jonathan909

Obviously I considered simple cloggage as well - a new rad was what solved the overheating problem I had with that old Dakota. But I haven't used any of the rad flush concoctions for a long time, so maybe I'll give that a go after I check the thermostat. If anyone's had good luck with any in particular, I'd appreciate the recommendations. That rad looks slick, and I"ll bet it works a treat. But more than $550 (Canadian, landed) for a rad? I paid less than that for the car.

AFK for a while, but back and with more related questions. Regarding the hose, I was lucky to have a second '01 H6 here (a cheapie waiting for a head gasket, as previously discussed), so I was able to loot a couple of hoses from it to keep my DD running, and I picked up the replacement lower from the dealer today. Rather more expensive than aftermarket, but in general I jam econo, so on the rare occasion I have to shell out a few extra bucks it doesn't hurt too much. But... The weather has been unusually hot here over the last month or so (as with a lot of places - it was hard to believe that a town in the BC interior set a record higher than that ever recorded in Vegas, and then was promptly destroyed by fire), and this car has been running a little hotter than it should. First I had to deal with the two sequential blown hoses out on the highway, after which I was nervous about potential damage to the bearings, but it seems to have gotten through it okay and settled down. But it's hot again this week, and on the way home an hour ago it was clearly struggling to keep cool - any extra load, whether it be a hill, going a little faster, or running the AC, was the difference between "somewhat hotter than normal" and "pushing toward the red". So I could use some suggestions. AfaIk, this is the original rad, but I haven't looked closely. I'll mos def drop the thermostat and make sure it doesn't have some low-flow aftermarket in there. Also, I recall from unrelated discussions years ago (regarding my old 318 Dodge Dakota pickup, I think) someone bringing up surfactants (added to the coolant) to improve the thermal transfer between the coolant and the metal. Is that real or bogus? Anything else I'm missing?

I think you jumped to a possibly-unwarranted conclusion there. I didn't read it as either sarcasm or arrogance. Could just as easily have been a sincere thank-you he felt he neglected in his first post. So I'd suggest lightening up a bit and giving a new member the benefit of the doubt.

I saw that they were all cut-to-fit, but the Gates didn't even look like that would work.

Normally parts are pretty easy to find, but here's a weird one - the lower rad hose for the '01 3.0 H6. I blew two rad hoses (the long upper and the lower) over the span of a couple of weeks. Grabbed the upper from the wrecker, but they ruin all the lowers when they drain the incoming cars. But every aftermarket lower (Gates, AC Delco, etc.) I've seen so far is completely wrong, and I wound up ordering one from the dealer. Did I miss something?

Not my own problem; a good friend is in the middle of overhauling an EJ20 (of provenance unknown) and is having a little trouble sourcing rings. I haven't confirmed any of this, but he says his pistons use 1.2mm rings top and middle, and the oil ring is 2.0mm - but that all the kits from Rock (for turbos) are 1.2/1.2/2.5 . Where is he likely to find the set he needs?

Ooooo! Pretty light show!

Any silicone dielectric goo (that's a term of art) will do, and use it liberally at both ends of the wire after cleaning everthing up - once the arc starts, it creates carbon tracks that it likes to continue to follow, especially on the surface of the (ceramic) plug insulator. If it still acts flaky and the fault sticks with the cylinder, you may have a hairline crack in the insulator, so you're just going to have to replace the plug.

Hell, I'm surprised that Canada and Oz aren't aligned on this.

Well, it's complicated... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HC-12a It's not just about ozone anymore - we pretty much solved that problem, so now it's about greenhouse gasses. But it's also about safety, which is why R12a is illegal in the US. There are exceptions to all these rules, of course, but they have to do with industrial users vs. consumers and whether you have to get a license to buy it and crap like that.

But the gauges are part of the package (i.e. "manifold gauge"), so we've got 'em and might as well understand how to use 'em, right? And as with most things up here, usually different (e.g. R12a vs. R134a) and/or worse (e.g. more expensive and sometimes just a lot harder to get). Rarely better.

Interesting. Counterintuitive. Would have been good to know before buying the keg, of course, but there was/is still a strong cost-effectiveness argument for having done so (assuming we can figure out how to use it). I have a digital shipping scale, so that might end up being useful. Until I can work out the weight approach (one part of which is going to be resolving the behavioural differences between R134a and R12a), I'm looking at temperature/pressure tables to get a handle on the behaviour of a correctly-charged system. It would seem to make sense, then, to just add refrigerant until the system kinda falls into line with the tables.

Here's the story to date: It's the '01 H6 OBW I've been working on over the past year. Everything's been going pretty well, so (since it just got hotter than hell here) it's time to move on to the AC, which hasn't worked since I got it. Thinking it's stupid and wasteful to use a can of refrigerant+dye to find a leak I know is there (I pulled a vacuum and it went away pretty quickly), I made up an adapter from my shop air to the manifold gauge. (Please skip the lecture about moisture in the system - I understand, one thing at a time, let's move on.) Took a minute to find bad O-rings on both sides of the compressor. With them replaced, the system holds a vacuum just fine. Now comes the tricky part: Every instructional youtube vid claims "here's how the pros do it!" when we all know the pros don't use little retail cans of refrigerant. I got a big tank so my pals and I can do this at a fraction of the cost. The downside is that this makes it a lot harder to add the specified amount of refrigerant by weight. Also, being in Greater Upper Soviet Canuckistan, we don't have R134a up here - it's illegal. We have R12a. It's compatible with R134a systems, but if you mix the refrigerants you seize the compressor in a heartbeat. So I added "some" refrigerant to the (evacuated) system today, and it's running detectably cool, but not cold. So what am I doing wrong, besides not knowing how much I've got in there? Should I be feeding in liquid or vapour (the tank has a valve for each)? How can I get the charge right without relying on a scale? Presumably I should be able to suss this from the gauges. Someone please set me straight.

Fwiw, the two things (in addition to cats, of course, and the exhaust pipes they trash when cutting out the cats) that I can never get (at least from the self-serve yards) around here are gas tanks and drive shafts. They destroy the gas tanks by punching holes to drain leftover gas, then the driveshafts - unless well recessed - get it from their forklifts. The full-service wreckers tend to be a little more circumspect. A driveline shop can also take care of balancing the shaft itself.

So right. The takeaway is that in 4WD/AWD vehicles in general, a vibration anywhere in the system manifests pretty much everywhere. I had an off-balance (rear) driveshaft in an old Dakota 4x4. I chased that one around right up until my wife held a yard sale out on the highway with it - it took out the rear U-joint, then exited, taking a good chunk of the xfer case along with it.

Would I be belabouring the obvious to ask if you've checked the wheel balance?

It was away for a bit, just came back. I didn't look closely, but it struck me as DNS borkage. Someone forget a renewal?

As explained in another post, that was only one of the reasons that tank had to go, as the denting process busted pump fittings, and that led to an oxygen-deprived-cowboy repair. I just had to make all that no longer be in my car.

And Allpar Mod added: "It's a real shame that something with the McIntosh name is junk. I'm in to vintage audio and McIntosh home audio units from back in the day command big bucks and are considered the Rolls Royce of audio components." In fact, they weren't only built by Clarion, but at the time Clarion owned McIntosh, so there's no telling what kind of inter/intra-company forces led to this. I wouldn't expect anything beyond Clarion quality in the digital portion, manufacture, etc., but I think that there's McIntosh design in the relevant audio sections. I've worked with their trad amplifiers; they are something special. But I tell you, in the last few days since I got this thing going again I've been playing a handful of CDs that I thought I knew very well, and I'm hearing things - very subtle effects, a bit of echo, some cymbals - that I've never heard before on a car, home, or studio (I've radio DJed for many years) system. Let the haters hate, but I'm quite impressed by the sound.

Shucks, weren't nuthin'.

These are all the really flat connectorless cables; they're not wire, but are probably considered flexible circuits - I'd have to check. The big one that mates with the main board below has a paddle attached to it for insertion/removal (you need needlenose pliers for either operation), and it had to come out to remove the CD transport, which is held in place by 6-8 screws. Once the drive's out, flip it over and there are a couple more of the same, but smaller and with those little compression/retention clips on the PCB connectors. I wasn't paying a lot of attention, but it makes sense that one goes to the laser and the other to the head positioning motor. I think one of them may have been a little unseated and the lock skewed by a hair, so reseating it may have been the fix. Makes sense that a connector like this might vibrate out a little after years of operation, though you've gotta figure that Clarion wouldn't (continue to) use them if they proved unsuitable for the application.

(later) It seems I got lucky. I cleaned the lens and reseated the (three, I think) ribbon cables, it came to life on the bench, and now it's working in the car. I'm not about to declare it "fixed" before taking a few long drives on rough roads, but at the moment I'm pretty happy.

I agree, but it's a reasonable starting assumption - because it's the reasonable starting assumption a user is going to make, and it's up to the designer to make a very compelling case if wishing to depart from it. (Trust me on this, I've done a lot of work in human factors, UIs, etc.) Sure, but so far neither of us have found what seems like a good reason for that departure, either.

Oh, yeah, tried a few. Flexing the board a little in search of a cracked trace, bad solder joint, etc., would certainly be a valid approach, but... The board is sandwiched underneath the drive and unreachable when the drive is (ribbon) cabled to the main board below. So there's no easy way to get at it in operation.

I think I have: That it should work the same as does a spare key. A key still works in the door lock when there's a key in the ignition, right? So making the fob not work when there's a key in the ignition is inconsistent from a human factors standpoint. As we've seen from the (typical, I think) example I cited, a user would tend to assume it just works. I can't imagine why such regulation would exist... but then again, the world is full of stupid regulations, isn't it? Maybe my favourite example: An old friend whose specialty was building specifications told me about a guy who worked for CSA (Canadian Standards Association, kinda like our UL) and got fired for writing a report explaining why the current regulations governing stairs made them more dangerous. I agree that the designers probably had a reason for doing it, but can't for the life of me imagine what it might have been. Hence the question.