C1175, C1297, C1222, C1296: Replacing rear wheel ABS sensor

Entrapment.  My top fear, right after heights and too thick (or thin, for that matter) a glaze on my creme brulee.  No matter what I do to ensure my car is properly lifted and secured, there's a nagging fear in my head my repair work will end tragically, where my last sight is the under-body of a Ford Freestyle before my demise; at least I will have the happiest widow in the tri-county area.

Lifting the rear of the Freestyle requires more forethought, because there's not a good lift point aft of the front door where I can fit a jack and then a jack stand to bear the weight while I'm working.  To lift the car, I jacked the front enough to lift the rear tire off of the ground and then placed a jack stand at the rear of the car on the unibody rails where one would put a scissor jack whilst doing a road-side tire swap-out.

Once the wheel was off, the sensor was nicely exposed and I had (just!) enough clearance to do what I needed to be done.

C1175, C1297, C1222, C1296: Traction control sensors; the beginning

Not that RCA.

Root cause.  The next few posts will be about root cause analysis disguised as automobile repair. Properly doing an RCA means identifying the problem, understanding it well and then fixing it.

For those in engineering fields, RCA, root cause analysis, has deep office-politics ramifications: doing an RCA for most below average engineering groups (half of the engineering groups fall below the average!) means somebody will be blamed for things not working at at risk of losing a chunk of their annual bonus.  Fingers will get pointed.  And people will scurry to avoid the RCA fickle finger of fate.  All of this is too bad, because when we learn the root cause of something, it presents the easiest way to fix the problem with the most certainty the same issue won't return.  Turns out, the real world is a bit more messy.

300K!

On my way to work this AM, hit the 300K mark.  Pulled over and got a snapshot of the odometer.  Mechanical odometers, as they quite literally rolled over were a bit more satisfying to watch, as the 9's moved to 0's from right to left, with the most-significant numbers not entirely moved into place until you hit a few thousand on the lower numbers.

What's 300K?

• About the average sale price for a house in 2006
• All the calories in this food, for a thousand of your friends and family
• Twice the capacity of the Nurburgring

I expected to keep this car for a year. I simply like it too much to let it go.  The combination versatility, comfort and super-cheap transportation keeps it around.

Onward!

Lift gate, minor issue, fixed!

Owning a cheap car means compromising with various things sort-of-but-not-entirely working.  You don't drive the car, you negotiate travel to your intended destination.  Anyway...

The lift-gate on my Freestyle was catching on the black, plastic trim.  The work-around was to push down on the trim when opening the lift gate to avoid the extra bit of effort needed to overpower the bit of plastic interfering with the operation of the rear lift-gate.

Not a big problem, but enough of a problem for me to spend 15 minutes to fix it.  Repair involved removing the panel, cleaning away the dirt caught underneath, fixing the fastener so the trim stayed seated and putting the trim back.

Battery of problems

As noted, several times, my battery has died after letting the car sit unstarted, for shorter and shorter intervals.  Usually, after a jump and a nice drive later, all of the electrons were back in their proper place.  This time, I wasn't so lucky, and after a few 30-minute drives home, the battery didn't hold a charge overnight.  Something was wrong.

Did I have a parasitic drain on an otherwise good battery due to dodgy wiring in my Ford?  Or, did my battery have one terminal in the grave?  I found out, somewhat inclusively, but not before disabling my wipers.

New fuel filter

Probably the original

While the car was in the garage getting exhaust work done, I figured why not change the fuel filter as well?  While I was at it, I ripped apart the old one to check its dirtiness -- turns out it was plenty dirty, but I'm not sure if a clean filter will make a difference in the overall operation of the car.

As the filter does its job, what it catches will reduce the flow rate through the filter, meaning the pump will need to work harder to provide the same amount of fuel as a clean filter, or the car will have figure out how to run with less gas that expected; in practice, both are probably happening.

Flex pipe fun - pt2

Rusted flex pipe

The exhaust project breaks down into two parts: 1) out with the old and then 2) in with the new.  After a struggle removing the old part, installation of the new piping was a snap.

Because I had cut away some of the connecting surfaces, there was a little more work than just twisting the nuts/bots the opposite direction and calling the job done.

Here's what I needed to do:

1.  Replace the flange to the cat converter on the back end-of the y-pipe.
2. Attach the fronts of the y-pipe to the existing plumbing.

Let's get to work!

Flex pipe fun - pt1

It's been a while since my last dispatch.  The Freestyle hasn't been on the road for the last six weeks due the following:

1. The exhaust was leaking, this needed to be fixed for PA state inspection
2. Things have been nuts on the home front, preventing me from tackling item #1
• Christmas!  I took some time to bake cookies (from the excellent Christmas Cookie Book from J. Knipe and a few of my own concoctions I stash in the front material)
• Some work travel
• Other stuff, I won't bore the reader. 

Now, things have calmed-down, giving me time to address item #1 on the list, that pesky exhaust leak resulting in the car sounding loud enough to attract onlookers.  I'm not a fan of exhaust work.  Yes, it's basically plumbing for air; it just seems to be the collector of all things rusty and stubborn -- as proven by this job.