jonathan909

Well, the conversation started with a discussion about oil pumps - about the last place where rust is an issue. I don't have a universal love for Allen heads - they get worse as they get smaller. I've used them all the way down to .030" (or maybe .035" - I'd have to check), and down there the engagement and torque are almost nonexistent. But up at these sizes they're tolerable, and preferable to "Philips", because at least a hexagon is always a hexagon. The problem with Philips is that they usually aren't - that is, there's a buttload of different heads that all look more or less like Philips, but the tooling doesn't interchange between them worth a d@mn, making every time you apply a driver to one a crap shoot as to whether it's gonna move or the head is gonna chew. To make matters worse, the sizings come in both imperial and metric, making it even harder to get the right driver. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives#Cruciform_drives Worst. Head. Ever.

Incidentally, I can't be the only person here filled with blind hate for the philips-variant screws used here and on the separator plate and wrist-pin port. I'm pretty well strapped with the right tools, but have never been able to avoid chewing up those heads. Bought a big bag of socket (allen) head screws as replacements and do so at every opportunity.

Mos def. Given the immediate circumstances, though (it's my wife's DD and the present weather isn't compatible with doing any more than absolutely necessary), I'll settle for "light not on". Besides, I need to get a fitting for my gauge. With any luck I won't need to find out anytime soon.

Gents, thanks for the input. I found I had a spare sender lying around, and all things considered, trying it involved the least time spent outside. Appears to have taken care of the problem. Now, to draining the excess oil... and giving the SO an education PDQ in how not to FSU.

I had to run it for a minute or so because she'd parked it in a bad spot (in front of the gas station's dumpsters) and it needed to be moved to where it could wait for a day. It's definitely the oil pressure light (which came on maybe 10 seconds after the engine started). And I didn't detect any obvious bad noises e.g. a spun bearing, so I have hope. I know where the sender is; I'm curious whether that's the only available port I can use for a diagnostic gauge, or whether there's another easily-accessible plug somewhere. But my larger question is about diagnosing the cause of the problem without risking (further) damage. How to proceed?

Thanks for the tip - though I'm desperate to brighten ours, I've been avoiding the hot aftermarket bulbs because of previous bad experiences with overpriced-and-ridiculously-short-lived ones. I'll give these a shot. For the plastic lens restoration, here's my two bits worth: I've used both the Mothers and Meguiar's kits, and the latter is vastly superior. Mothers gives you a couple of little teeny fingertip sanding pads; Meguiar's are much larger and come with a nice big handle. The Meguiar's buffing pad is fabric, where the Mothers is a foam ball that explodes if (when) you over-rev the drill. And the Meguiar's kit includes a bottle of UV protectant, absent in the Mothers kit. Given that they're at the same price point (about $30), there's no contest.

So I got the call from my wife last night during her commute home - her '98 Legacy DD's idiot light went on. Under the misapprehension that the light means "time to add some oil" and not "stop right g0dd@mn now", she continued to drive to the next convenient gas station, then dumped in a couple of overpriced litres without first checking the dipstick. She phoned me when that failed to turn off the light. (It's now very overfilled.) After I stopped yelling... I drove into the city and picked her up; there's a call in for a tow, which should be some time today - response times are rather long at -30 degrees. I've never had to debug low/absent oil pressure in one of these things, and could use a little guidance: How to go about it without risking (further) damage? And is there a convenient port where I can connect a (mechanical) gauge for diagnosis, or do I have to unscrew the existing sender? This is going to be hard enough with the low ambient temp, so I really want to make sure I don't screw up.

I'm not keeping up. I don't know what you mean by RDOT or "bridges", and "piston dome shape" suggests differences that aren't actually part of the block. Please clarify?

Cool. A couple of questions, svp? How does one distinguish the various 25x blocks? Casting, stamping, etc? And when you "shave" a head, how much is typically removed?

Okay, thanks. Guess I'm just going to have to trudge the yard to get a paint match.

Yeah, that was fun. Thanks to everyone for bearing with us. Next time we can start a fresh thread for this kind of wide-ranging blather.

Sorry - stupid me. '01 Forester.

We've determined that all Foresters on Alberta highway #549 are cursed. After writing off two last year (deer), a moose ran my girls off the road on Friday. I just can't get a break (in the wrenching) with these things. Now I need a fender. So I looked up my VIN on vindecoderz.com , which is the best free online tool I've found so far (Question 1: Does anyone know a better one?), and it confirmed that I've got 8J6 - ROYAL SILVER M/GRAY paint. Now I'm plugging in the numbers from the wrecker's web site in an effort to find a match, but it's not returning the "additional information" section, where the paint info is. Question 2: Is the problem that the paint is in the last six ("sequential production") digits, and the detailed information on those is just not available anywhere? Question 3: Am I going about this all wrong? Question 4: Which years use the same panel?

I'm sure I read something about that, or maybe one of my more credulous friends drew my attention to it... wasn't it more like a fermenter or coal gas generator that you fed wood into? Struck me at the time that you could do it that way, but you wouldn't be going very far very fast. Most certainly, but as I said, the oil companies are big, practical, profit-driven entities that would ditch oil and sell hamburgers if they saw more profit for their shareholders in it. Seriously, as the market for fossil hydrocarbon fuels slowly dies, they're rebranding themselves as "energy" companies and diversifying into wind and solar and hydrogen and anything else that'll keep the dividend cheques flowing. So they really couldn't care less about "oil" as a thing. In contrast, the gun lobby isn't just doctrinaire, it's obsessive and fanatical in a way that's not well understood anywhere else in the world. They aren't motivated by profit, logic, or common sense - just look at how they work to the detriment of their own constituency by absolutely refusing the CPSC jurisdiction over firearms (the only product sector so excluded). We could get into a discussion about the historical origins of this weird behaviour, but I think we're sufficiently OT already to try everyone's patience quite enough. So any parallels between the two industries fall apart really fast. Ah, I never bought into that five-hundred-mile-per-gallon-car-runs-on-water-and-dark-energy-but-big-oil-suppressed-it bu11$h!t. Strictly conspiracy-theorist nonsense, no different than any other perpetual-motion fantasy. The laws of thermodynamics still apply: You can't win. You can't break even. You can't get out of the game. If there'd been any substance to any of that crap, James Randi's million-dollar prize would have been claimed. But it wasn't, and it was retired with him after 30 years. Fun idea (and I hate to be a buzzkill), but I think about half an hour of back-of-the-envelope calculation would probably show why it wouldn't fly...

Crimp butt splices are okay in a pinch, but they really don't have any place in building a proper harness. The tape you're talking about is self-fusing butyl rubber (same sort of stuff used for sealing windshields). You stretch it, then wrap it over itself, and it fuses into a single piece of rubber. I'm pretty fond of it because it doesn't leave any adhesive residue. The downside is that it's very soft and easy to chafe through, so you have to careful where you use it. And one of my earliest tool investments was a Panduit wire tie gun - it tensions the wire tie, then cuts it off cleanly, all in one pull of the trigger. You don't have to use one, but if you don't you'd better have a very good pair of flush cutters for cutting the free end off. There's a special place in hell reserved for people who don't, and instead leave sharp little stubs sticking out of the wire ties to lacerate the wrists of those who come later.

Whoops - sorry!

You shouldn't have to do that. The engine doesn't need to be running in order to clear codes via the ODBII port - you just need the key on.

Should be okay - I dunno exactly where the electronics drop out, but that's a reasonable drop for cranking. As mentioned, easy enough to check. My only timing failure experience was a catastrophic one. I can see the crank and knock sensors complaining, but the others strike me as less directly related. That's where I'd be thinking about a wiring fault common to them, and the canonical answer tends to be "grounds".

It would suggest that the power is good enough to crank. But at the same time, the voltage may be dropping low enough to create problems for the ECU, etc. You really want to get a meter on it.

I wouldn't believe it either. Think about what all those things have in common, starting with bad power. I'd be looking at the battery, alternator, etc. If they're okay then the debugging starts.

Well, nobody's threatening to come and pry your steering wheel out of your cold, dead hands - they don't have to. It's much more simple than that: Gas will simply be priced out of reach, then ultimately banned. You can keep as many big shiny metal planters as you want. This isn't like guns, where (Americans) have a (debatable) constitutional right to them. Nor is there a gas-guzzling-car equivalent of the NRA going to the wall to fight against end-run fuel restrictions, the automotive equivalent of the Brady bill. And the big petroleum companies are already showing signs of starting to divest of the worst of their hydrocarbon holdings i.e. the Alberta tar sands. They know what's coming down the pike, and if getting out of what is still their core business is what they have to do to preserve shareholder value, then get they will. As far as electric supercars go, I hope you caught the episode of The Grand Tour in which Richard Hammond wrecked the megabuck Croatian Rimac. He rolled it, then it burned for four days. Every time a battery cell blew, it set the next one alight, and they couldn't put it out. Just amazing.

Dude, please. This has been discussed ad nauseum. You know what it is. You know where it is. It's not that hard. Just do it.

Whew - that was a blowout rant. I'm not the slightest bit interested in getting into a knock-down-drag-out on the (WAY OT) subjects of peak oil, the growing environmental depredations associated with its extraction, and global warming here, but they're all real. And they're the pressures that are going to cause the effective extinction of the ICE - probably in my lifetime, but most certainly in that of my kids. Are electrics perfect? Far from it - in fact, around here, at present, they're the worst example of "long tailpipe" pollution, as most of Alberta's electricity still comes from coal (yes, all of those plants are being forced by legislation to convert to natural gas by 2030, but that's a marginal improvement, not a quantum one). So while Teslas are cool, they aren't as meritorious as owners here would have you believe. They may tell you that they pay a premium for solar- or wind-generated power, but that's accounting flummery. Hydrocarbon fuels remain the gold standard in terms of energy density, but there isn't a car company or related industry that doesn't see the writing on the wall, and the investment and effort in improving battery chemistry (and every other aspect of the electric drivetrain) is massive, and will continue to improve to the points at which it's competitive with, then superior to, burning fossil fuels. And that's the viewpoint from the very practical engineering perspective, not the starry-eyed environmentalist one. That doesn't mean we don't have a lot to atone for. The energy of slaves (as fossil fuels haven been described - PM me for references) has resulted in our building an unsustainable society in many respects. Departing it may force us to make very difficult and unpleasant compromises, but compromises that will in the long run rationalize and improve our society.

It's a small point, but one that separates the knuckle-draggers from the pros: Do not use tape. Just don't. It's amateur and ugly and in time the adhesive turns to goo and you (or the person who deals with it later) will be filled with hate. Use heat-shrink tubing, and the clear stuff so you can see what's underneath. Your work will look like a million bucks.

Sorry for the drift - it happens. But a simple "yes" or "no" would have been nice. [edit] Found the cross-references. EOT