Coffee 3-17-2012

freetown fred wrote:SURE!!! easy for you young woodpeckers to snicker. Your time will come. ...

I've been doing that for 10 years .... falling asleep mid day .... and I'm 20 years younger than you folks! So what happens when I get ..... "old" .. ?

Well in comes the warm weather, out goes the fire, and along with that goes all my automotive nightmares. The Blazer is FIXED! The problem was the wiring TO the fuel pump. So now I have a backup sitting in the tank for whenever I might need it, since I installed that Walboro. Also by the time the sun set, I had the Marquis running again after chasing this damn vacuum leak for 3 months (yeah, wasn't chasing it that hard ... no heat in the barn this year!)

Now all that's left is a complete front end job & new shocks/struts on my '07 Government Motors pickup with less than 53k on the clock. Union pride ....

Life is ...... uh ... goood? I guess. At least the weather is nice!

SMITTY wrote:The Blazer is FIXED! The problem was the wiring TO the fuel pump.

Wow, good thing you tested the pump feed.... Aggravating to troubleshoot a electrical problem, thinking its a fuel problem, and vice versa....
K.I.S.S.
Put the tank on the roof and let it gravity-feed

This winter the fuel pump in my dad's Suburban quit...after a lot of troubleshooting we discovered a broken body-to-frame ground strap. Fixed that and it took right off.

Yeah it's just amazing how quality in every part of vehicles today has hit rock bottom shittyness. I had 40 year old wires in the El Camino that, although faded, were as intact as the day they rolled off the line in '72. Fast forward to '86 .... Ford, 25 years later, wire jackets are splitting wherever there is any sort of bend, especially near the heat of the engine. Now fast forward to '00, GM, wires BREAKING IN TWO inside steering column, due to the up/down action of tilt wheel ... in JUST 9 YEARS!! You see a pattern here. Also in that time frame we went from 16 gauge steel to ... I don't know .. 32 gauge sounds about right. Wonder if they'll start building 100K engines now, to save a buck. The days of going over 100K on the same engine will be gone. I can see this coming ....

Changed the oil today on a '11 Ford F-150 with 3.5 L Ecoboost V6. They put a flimsy fiber "guard" over the transmission & rear portion of the oil pan. At least they were nice enough to include 1/2 turn Dzus style finger screws, so the whole thing can be dropped by hand in just a few seconds. But that damn oil filter! I shed a few layers of skin off both biceps reaching waaaaaaaay down the front of the engine to get the oil filter! What a pain in the ass! At least with all those guards in place they designed a plastic channel to guide the oil pouring out of the old filter down into an opening in the aluminum skid plate up front. There was an access door in that plate, presumably to attack the filter from the bottom up ... but I don't have the luxury of a lift here ... nor do I have many 4' extensions which would be required to get those bolts out - yeah ... they put them on the engine side ..

Can't wait to see all the electrical nightmares that truck will have 5 years from now with the computer screens, heated/cooled seats, power everything ...