If someone in the Fire Department offers to open your door for you, you might want to think twice . . . .
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Category: Life
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Extraction Drill
If someone in the Fire Department offers to open your door for you, you might want to think twice . . . .
Category: Life
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Battery Charger
Here is the battery charger, charging up the battery. After getting it charged up, there was some trouble getting the engine started. There wasn't gas for some reason, maybe because it hasn't been driven at all since the week after the accident. Once the gas got in there, then there was lots of smoke. But past that, after giving it some gas, everything seems to be running normally. I'd say I ran it for about 20 minutes. The power steering pump pulley seems to be working just fine. There are some other mechanical problems, but now it seems it will mostly be a matter of repairing the body damage.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Category: Life
Power Steering Pump Pulley Wheel Installation
This is what was left of the pulley wheel on the shaft of the power steering pump after the collision or thereabouts.
This piece of the wheel was caught by the splash guard at the bottom of the engine compartment . . . I do not know where the rest of the wheel is.
This is what the pulley wheel ought to look like. Notice especially that it happens to be in one piece, versus two.
The shiny spot is where the old wheel was and where the new wheel is to go.
Here is a much closer view. I really had to exert some force to get the old wheel off of the shaft. There were several loud popping noises during that process. I am hoping I didn't destroy anything in the process of removing it, but I won't really know that until I start the engine up, which I can't do right now because the battery is dead.
Here is the new pulley wheel installed in its proper place. The power steering pump pulley installer is still attached.
And here is the pulley in place, along with the accessory drive belt. This makes my engine look a lot more like the diagrams in my service manual. The belt drives the power steering pump and the alternator, which is why the battery has no charge left. So the next step is to charge the battery and see if something goes horribly wrong when I start the engine.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Category: Life
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Intrepid Part II
Remember my Intrepid? Here it is. You might notice the crossmember on top of the radiator is tilted up and to the left in this picture. That's not really the way it is supposed to look.
So, we get rid of that. I will need to get a new one of those, however, since it does convenient things like holding the hood down, holding the radiator in place, etc. With it gone, though, I'd say my car looks more or less like a normal Intrepid now! Except for that little ding on the front left fender (on the right side of the picture). It's a little hard to see in the picture, but eh . . . not so hard in real life.
Here again, this is mostly how things are supposed to look. Mostly. There is a small problem.
To get at that small problem, I had to take the radiator fan assembly out. Again. Sigh. I took it out last summer to replace the fan motors. It's horrid because the screws are nearly impossible to get to and you have to wrestle it out from where it sits. Or at least I do. I never wanted to take it out again. But out it had to come.
This is an extreme close-up of what should be a pulley wheel. It was once. Now I would say it most closely resembles the blade of a weed-whacker. I needed the room to pull this off and put a new one on. I really hope I do not have to pull anything else out. We'll see.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Category: Life
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Messiah Performance
This is a very blurry picture of the sixtieth performance of Handel's Messiah by the Hood College Choir and the U.S. Naval Academy Men's and Women's Glee Clubs at Hood College. No flash photography allowed plus my nerves equals blurry pictures, so this is the best of the lot. I took it while standing for the Hallelujah chorus. Standing for this chorus is a tradition that is over two hundred years old.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Category: Life
Drivesicles
Why is my hard drive in the freezer? Supposedly freezing hard drives can help if they crash, which mine did last week. Fortunately, the drive did not totally fail and I think I've been able to get most of the data off of it. I put the drive in the freezer for a little over four hours. I'm not sure if it helped or not. I wasn't able to get at any more data than before, but maybe it helped to forestall its total demise. I also moved my computer into the garage, which was around 40 degrees, while I tried to get the data back.
Freezing drives was news to me. My friend Jeff told me about it last week when I told him my drive had crashed. I found plenty of people on the internet talking about it. I think this guy probably went too far.
In this picture, the drive on top of the case is the drive I bought two years ago to back up my data. I think the ideal time to do this would have been before my drive crashed, eh? The moral of the story is this: back up your data. But nobody ever does. Unfortunately, I backed up the failing data on the hard drive onto a Seagate FreeAgent external drive--which also failed. I'm not sure how much I lost from that. The moral of that story is: don't use Seagate FreeAgent drives to store anything important.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Category: Life
Friday, November 2, 2007
Oops
From the back, my car doesn't look too bad, eh?
From the left, still lookin' good.
From the front . . . err . . . not so much. This is some expensive blog content.
Yeah, this is kind of what happens when you try to drive under the traffic that is (suddenly) stopped in front of you. I did that last Friday night. The roads were wet. The guy in front of me locked up his brakes. I locked mine, but whereas his car stopped, mine did not. It just slid into and then under the back end of his car.
A close-up of the smashed headlamp.
Strangely enough, the gap between the fender and the front door is fine. It wasn't pushed back at all. The door opens and closes just fine.
This picture was taken by the insurance estimator. It's what the front of my car looks like right now.
And this is how I get around now. These are my feet. My car was officially totalled by my insurance company the day before yesterday. The other guy drove away. You never would have known his car was in an accident, but apparently, sight unseen, he still had $2,000 worth of damage to his vehicle. The estimate to fix my car was around $4,000. I'm not sure what I want to do now. I'll need to buy another car, but new, old, etc., I'm not sure. I will have to spend money and I hate to spend money. I will have to spend a lot of money and I really hate to spend a lot of money. We'll see.
Friday, November 02, 2007
Category: Life
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