Happy (belated) new year!

After Christmas, we headed out to Birmingham, AL, mostly because I hadn't been there and my wife refused to visit Paducah, KY.  Why Paducah?  Not really sure, but the city's own website highlights the bridge out of town, that should be telling enough. Hadn't been there either, not really sure why anybody wants to stay there, but I did find out, while watching NOVA, that Paducah has a large scale storage facility for nuclear waste, so it has that going for it.

Vulcan

The largest cast iron statue, Vulcan, resides in Birmingham.  The work itself can be found atop a hill in sturdy park that has the look of a WPA project -- The kind of public works the U.S. desperately needs but no longer undertakes. Unfortunately, the pedestal on which the sculpture rests was the victim of a late 1960's improvement where an elevator shaft was installed directly in front of the pedestal, obstructing the view of the original architecture and visually competing with the structure from nearly every angle. The impressive fountains were replaced by grass and the statue itself was actually painted dirt red.  A complete disaster for such an impressive work of art.  In the 2000's the statue was refurbed (as the picture shows) but the terrible elevator shaft remains; hopefully, somebody will get the sense to tear it down.

Returning from Birmingham, I was sent to San Francisco; actually, Sunnyvale, which is an edge city with who's primary resident is Google along with a smattering of other high-tech companies of all flavors.  While in Sunnyvale, I had lunch at a place called Barn Thai, who's decor was decidedly un-barn like, I think "barn" might not mean "barn" as in Pottery Barn, or maybe it does and the decor was just that bad. Despite the confusing name, the food was excellent.

As we were leaving lunch, I spotted this gem of a Chevy Astro van:

Not really sure why the owner was decorating his van as such.  The group I was with thought this was a soccer fan, but the appearance of several bicycles didn't seem to jive with that theory. I would have liked to get some better pictures, but all I had was my cell phone and we were running late by the time we left.

Car problems; or, lack thereof

Unlike the last time I returned from CA, when my car didn't make it home from the airport due to the water pump failing, this time, the ride home was uneventful.  I was very happy because the weather was unpleasant when I landed and I wasn't much in the mood to call for another tow.  Oddly enough, I did share a flight with another pair of basset hounds.  Different than the pair before, not sure what's going on here, maybe some elaborate basset hound migration scheme?  I'll have questions if I encounter another set of hounds on my next trip to SFO.

Over to the left is a picture from window of the snow covered Pittsburgh suburbs on my approach to PIT when returning home.  The prior week in Sunnyvale, temperatures remained in the low 60's, maybe in the 40's at night.  In the greater Pittsburgh area, the weather told a different story, with snow accumulation and temperatures rarely rising above the teens.

Here's the good news: I think I've reached steady-state with the mechanical condition of the Freestyle.  There's still problems with the car, but none interfering with the daily driverness of the car:

1. Rear lift supports not working
   More of an annoyance than what would expect.  I like taking the Freestyle for grocery shopping as the flat folding back seat is great for loading the bags.  To use the back gate, I need to balance the door on my back while loading/unloading.  I think I'll tackle this next.
2. Exhaust leak
   A small leak has blossomed into a more agricultural exhaust note.  The sound seems to be emanating from the far side of the catalytic converter, so I'll just need an resonator and muffler. I hope.  Working under a car tickles some deep-seated entrapment fears, I'll need to get other these to fix this problem.
3. Air conditioning system recharge
   The compressor failed, resulting in the accessory belt breaking regularly.  While no article has been written on the subject, I replaced the compressor and while I was at it, the rest of the A/C system.  The system hasn't been recharged, I task I felt could wait until the arrival of warmer weather.
4. Transmission not shifting smoothly
   The symptom I'm seeing is the transmission not wanting to shift into glide or sometimes not up-shifting, as much as that concept exists in a CVT.  I've found putting the car into neutral and letting is drift for a little will result in the return to correct behavior.  The weird thing: the RPMs  don't drop below 2000 when in neutral in this state, so we might not be seeing a transmission problem per se.
5. Airbag light
   This turned on a few months ago, I need do some continuity tests to chase down this problem, as I'm not sure if the sensor failed or if the wire to the sensor failed.
6. Traction control and ABS lights
   We have some dashboard lights for traction control and ABS.  I have the codes for these, it's   a matter of chasing them down and figuring out what's really wrong.
7. Suspension
   The Freestyle has the factory dampeners, at nearly 300K, well past their service life.  This mildly inteferes with the handling under regular driving conditions and when a bumpy road the ride becomes, well, let say spirited.

Over the next few months, I'll be knocking things off the list as I have the time, unless something else crops-up that takes the Freestyle off the road.

Christmas tree and a trip to the mall

We went to our local tree farm (being out in the country, there are several tree farms to pick from) to slay our Christmas tree.  The "product" of a fresh-cut tree involves climbing on a tractor, being abandoned in a field with a saw and hauling the tree home atop one's car after the tree has been baled. Wondering around in the field looking for a tree means that quite quickly, nearly all trees begin to look the same.  Only once it's home does one notice the bald spots and general crookedness of a tree that looked just fine in the field.  Buying a used car is pretty much the same experience, what looks to be great in the lot with its companions seems to loose its luster once you've gotten it home. Buyer's remorse?  Maybe it's just too difficult to process so much information at one go, so our brain fills in the details, dents and scrapes.  When we're looking at one car, we can the concentrate on the finer details.

Probably won't fall off, maybe?

 We didn't always go Christmas tree hunting, in our family, BC (Before Children, or, BCE, Before Children Existed for the folks with a knot in their kickers and variously colored hair.), we celebrated Christmas sans a tree. Having a $500 dollar car means not having to worry about dents/scratches incidental to getting the tree home, all one needs to do is heave the tree on the roof and secure it with some twine.  No padding or a tarp, just get close and lob.  It wasn't always like this, when we drove an overpriced Honda SUV or pricey minivan, we cared about the roof.  Dents?  Scratches?  Sap? Mud? All of that used to matter when our car monthly payment approximated the purchase price of the Freestyle.

One feature of the Freestule that I just love is the raised roof rack.  This made securing the tree much easier, as I had an easy place on which to loop the twine and make knots.   In the process poorly securing the tree to the car, I looked down and what did I see by an expended hypodermic needle.  It's probably flotsam from a friendly neighborhood injectable drug user, either getting their tree or working in the fields.  Maybe a diabetic?  Most diabetics fanatically keep their sharps safe, so maybe, but unlikely.

A trip to the mall, some more Christmas lights

Limp home mode

The next day, we got the first snow of the year: better than a light dusting, maybe one or two inches. On my way to the mall, after dropping my kid off at work who didn't want to drive in the snow I felt the AWD system kick-in and then my troubles started.  The car went into "limp-home mode".  An Eat 'n Park was close by, so we stopped there for brunch and after eating we'd see if the problem went away, as stopping for a quick road-side reboot of the engine didn't help.  I didn't have my code reader handy, I'm not sure what problem occurred, but we got the combination wrench and check engine lights, as the picture shows.  This can mean either transmission, transfer case or throttle problems.

Former furniture store

Post breakfast, the engine started without an issue.  We needed to head to the mall for some shopping, which was close. If the car became cranky again, the plan was  to have the better half shop while I called for a tow.  I'd have a nice place to wait at the mall for a tow truck and would return to the mall with a working car.
My last visit to the mall was... I can't even recall when I was last at the mall, but over the years, there's been a shift from retail to personal services.  Now, however, the transition now seems to be from personal services to just empty spaces, not unlike the transition many small town's main streets in the area endured in the 1970's as retail fled main street for the mall, store fronts turned into exercise and tattoo parlors before the front windows served to hold news paper concealing the empty insides.

Earlier this year, before the retail season, Sears closed at the mall.  When the Beaver Valley Mall opened in 1970, Sears was an anchor tenant (along with Gimbels and Horne's), maintaining the same location for 40+ years: a dependable source of tools, lawnmowers,

As always, an empty lot around Sears

boots, Levi's and something polyester your grandmother would wear to a cousin's wedding.  The next biggest tenant, Macy's, doesn't look to be sticking around, as the upper floor has been closed and the range of merchandise greatly decreased.  Meanwhile, across the street, Wal-Mart's lot brimmed with shoppers.

Torn seal, failed water pump, back on the road

Oil from torn seal

When my new water pump failed, the ground metal from the water pump tore newly installed seal into bits, causing another oil leak.  Here's what I saw when I removed the pump from the car, over on the right.

Having replaced the very same seal before, I wasn't at all intimidated this time around. Out came the seal puller and in one swift hand-motion, I lost my grip and whacked the back of my hand against the radiator.  I was wearing my gloves, but they don't offer much protection for the back of the hand and it seems that's the most sensitive part. A little more fiddling and out came the seal. 

Torn seal

The tearing was complete, a replacement was necessary.  Getting a clear picture wasn't easy, because it was difficult to keep the background and foreground in focus, but here it is over on the left.  While the old seal apparently wore so that it wasn't keeping a tight grip on the camshaft, this one was completely compromised.  Just like the last time, I put a thin coat of oil on the seal and worked it over the camshaft, using my Craftsman Seal Seating tool (right) and a few taps from a plastic dead blow hammer to make ensure the seal was seated.

Re-attaching the water pump

New pump installed

Once the seal was back in place, I re-attached the three 8mm bolts holding the new water pump loosely and then the center 13mm bolt loosely, then tightened the outer bolts and then put more force on the inner bolt.  I'm not sure why this is the process, probably to make sure the impeller is correctly centered in the housing.  The final torque specification for the center bolt is 18 in/lbs (25nm) which is not much more than hand tight and on the lower end of my torque wrench's scale.  It didn't feel like much so I gave the bolt an extra 1/2 turn, as I wasn't sure if my wrench was accurate and I didn't want the impeller to stop working if the bolt wiggled loose.  But I didn't want to overtighten either as that could crush the seals around shaft keeping the fluid where it belongs.

All back together, recycling the coolant

When I took things apart, I used a basin to catch the coolant fluid in hopes I could use it again and not have the hassle of taking it to the disposal center (c'mon, we don't put chemicals like this down the drain, that would be uncivil) whilst saving a few bucks.  Before pouring the coolant back in the car, examination showed bits of dreck floating about, dreck I'd rather keep on the outside of the cooling system.  My solution was to put a coffee filter in the funnel and have that catch the chaff; however the filter was a bit too fine and I was a bit too impatient. 

The filter was replaced by a paper towel, and in about 10 minutes, all of the captured coolant was back in the system.  I was thinking that the ethylene glycol molecule's size was the cause of the poor flow through the filter, but I was wrong by a factor of 1000.  Our friend C₂H₆O₂ is about half a nanometer and a the average pore size of a coffee filter is about 50 microns, so the chemical should have passed through like a bee through an open window, or air through a residential screen, even if some of the molecules clung together in the filter's mesh.  The slow speed was probably the filter doing it's job removing nasties from the fluid.

I thought I was being paranoid with the filter, but here's a picture of what remained in the pan after filtering.  And, yes, the pan was clean before it caught the fluid.  When pouring the liquid into the filter, I was careful not to disturb the sediments, as I didn't want the filter to break, or more likely, clog.

Job being done, I'm hoping that two's a charm when it comes to water pumps.  It's been about 200 miles on the new pump with no problems, so I'm not worried about the torque of the impeller bolt, or at least I'm not worried that much.

Water Pump, Encore!

When your correspondent last wrote, my Freestyle stranded me on the way home from the Pittsburgh

Frownie

airport.  Something in the cooling system failed (I was guessing the thermostat, which turned out to be half true!) and when I tried to slowly return home, stopping to let the engine cool, my wife guilted me in calling a tow truck and having her meet me for breakfast.  I came to a stop at King's, a chain started by Hartley King, an offshoot of his fuel distribution business.  Kings always played second-fiddle to Pittsburgh's dominant family chain "Eat 'n Park", despite having both better breakfast and desert menus.  For years, as a counter to Eat 'n Park's "Smiley" cookie, King's had the Frownie -- a stroke of marketing brilliance to counter the Smiley -- a brownie with a no-so-menacing frown.  But it went deeper than the frown: the earth-tone brownie matched the Kings décor to the tee, the fudgy bites were more substantial than the nearly flavorless Smiley cookies, like the food at Kings versus E'n'P.   Kings has since been purchased by some outfit on the west coast and is losing it's quirkiness, the menu isn't on the placemat anymore, the Frownie retired to mascot Florida and decidedly 70's faux wood Formica décor replaced by cleaner and brighter tiles and paint.

I didn't have the chance to look into the problem that day and some home things kept me from tearing into the engine for about a week.  When I did get to seeing what was happening, I had the following suspects, in my order of probability:

1. Blockage in radiator
   This would keep the coolant from flowing, since I was not getting heat in the cabin, this would sort of make sense, but I would have expected some coolant flow from the engine to provide some heat.
2. Thermostat valve failure
   I replaced this already, but it could have been the problem, maybe a discount part failed?
3. Water pump
   Least likely, since it was just replaced.

I'm thinking #1 as the problem, since I replaced the thermostat and water pump.  But, the nature of the symptoms (over heating engine, no output from heater) lent itself to being a failed water pump, despite it being replaced just a few months back.  I started by removing the various pipes from the cooling manifold (using a basin to catch the fluid) and to my surprise, saw some fresh oil dripping on the starter, along with a whiff of the "oil and coolant" smell.  Something interesting is afoot, just not sure what.

Note oil drip on starter...

  Off came the water pump.  Flipping it over, I see oil leaking from the weep hole of the pump.

This was odd, because water pumps shouldn't contain any oil.  Then, on close inspection of the part, the nature of the problem became more obvious, looking closely where the pump interfaced with the cam shaft:

Then, it can back to me...  When I was pulling out of the airport, I heard a squeaking/grinding noise, I that was this part of the pump breaking and being reduced back to the metal powder from which it was formed, in the process tearing the seal around the camshaft, permitting the oil into the pump shaft.  Here's what the seal looks like in the engine:

At this point, I needed to replace the water pump and seal.  But the thermostat was OK, right?  No it wasn't, so that will need to be replaced as well.  What makes this more frustrating is my smugness over having the luxury of time to do the research and wait for delivery.  At least I have practice!

Overheating and stranded

I was out of town for most of last week, at a company site in CA.  When I travel to our offices in California, I usually take the early AM flight Monday from PIT to SFO and drive to San Jose.  This flight is usually at 100% capacity.  However, this week, I departed on a Tuesday and found myself in a row with an unoccupied middle seat, and on the way back on the red-eye Friday, same seating arrangement!  Unusual. What was also unusual was the pair of basset hound "emotional support" animals waiting to board the plane I just departed (was too tired to get a picture, sorry!) on Saturday morning.  We have a basset hound, they're great dogs, but they smell, shed and drool more than the average traveler.  While the bassets display excellent temperament, they tend do want to do their own thing and will put their weight into getting their way, so I can't imagine one being on a lap and compliant for even a short flight.

Overheating

When I returned to airport lot, I jumped into the car and made it about 5 miles down the highway to discover the engine heat climbing.  I also heard a bit of a weird noise coming from the engine, a high pitched whine.  I stopped on the highway's shoulder, let things cool-off then got off the highway and stopped again at a gas station, then at a McDonalds, Rite-Aid, Golf course -- each time the temperature made it too close to the red-line for me to be comfortable.  After 2 hours, traveling about 18 miles, I stopped at the King's in Monaca called my wife to meet me for breakfast and then AAA for a tow home. 

I didn't want things to get too overheated, as that could cause the a head gasket to break or worse, the block to crack.  Since I hadn't called AAA in a while for a tow and I wasn't that far from home, this was covered under the cost of my membership.

By this time, I was tired and just a little more than frustrated.  This would be the first time the car left me stranded.  At least I was close to home and could easily get to help.  But still.

There's a few things this could be:

1. Water pump
   The engine was overheating because coolant wasn't circulating through the system.
2. Thermostat
   Coolant was being blocked from flowing through the system, resulting in poor cooling.  Maybe not the problem, in many cases the coolant will still circulate through the heater core before the thermostat opens... But I wasn't getting heat, so maybe not.
3. Radiator
   A blocked Radiator can result in decreased cooling efficiency. 
4. Coolant leak
   Could be a problem... But I found that the system contained lots of coolant and the cooling system was under pressure, so I think I can cross this one off the list.

Recall, that I replaced the water pump and thermostat already.  Could one of the new parts failed?  It would seem so, but that would be a real bummer.  There's some interesting things of note I'm mulling over:

• Heater wasn't working.  This could mean a the pump was not circulating the coolant or the thermostat wasn't opening to let the water circulate through the heater core
• A squeaking noise was heard as I was exiting the airport.  I thought it was the wheel, but maybe the water pump?

I have some yard work to do, so won't be able to tackle this problem in the next day or two. Considering these parts have been replaced once already, I'm not that happy about having to do the job again.

Despite the car problems when I got home, the trip was great.  One of the great things about the San Jose area: all of the great food around the area! The people at the office might think the various Korean hot pot and Pho places are pedestrian, but it's a delightful culinary break for me.  One of the new things I tried was persimmon, a crisp fruit with what I can describe as a sweet, crunchy pumpkin taste.  There's a much musher variety of persimmon as well, but the firm variety makes for the best out of hand snacking.  Can't find any in these parts, so I'll have to bring more back from my next trip.