jonathan909

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.

Honestly, I just think you're grasping for obscure and unlikely use cases. I still think the desirability of being able to do what my daughter tried - to (un)lock with the key in the ignition - outweighs these weird examples you're offering. I just can't see the justification from a normal use, common sense perspective.

I'm not buying it. You can make all the same mistakes with the lock control on the door. Doesn't change the nature of the problem, just the location of the button.

No, it was actually pretty clean in there, and in the car it loaded the CD just fine, then sat for a while before delivering the Err 6. On the bench I spun the head positioner with my finger, and it traveled through its range, so about all that's left is to power it up and see if it appears to work normally. Other than cleaning the lens and reseating the cables, I don't think there's much else to be done.

That's what I'm thinking. I pulled it apart today and there's little that can be done by mere humans - cleaned the lens, reseated the ribbon cables, moved the head to make sure it's traveling freely. I have to dig up a connector on the next visit to the wrecker so I can at least see what it's trying to do on the bench. Unless some magic happens, though, I'll be fishing for a replacement - whole unit or maybe just the CD transport.

Okay, here's a question for you all: "The keyless entry system does not operate when the key is inserted in the ignition switch." I'm quoting from your owner's manual. Can anyone argue in favour of this design decision? We can't come up with a single reason for this being a good idea. Why on earth would they do it this way? This is now A Thing because in the dead of winter, at night, one of my girls left work, and en route home (about a mile from her starting point) she stopped to grab a jug of milk. Since it was very cold and the car had barely started, she didn't want to risk it not starting the second time, and left it running to let it warm up. She took the remote off of the keyring, pocketed it, and used the door switch to lock it up. Only when she returned with the milk did she discover that the remote in her pocket wouldn't work, and she was left standing outside a running car in -35. (There are possible workarounds, of course, but the most obvious one - disconnecting the key-in-lock wire at the ignition switch - has hair on it. Though it would also eliminate the very annoying door-open-key-in-ignition alarm, it would prevent further programming of the keyless entry system, which requires that signal. But in most of my cases that wouldn't matter, because they won't program in situ anyway; that's why I do them on the bench. The next most obvious fix is having both a spare key and your wits about you, which is a difficult operational mode to support.)

And repair even less likely (as if that were possible) now that the Toronto Clarion depot tells me that they can't fix this one because it's OEM, it has to go to a stateside outfit called United Radio.

Oh, no doubt there's tons of that stuff around. No use to me, I don't carry a tracking device (or like the sound of mp3s).

Agreed. I'm not really interested in the potential workarounds. The AM/FM/cassette (curiously enough, I rediscovered some great music I hadn't listened to in many years thanks to just grabbing a box of old tapes for a road trip - ever heard ZZ Top's "La Grange" sung in Russian?) are fine, it's just the fershlugginer CD that won't work. I'll bust open just about anything to take a look, clean it up, see if it's a simple fix, but I don't intend to make it my life's work. And I just heard back from the canuckside Clarion people: Their only service depot is in Toronto, which is a nonstarter (as if I'd be willing to pay the rates people have spoken of for the fix anyway).

Dredging up a very old thread here... I have the McIntosh, and am pretty happy with it - except for the error (Er 6) it spews on inserting a CD. Does anyone have any sort of reference information for these things, even if only the error code definitions? (Scoobywagon hasn't been around for five years.)

Hmm. That's interesting. Just programming up a couple of fobs for the H6 and ran into something I don't think I noticed when I did this a couple of years ago. It appears that to reset the fob-programming state machine you have to first unlock the doors. In practice, of course, this is a non-issue - in order to open the door and get in and go through the programming routine, the door must first be unlocked, and if you lock it after you get in you're violating the procedure as described. But on the bench it got stuck and wouldn't enter programming mode until I started the process with a (door switch) unlock.

Just an additional note here: In the 2001 OBW (mine are H6) the keyless entry module has been moved from under the instrument cluster to the far right of the dash, between the glove box and the door. The location isn't exactly clear from the FSM drawings. You have to remove the glove box to get at it, which should just be a few screws, but also requires mutilating the glove box stops that the manual casually tells you to remove first.