powercruise in Brainerd, MN. They had gone up to Powercruise with Tim, who brought his home-turbo'd diesel Mercedes. Tim had lined the car up next to one of the new Vipers and walked away from it in his 4-dudes-in-it Mercedes. I didn't get any shots of the outside, but here's its engine:   That turbo is out of a 6.xL Cummins and he did all the welding on the intake manifold himself; a friend of his did the welding for the exhaust manifold after Tim tacked it together. What you can't see because of the camera angle is the nitrous injector/regulator/whatever because Tim's motto is "do it big." He was "disappointed" when he found out that this whole thing only made 450hp and 500lb/ft to the wheels, so he tuned it and got an extra 75hp and 100lb/ft. To demonstrate, he did a burnout in his own shop. The tailpipe belched thick, black smoke and then the tires did a bit of smoking themselves. Everyone laughed then we popped the garage door to get the smoke out. His other car is a Mercedes V12 biturbo, I'll try to get snaps of that next time I'm in. An update on the Miatakart: he's ordered an Exocet frame which should be arriving mid-November, but that's not the biggest update. He's not using the Miata engine, he's using, in his words, a built LS. I cannot wait. I told him that if he needs any pro bono assistance that I'm 100% up for helping out because my thirst for balls-in-a-vice-crazy projects will likely never be quenched (mostly cuz I can't afford them and have to live vicariously through the exploits of others). Here's the "miata" as it sits now:  That puny 4 cylinder will soon be gone, not sure where it's going just yet. Some delusional urban cowboy decided that they wanted running boards installed on their 1997 F-150. The plugs that are supposed to be popped out to mount them were accessible from what should have been the inside of the steel rails, but it was rusted to pieces. Those rubber plugs were now load-bearing, and when I popped one of them out, the rust crumbled down around it, making it impossible to mount anything. Nobody believed it when I told them and everyone was shocked when they saw how rusty it was. I'm not certain why. It's a twenty year-old truck in Minnesota. No running boards for the person who chain-smokes cigarettes in their V8 F150 with every radio preset set to NPR. Odd combo. Another patient was a 1996 Jeep Cherokee Sport with a leaky radiator and power-steering weirdness. It also came complete with these questionable valve caps:  The valve cover was seeping oil so bad that it was hard to breath when the hood was up and the engine was up to temp. The water pump squealed like a banshee and there was no radiator leak to be found except on the host connected near the radiator cap, which was also leaking. A new rad cap and a hose clamp fixed that right up. The customer didn't want to fix anything else on the engine, but at least it had a new radiator just installed by someone else, so that's fine, I guess. Tim also likes LaCroix:  A lot. While I was doing an oil change on a Lexus, behind me, I heard a sound of a viscous fluid hitting the ground. The used oil collector had become so full that the oil was coming out of the quick disconnect where the air gets plugged in. Oil was all over the floor, probably two or three quarts' worth, and it was still coming out. I didn't know what to do so I jammed the nearest thing that would plug the hole (a screw) and went to get sawdust to clean it up. Learned all kindsa things about those used oil collectors, like how they feel when they're full, where to look to find its levels, and how to pump all the oil out of it and into these enormous plastic cubes. I also inhaled what felt like five board feet of sawdust. I woke up from a dream being very sad. That dream was that I had forgotten so many car payments that the bank took the Golf from me and said "don't worry about the rest of the money you owe us." I was so happy. The Golf ran especially rough this morning which means it's burned through the last four quarts of 5w-30 I poured into it a month ago and the spark plugs are hosed. I should clean those before the weather gets much colder.
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Oct 13, 2016 17:41
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scuz posted:
Is it bad that I am more jealous about this picture than the others? LaCroix is the best.
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Oct 13, 2016 19:41
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scuz posted:
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Oct 13, 2016 21:06
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Be careful with those oil collectors and make sure you know the difference between vacuum and pressure when you go to purge them, eh? No reason to be the 5W40 Al Jolson.
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Oct 14, 2016 03:29
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jamal posted:Opening the bleed screw makes it easier to push the pistons back in plus you aren't sending the old fluid back up the lines. always this, you can usually push it back by hand with the screw open.
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Oct 14, 2016 23:19
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Seat Safety Switch posted:Be careful with those oil collectors and make sure you know the difference between vacuum and pressure when you go to purge them, eh?
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Oct 15, 2016 00:33
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scuz posted:When I left the shop, oil was well.
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Oct 15, 2016 00:51
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| # ? May 2, 2024 18:09 |
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"You walk along the street at night, shouting It's Twelve O'clock and All's Well" "What if it is not all well?" "You bloody find another street."
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Oct 15, 2016 00:58
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