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From A Demon's Nest of Sentiments
Jul. 14th, 2014 12:15 amPeople are quite at home with evil. It's fighting it that raises the dreadful spectre of inconvenience.
http://www.gocomics.com/pibgorn/2014/07/13
http://www.gocomics.com/pibgorn/2014/07/13
Jul. 14th, 2014
Sometimes people are basically decent
Jul. 14th, 2014 12:31 amSunday evening we were driving to Phoenix, returning from Las Vegas where we attended a fanfic/slash convention over the weekend. And we had some pretty weird car trouble. North of Kingman while Russet was driving, we started getting a noise and vibration that could be felt through the gas and brake pedals, but not through the steering. I looked under the hood and everything looked good, looking under the front of the car showed a deflector designed to keep rocks and grime from mucking up the engine casing has been damaged and were probably flapping at high speed. It was an interesting thing: nothing happened until you hit about 50 MPH, but then when you slowed down, it didn't go away until you were almost completely stopped.
So we decided to have the car towed to Kingman and get it looked at in the morning, and while I was on the phone trying to get through to my insurance, a truck pulled up. He was pulling a trailer, and actually offered to trailer our car to Kingman! So we backed up our Subaru to give him more room to line things up so we could load our car.
While backing up our car, the hood was up and the guy's son noticed that the air intake manifold was vibrating bad, he thought we might have broken a motor mount but then we'd get decided vibration through the steering. There are two plastic bolt holes that should hold this assembly to the rest of the engine, the bolts were no longer there. I asked the guy if he had any zip ties, the plastic ties that have teeth on one side that lock when you pull them through. He dug around in his kit and found three small ones. They worked just fine for the intake manifold and cinched down nice and tight. Then we looked at the lower deflector, and found that by gouging two holes through the left piece and tucking the right piece above it, I could loop the last tie that he had through a chassis bracket and secure that up!
And that was it: problem resolved. Another 200 miles with no problems, we lost about 45 minutes between inspection, repair, and stopping at a car parts store buying thicker ties in case any of the thinner ones failed before we got back to Phoenix.
Zip ties. Wonderful things. Fantastic for some field expedient repairs. I had them in my Toyota, but that's in New Mexico. I'm glad that I had a good knife in the car capable of gouging holes through the shield fiberboard or whatever it was made of.
So we decided to have the car towed to Kingman and get it looked at in the morning, and while I was on the phone trying to get through to my insurance, a truck pulled up. He was pulling a trailer, and actually offered to trailer our car to Kingman! So we backed up our Subaru to give him more room to line things up so we could load our car.
While backing up our car, the hood was up and the guy's son noticed that the air intake manifold was vibrating bad, he thought we might have broken a motor mount but then we'd get decided vibration through the steering. There are two plastic bolt holes that should hold this assembly to the rest of the engine, the bolts were no longer there. I asked the guy if he had any zip ties, the plastic ties that have teeth on one side that lock when you pull them through. He dug around in his kit and found three small ones. They worked just fine for the intake manifold and cinched down nice and tight. Then we looked at the lower deflector, and found that by gouging two holes through the left piece and tucking the right piece above it, I could loop the last tie that he had through a chassis bracket and secure that up!
And that was it: problem resolved. Another 200 miles with no problems, we lost about 45 minutes between inspection, repair, and stopping at a car parts store buying thicker ties in case any of the thinner ones failed before we got back to Phoenix.
Zip ties. Wonderful things. Fantastic for some field expedient repairs. I had them in my Toyota, but that's in New Mexico. I'm glad that I had a good knife in the car capable of gouging holes through the shield fiberboard or whatever it was made of.