Perpetual Ruminations

Tuesday

Kind of late again, but with good reason. It's my day off, and I had a full day.

It started off fine, with sleeping in and getting caught up on some much needed sleep. I woke up around seven, went to the bathroom, then went back to bed for a few more hours. We had been up kind of late last night, getting to bed after one this morning, so it isn't like we slept for ten hours, but it was nice to sleep in. I'm not sure what time I got up, around ten or so, but thats just a guess.

Then it was coffee. I have to have a cup of coffee to get me started in the morning, and we had ours out on the patio. It was a beautiful morning, and there was no sense in wasting it by sitting inside. In fact, we had several cups of coffee, watched the birds, and enjoyed some relaxing and good conversation. But all things come to an end, and so did our leisure morning.

Around eleven or shortly after we had breakfast. Rhonda cooked up some oatmeal while I worked at taking the insoles out of my new shoes so I could put my lift in the left one and then replace the insoles that came with the shoes with the memory foam ones I bought. Next it was out to work on the van. I couldn't find anything obvious as to why the van would not start, so we tried a few different things.

We had changed the low idle valve, and that's when it started not starting. Nice play on words with that sentence, huh? Anyway, I thought maybe I had forgot to hook something up, but no such luck. So, I pulled the air filter housing out, and the attaching hose. I looked at the wire harness and noticed a lump inside the tape. There should have been a sleeve over the wire, but it was only covering the lower half of the wire bundle, the rest was taped.

Inside the tape, something was creating quite a bulge, so I began to unwrap the tape. I soon discovered two crimp on splices in the wire harness. Two wires had broke or been cut, and this is how they fixed it. I pulled on one of then, and the wire pulled out. It was corroded, and looked like it had not been tight for a long time. The rest were tight, and even soldered together, but the one wire was missed or something. What have happened, it was loose.

These wires connected to the Mass Air Sensor, and it is this that tells the computer how much air and at what temperature, is entering the engine. The computer takes this information along with other readings and determines how much gas to deliver. This means, the lose, corroded wire may be the problem. So, I cut out one of the splices and started setting up to fix the wires. But, there was too much stuff in the way of my tools, so we decided to make a run to the dump.

We loaded up the trash and all the junk from the garage in the back of the Jimmy, then drove into the landfill to deposit it. Soon enough we were on our way back home and then it was time to start work on the van. I took all the tape off, moved things out of the way, and soldered the broken wires back together. I then slid some heat shrink into place and sealed the splice. Next, I coated everything with some silicone, then slid another bigger piece of heat shrink over the entire repair area, heated it up and then wrapped the area with electrical tape. Once I had that done, I wrapped the entire wire bundle up good with black tape, then slid the protective sleeve over the bundle.

After putting everything back together, we took it for a test drive. It had more pick up and power, and I run it up a bit high in speed. When it hit one hundred miles per hour I let it idle back down and then drove sensible the rest of the way into town. I had taken a back road in, but came home on the main highway. About forty five miles round trip, and it ran great. It seems we have discovered and corrected the problem.

It's kind of funny and not funny at the same time. We had it in for repairs a couple of times, replaced a few things, and put a good two hundred dollars into the thing, likely closer to three, and nothing fixed the problems. Today, I pull the stuff out of the way and there it is, a couple dollar fix with the soldering gun and it's running like a dream. Oh well, there isn't much to say about the whole mess, and it was cheaper than taking it in to a high tech garage, they would have found the problem, in time, but how long would it have taken? I know it's a slow process to diagnose an electrical system and the mechanic likely would have replaced components before checking the wiring for breaks and bad connections. So, we did save a lot of money, but it took us a long time to discover the problem.

Once the van was fixed and the test drive over, I worked on the rider for a bit, then mowed about half the yard. After getting the uncut part of the yard done it was time for dinner, then I logged in here and now I'm going to go take a shower and watch a spot of television before bed.