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Tales of Woe

Don't Try This at Home

These are a bunch of annecdotes put together to illustrate the perils of doing it yourself. None of these disasters have caused casulties, so feel free to laugh (those of you who would feel constrained from laughing at casualties that is, the rest of you can just log onto a live feed from a war zone and get your amusement that way).

Fire!

As mentioned in the diary, I wanted an engine immobilizer installed in my car. To do this I needed a soldering iron. Well I had the soldering iron at the end of three extension cords to reach the car, but I made sure the power was off.

Then someone else went and used the first extension cord to power a grinder. Being good they reconnected it to my other cords when they were finished, but failed to turn the power off.

So I was all set to go but didn't know the soldering iron was on. Normally this would only result in burnt fingers, but then the neighbour from up stairs brought down a plate of dinner from the BBQ he was having. Not being one to turn down fresh, free food, I chucked everything, including the iron, onto the seat, closed the door and went to eat.

Luckily I finished quickly and didn't decide to watch TV or anything before going back to work, to find the car full of smoke and a big hole burt in the previously immaculate drivers seat. :(

The fire was solved by pouring water on it, though the only container I had was my cupped hands. Then I got to dig the ashes out of the seat with my fingers, before plugging the hole with some spare foam. Luckily the fire hadn't penetrated any of the pneumatic lines or chambers that control the variable seat geometry.

This seat was covered in a sort of light blue velvet. While putting the burnt foam in the bin I noticed that there was some light grey suede leather in there, of a shade that sort of looked the same. So I cut out a section the same size as the panel on the seat and stuck it on with some spray adhesive that I found under a table. (There is one good thing about living in a place that looks like a junk yard, you find a lot of stuff lying around.)

So the moral of the story is, don't just turn them off, unplug them.

Chain of Events

About two days after I finally got my bonnet to close nicely on top of my intercooler, it all decided to go wrong again. Naturally that very day I had been wandering about telling my friends that I had finally gotten the intercooler set up and was ready to start upping the boost.

That night the car broke down 3 times. In 3 different ways. And didn't start for some days afterwards.

1. The battery terminal had a loose connection and so it wouldn't start. Tightening this up solved that problem and so I drove off.
2. A few blocks later the whole car went dead. The main cable from the battery had shorted out. Probably set off by the wiggling I did to tighten the terminal. I opened the bonnet to find the battery smoking from the heat. Filled with visions of the battery exploding and showering me with acid I used a long piece of metal to undo a battery terminal while hiding my head behind the bonnet. Then I ran away until it cooled down. I found the short, rerouted the wires, and wrapped it in much tape. Then the battery was too dead to start the car but I got a jump start from someone.

   I got to where I was going (Dinner with a cousin) and was relieved to find the car started easily when it came time to leave.

3. On the way home the car started to run rich, really rich, and lose power. And eventually stalled at a set of lights. And did not have enough current to start it again. I pushed it through the lights (Which went red 1/2 way through but I had checked and there was no camera or traffic.) Once I was going down hill I did a push start and was able to limp home in 2nd. Still with no power and really rich. The next morning I looked for the obvious culprit, and there it was, a hose had come loose from the intercooler, so I tightened it up and solved that problem. It had probably been pulled partly off when I was pressing on the intercooler to get to the short.
4. Still didn't solve the battery problem though. It could be that the battery was damaged too badly by the short, but the fact it started fine at least once after that made me suspect a loose terminal again, probably the one I ripped off to stop the shorting. However now I reckoned that a new battery is in order.
5. I then got my flatmate to give me a jumpstart. No good. It would fire up and run for a few seconds but then stall. I guessed the plugs were probably fouled from running so rich.

These problems were eventually cleared up but they did make me think about ripping the intercooler out and just running water injection for a while. That is still a possibility. WI is so much simpler and at the limit of my turbo's range (about 14 psi) it would give me another 2-3 psi over the restriction of the intercooler.

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