Stuck at the Election Party

Things ended earlier than expected.  I have some friends and family over to help me stay up into the wee hours as we awaited the election results, but as we all know by now they came a lot earlier than expected.

About 11:30 people started to leave.  Which caused a problem because as we were watching the election a crew had come to fix a water main crossing my street 2 houses up.

The road was completely blocked off, my house dead center of the closure.

My niece’s boyfriend had to move some barricades so my guest’s cars could get out.

When I went out to get my paper this morning I saw this parked out in front of my house, they were still working on the repairs.

Good thing my house blocks out most of the noise, I didn’t hear anything throughout the night.  Would have hated to be living in the house right next to the work.

Cat on a hot tin roof…

and “Anatomy of a Swamp Cooler”.

My swamp cooler bit the dust.  I’ve been planning on replacing it since last summer, it’s over 15 years old and rusting out all over the place.  I was hoping to get one more complete summer out of it, but the pulley on the fan broke and the spot where the water shut off valve bolts up rusted all the way through.  (It’s a thing a lot like in your toilet bowl that automatically stops the water from overfilling.  Without it securely attached I’d have a river flowing down my roof.)

I was up on the roof, ripping out it’s guts so that I could remove it to I’d be ready for a new one.  It’s only just past the middle of July, there is no way I’m going to make it through August without one.

Denny decided to come keep me company while I worked.

In the first picture, he was on the side of the roof that falls a whole foot down to the deck I built so I can work on the cooler.  But at first he was on the north side of the roof, which made me a little nervous.  It’s only a one storey house, but it’s still a good 15 foot drop.

Fortunately, he’s ok and sleeping on the chair right behind me.

Anatomy of a Swamp Cooler : caution, the following pictures are graphic shots of my disemboweled swamp cooler.  Not for the faint of heart. 

The Swamp Cooler skeleton.  Metal top, four corners and the water pan at the bottom.

It’s epidermis, the four pads that become the sides.

The lungs, the fan that pulls the air through the water soaked pads and into the house.

The guts.  The heart, the water pump that gets the water up to the top of the pads so they get soaked.  The muscles, the electric motor that turns the fan.

There ya go, more than you ever wanted to know about a swamp cooler, aka Evaporative Cooler.  I hope it wasn’t too gory for you.

Go figure.

… 3 months ago Battlecruiser passed inspection.  I never got it registered, I needed to drop the insurance on it and park it for the winter.  So, today I brought it out to get inspected.  With old cars, there’s always the anticipation of it being rejected, for a number of reasons, and even though it passed only 3 months ago, and hasn’t been used since then, I was a little anxious.  So when I saw the REJECTED stamp on my paperwork, I was running through my mind the things that could go wrong while just sitting, and guesstimating how much it was going to cost.

… Imagine my surprise when it failed because the wiper-washers weren’t working.  As a matter of fact, most of the system was removed by the previous owner in order to install a second, backup battery.  It’s not something someone would steal out of the car.

… So, tell me why, two years in a row it can pass inspection without any wiper-washers, and then  all of a sudden this time they notice?  Guess it all depends on who is doing the inspection, and what kind of day they are having.

… I brought the car home, jumped in the Subaru and went down to Pep Boys to see if they had the stuff to fix it.  I knew pretty much nobody would have original equipment parts for that system, so I just wanted to get a universal, after-market system.  The guy at the counter looked at me like I was growing a 3rd arm out the top of my head.  I had to explain the whole situation to him before he figured out enough to send me to someone who actually knew cars*.  This is how I discovered CarQuest down on 3rd East and about 22nd South.  I walked in there, looked around and immediately felt like these guys knew what they were selling.  I asked one of the guys on the counter about and after-market wiper-washer system and he said “Jes a sec.”, wandered off and came back 5 minutes later with exactly what I needed, short one piece.  I found a vacuum hose T which looked like what I needed and asked him if it would work with the washer system.  Instead of “dunno”, he said that it sure would, since the systems are basically the same.  $55 later I have just what I need to get the car to pass inspection, just need daylight back so I can see what I’m doing when I install it.

 

 

*My brothers and I have often discussed how to work in a car parts store these days all you need to know is how to read a computer terminal.  The days of “Well, I got the part for a 1971, but if ya just drill an extra hole in it it’ll work for a ‘68” are long gone.

A buck forty eight.

… In my opinion, one of the worst problems to have in a old car is an electrical one.  With literally miles of wiring, problems can take hours and hours just to track down.  Which is why I’ve always said if you take it to a repair shop you can expect to spend hundreds of dollars on labor just to have a 47 cent part replaced.

… The most worrisome problem I saw when I pickled up my $200 car #55 was in the turn signal system.  The left signal worked perfect, but when you turned on the right signal, the left signal flashed also, although not as brightly.  It was even worse when either the tail lights or the brake lights were on.  Because of the crossover from one side to the other, I didn’t automatically assume that it had something to do with bad light bulbs, after all, they were all working.

… So I took apart the right tail light and started messing around with it.  All the bulbs were working, but I finally did notice that one of the two bulbs for the tail/signal/brake lights always burned bright.  The other one was bright whenever the signal was on, but was dimmer when it was just  the tail light.  (Older car tail lights have bulbs with two filaments in them, one dim one for the tail lights and one bright one for both the brakes and signals.)  So, I pulled out the bulb and noticed that it was a 1 filament bulb, in a 2 filament socket.  Not good.  A single filament bulb has a single electrical connection in the center, the double filament has two connections, one for the dim system, one for the bright system.  With the single connection in the center, put in the double socket, it was connecting the two systems together, which was what was making the whole thing skewompus.

… I put in a correct bulb and voila, everything worked right.  Which is a big relief for me, since the cost of fixing electrical problems can be so unpredictable.  Now, I at least have an good idea how much it’s going to cost me to get the new beast on the road.  I know it’s going to need a new exhaust system, which is no big deal since I’ve always put dual exhaust on the old LTDs I buy.  It will also need brakes and tires.  It’ll cost around $1,000 altogether, but at least I now know I’m not going to have to buy a complete new electrical harness for the car.