Recently I have had to fix everything.
Specifically, my clutch went out in my (manual transmission) car. And the heating didn’t work, several times.
Car
So I had to replace the clutch. I learned a lot, specifically that much of the ‘advice’ of what not to do is actually the best and only option available, they just don’t want to be blamed when you do it and ruin your car.
I didn’t ruin my car. I did resolve to stop taking advice on maintenance from people that live outside the salt belt, or that can’t or won’t explain WHY they give a piece of advice.
Replacing the clutch looks like this:
- Remove the underbody panels. (You just broke the heads of four bolts clean off without even trying, and without power tools)
- Remove the exhaust. Two more broken bolts, and the front pipe to overpipe flange has studs where you cannot remove the nuts no matter how red they get.
- Fuckit, cut the studs. You now have no exhaust. This takes a week. It should not take a week but you do not have the correct tools or experience and are indeed gaining both the hard way.
- Remove the driveshaft. Remove the transmission. You are not supposed to use a crow bar. A crow bar will not be enough. You will need two crow bars and a strong friend, and must achieve the magical angle of engine tilt. You remove it literally a few millimeters at a time. This is foreshadowing. You may not jack up the oil pan because you will ruin the oil pan. There is no other way to change the title of the engine. You didn’t ruin the oil pan (this time?). This takes an unknowable amount of time. 4a. You have made an oil spill of transmission fluid because you listened when someone told you it doesn’t need to be drained. -1 kitty litter bag.
- Leave it on your friend’s vehicle lift for a week. The reason the transmission was hard to remove was the indexing pins are corroded solid into the transmission. They are supposed to stay in the engine and help you align the transmission. You cannot remove them from the transmission.
- Replace the clutch. This is the easiest part of the whole thing. There are three different standards for the installation torque. It doesn’t actually matter.
- Try to install the transmission. This is impossible.
- Wait an indeterminate amount of time. Due to time dilation this feels like a few days but outside sources, like those that own the lift, insist it took at least a month (Total time so far: Two months? Who knows).
- Enlist a friend to get the transmission back on. Success is not forthcoming.
- More time???
- While reading in frustration, you realize there is only one method consistently mentioned. It usually shows up like this:
Installing the transmission: Align the transmission housing on the engine using the alignment pins and push until there is no gap between the transmisson housing and the engine. DO NOT DRAW IN THE TRANSMISSION WITH THE BOLTS!
This is a style of writing called ‘helpful’.
- Epiphany: They only mention drawing in the transmission by the bolts because people do it. People do it because there’s no other way. The people writing these guides do not want to be responsible when you fuck up your engine and break your bolts or stripe your threads.
- Install the transmission by getting best possible alignment, and tightening bolts with a low power impact wrench a tiny bit at a time per bolt, in a star pattern around the housing to ensure consistent torque and alignment and not break any bolts or strip any threads.
- This works flawlessly.
- You made another oil spill by the way. -1 kitty litter bag.
- The car sounds absurd. It still doesn’t have an exhaust. But you can drive it, as long as you know when the local cops aren’t around so you don’t get a noise violation.
- Eventually - you have a motorcycle, you’re not working on the car - it gets cold and you can’t ride your bike anymore.
- You must buy a new exhaust (which doesn’t fix the overpipe studs being cut). Literally everyone you know asks you why you don’t just buy the exhaust. You are given cash for your birthday, so you can buy an exhaust. The money is not the problem. The problem is the bolts that hold everything from the headers back to the overpipe are rusted so completely they aren’t bolts anymore.
- If you can’t just replace the overpipe easily, at least without risking having to replace everything including the headers, which might well mean having to tap the engine for larger bolts, maybe you can just drill through these remnants of the studs on the overpipe flange?
- You are six hours of drilling in. This is not the way.
- Maybe you can … clamp it together? This is apparently a whole industry on Amazon.
- None of those will work. Maybe you can cut the flange off both sides, replace the flanges and weld them in?
- Fuckit, weld the two flanges together.
- This works.
Heating 1 and 2
During all this, the house heating doesn’t work.
It was a short in BOTH of the thermostat wires (I debugged this just fine), plus a check valve the previous owner installed backwards for the heating system (thanks local plumber dude!).
The electrician who comes over to fix the heat is measuring the voltage on the thermostat wires, and is puzzled because it reads right about 0v. He thinks the board needs to be replaced. “Hey, disconnect one of those wires. Those leads are shorted.” Oh look there’s voltage.
Smug in my superior knowledge, my friend later points out that most electricians don’t really deal in theory - in their world, a short usually gives off quite a bit of heat and light.
Oh, right.
I can’t really be smug anymore. Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.
Heating 3
Two months later of working heat, and the boiler suddenly won’t fire anymore. It’s going into lockout.
It’s the flame sensor. For some reason no one wants to believe it’s the flame sensor.
The guy at Sid Harvey won’t tell you if they even have the part in stock since you’re not ‘in the trade’.
Amazon replacements are trash, you discover this experimentally.
Local plumber dude sends other plumber dude, who walks in and replaces the flame sensor. This item ‘basically never fails’.
No smugness. Just happy to have warm showers again.
Conclusion
Welding, grinding, minor vehicle maintenance, oil burner and hvac troubleshooting.
Going right on the linkedin. I’m going to be just rolling in the tech recruiter messages.