The ballad of fixing my Car(s)

So, it always seems that everything that can go wrong, does so right around the time I have to pay my taxes. This year was no different. I have two cars, and they both broke at the exact same time.

Now one of the cars I don't drive very often. It's a sports car I bought a few years ago for various reasons. Normally I only drive it on weekends, but working from home now, well it can go months without being driven. When I was working in Oregon a couple years back, it would also go months without being driven. So the battery went dead this week, for the third (and final) time. There was no recharging it; it would no longer hold a charge. And batteries here in California are pretty damn expensive. Maybe they're that way in the rest of the country, I don't know. I just know from other things (motorcycles) that the prices all have doubled in the last four years.

While that was all going on, my other car started to make the grinding noise of death from somewhere around the fan belts. I thought it was the alternator at first, so I had to start pulling off the belts (there are two - one for alternator and power steering, one for AC). Of course, as odds would have it, it wasn't the alternator.

So, I had to pull off the AC belt, which means pulling off the electric fans attached to the radiator. I get the belt off and check the idler pulley, and it's grindy. Very grindy. That's what I get for buying a cheap plastic one a few years ago when it died the last time. So off to Napa and $40 later I have a really nice heavy metal one with a lifetime guarantee. Yes, the car is a 2006 Forester XT. It's got 130K miles on it. Or, like the Subaru people like to say: It's just getting broken in.

So I put the new pulley in and promptly break the idler adjuster (damn! Didn't I do that last time I changed it? I did? Double Damn!) so I order that and have to wait a few days.

Now, a bit of an aside here. Last week, when I noticed the A/C wasn't working, I recharged it. And things got really noisy after I did. That was when I noticed that the high-pressure line was leaking, hence the noise. Turns out the o-ring went. So I replaced the o-ring and recharged the system and everything was fine.

Or so I thought.

So, get the new idler adjuster, put it on, fire it up. And the compressor is what's now making the noise. So, either the compressor is shot, -or-, hopefully, when the system bled down twice due to the bad o-ring, it lost a lot of oil. So I go buy some oil. It's not too expensive and the can says it contains an ounce. So I put it all in, and the compressor gets nice and quiet like it should be. So obviously it needed oil!

But! Now the system is over-pressured! So I bleed it down.

Now, no cooling, but lots of heat!

So, now what? I figure that maybe whatever propellant they put in the oil can isn't cooling, or maybe it's too much oil or something. I know the older systems took a lot of oil. Or maybe the compressor is shot.

So, I go buy a can of coolant (TEN dollar core charge on a CAN? WTF????? Thank you California!!). Bleed the system down to 0, then refill it with the can. This time the system hits a nice legal pressure, and even as I put the rest of the can in, barely climbs up at all. And best of all, it's blowing nice and cold now!

So. Hopefully it's fixed. It is possible that the compressor may have gotten damaged from the lack of oil, I'm hoping it didn't. At a new one is about $150, which I don't have right now. (That's putting it in myself, so add the cost of oil and R-134a to that). But at least it's all back together and seems to be running fine again. Both cars that is.

But I think the Forester may be up for a clutch soon....

And it still needs the headlight enclosures replaced....

So, if you have, say five or ten thousand friends out there who are looking for something to read, tell them to buy some of my books. So I can finish fixing the car!