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!