pboehmer.com

2014.04.04

Still sore from last weekend, so I'm taking the weekend off to recover. I managed to get a little work done in the garage, but nothing worth talking about.

I totally spaced and forgot to mention that the wife, girl, and I took Monday off to go downtown to see the Red's opening day parade. My wife managed to score some last minute nose bleed seats, so after the parade, we headed down to the stadium to watch the game. Despite being very sore, suffering PTSD from the timing belt replacement, and a combination of walking/standing non-stop for 4 hours, I ended up having a good time (really). Too bad the Red's lost their opener, at least it was a beautiful day!

2014.04.02

It was tortuous to say the least, but the timing belt was replaced over the weekend. After two days of 6+ hours each day of leaning over the engine bay, I am sore and bruised all over. Of positive notes, the car fits completely in the garage with the door closed with enough room to work, breakdown of the car to get the belt wasn't too bad, and finally (and best of all) the car is back together and running. Of course, this is after I convinced myself that I probably destroyed the engine at least twice. I also can say I saved myself at least 1500 dollars.

Now for the list of issues that I had: Timing marks on the two camshafts and crankshaft were darn near impossible to keep lined up, especially after releasing the hydraulic tensioner which resulted in everything getting knocked back a tooth or more. To fix this, the tensioner had to be screwed out, compressed with a C-clamp, and lock-pinned back together before reinstall. Repeated this about 12 hundred times before getting it right (managed to partially strip one of bolts as an added bonus). I tried to cheat once and ended up breaking the new tensioner pulley, so I had to reuse the old one. Despite reading the step-by-step over and over, I still managed to shoot myself in the foot and forgot to mark the crankshaft position before removing the belt. Fortunately, I did manage to mark the crankshaft shortly after removing the belt because when I later lined everything back up to TDC (top dead center) and put everything back together, I got the dreaded check engine light. Tore everything back down and noticed that my mark made the crankshaft two plus teeth advance. This is early Sunday evening, so I said screw it and matched my marks up and put everything together and voila, fired right up without a CEL.

So, this past weekend, I managed to replace the water pump, timing belt, hydraulic tensioner, serpentine belt and tensioner, and flush the cooling system. I'll have to go back and replace the timing belt tensioner pulley (broke part trying to compress tensioner in-place), serpentine idler pulley (broke bit trying to remove), and re-tap the one tensioner screw hole and two belt cover holes that stripped when I got lazy/tired and used a pneumatic ratchet (don't ever do this).

Next week, spark plugs, yay!

2014.03.28

Work on the garage is progressing. So far I have about 2/3 of the walls primed and working on getting the rest ready for primer. The biggest hurdle is the ceiling, which in hindsight, I should probably have started first. A lot of work needed on the ceilings. I've been cheating a bit with the drywall, using a random orbital power sander instead of the typical sanding sponge/drywall pads. This makes quick work of sanding and is physically less demanding, but it makes a hellva mess.

The 300 passed 190k miles this week. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been getting parts together to replace timing and serpentine belts (and all associated pulleys/tensioners/idlers), water pump, EGR valve, transmission filter/fluid, and spark plugs (I think that's it). I planned on doing the tune up this this weekend, but it looks like the weather is going to be pretty cruddy (cold/wet). While I have a pretty spacious garage, it is actually about 3ft shorter lengthwise than what I need to comfortably work on the car (due to city zoning requirements). I have about 6 inches of free space on both ends. Fine for parking, not so much for working on the engine which requires the rear of the car to hang out a couple of feet, thus having to leave the garage door open. Still way better than working in the driveway.

2014.03.07

Replaced the drives in the server earlier this week and immediately the server locked up again. I shut down everything and started breaking down the server to determine what the problem was. Motherboard is a stout MSI �military class� board, so the expected blown capacitors was not the problem. Memtest86+ tests passed without any problems. That pretty much ruled out board, CPU, and memory being the culprit. That pretty much left just one thing, the power supply. I guess 550w was just not enough juice to provide clean power, so replaced it with a beefier 750w supply. Its been three days now without any issue. Hopefully that takes care of that problem.

Now that the weather is starting to get a little warmer, I'm going to make an attempt at starting, rather, finishing the garage. I have no illusions that it'll be done this weekend, but hopefully I'll accomplish some sort of progress on it. The sooner I get the garage completed, the sooner I can get my tools moved in and ultimately, a car lift.

2014.02.27

Came into work this morning only to find that this server had crashed shortly after I left last night. To make things even more interesting is that the server was still responding to pings, so the script that runs on a different box that checks the server status showed everything just dandy. The issue has to do with a dying drive that has since been pulled. New drives are on order, so we'll be limping along for the next couple of days. Naturally, the monitoring script has also been reworked to test for more than a simple ping reply.

I got my new work laptop late last week, a Dell Precision M3800. This replaces my 2008 Dell Latitude that still works pretty good, but showing it's age. Good news is that I was able to downgrade from Windows 8 to Windows 7 Professional. The bad news is that FreeBSD does not yet support the on-board wireless, nor the USB to Ethernet adapter, so I had to resign to running FreeBSD in VirtualBox. I was also able to virtualize my old laptop hard drive, so I can now run Windows XP (as loaded on my old laptop), Windows 7 Pro, and FreeBSD. I've been spending most of week getting everything moved over to the new system, so the flood warning project has been sidelined for the moment.

Its been way too cold outside to work on the garage, that's my excuse anyways. Even though the temperatures in the garage aren't nearly as bad, typically between 40-50f, I just can't muster the desire to finishing the drywall work. I'm not trying to get perfect results, but at this point, I'm still looking at a lot of sanding and mudding.