jonathan909

Based on the description and comments, I'd say "MIL SPEC my @ss" (like Ford trucks and their "military grade aluminum" - humph). But they do look a little chunkier and more robust than the usual. But yeah, most of the above suggestions cover it. There's a very short high-current path between battery and starter and not that many parts to go wrong. If it isn't the battery, it may be the starter (or just the solenoid), or a bad termination/connection between. With a fully-charged new battery, do you see any voltage drop (at the battery) when you attempt cranking? And do you see +12 at the starter's control input (from the starter relay) when you try to crank?

Fwiw, I'm not picky about the oil I use in my '95-'01 cars, but have switched to Wix filters on GD's recommendation.

Isn't that the lake in Scotland with the most distilleries around it?

That doesn't scan. You're putting steel bolts into an aluminum hole. That means that it's the aluminum threads that stripped, and all the tapping in the world isn't going to replace the lost metal. So I assume you mean you put in helicoils.

Not correcting, just offering a data point. That seems awfully fussy to me. I've never had to replace a water pump in an EJ22 or 25, but it needs to be pulled in the course of removing the timing cover on the H6 3.0 . I just used whatever gasket was in the kit; I don't think either was metal, just fiber, and I always give those a coat of gasket goo (it's the only place I use that stuff routinely). The first of those two engines now has at least 5000 fresh km on it with no leaks. Much of that was in hot weather, and this morning we woke up to -30, so it's safe to say that it's getting stressed.

A little OT here, but I should add that I pressed these into service this summer while doing the two H6 HG jobs. In both cases at least a few of the 60+ timing cover bolts (small Allen cap screws) were messed up, and after trying and failing with an assortment of internal extractors, these were the ones that worked.

I'll vigorously second that! I have a set of the Craftsman version (red box). This is the "base set", which is five sizes in a case that holds ten. You get the other five in an "expansion set". I had the base set for years, and they were the only extractors that worked for me really consistently. Just this last summer I snagged the expansion set on ebay.

Please choose between not being able to see because dirt's falling in your eyes or not being able to see because the visor's fogged. Fun^2.

Lemme read you a list of my least favourite places to work, starting with "under dashboards".

I had one instance of severe corrosion in the connector behind the driver's kick panel in the '02 Forester. What made that particularly miserable to deal with was that it - as a US-market car (rather than Canadian) - it used a different connector housing than anything I could find up here. I've run into that "different connector between the US and Canada" thing a few times, and it's a real PITA.

Not enough info to speculate. It may have been the pump that was acting up - intermittent, a dead spot in the motor, etc. Behaviour like this is always difficult to debug (and unnerving for the drivers). If it were me, I'd install the new pump and see how it behaves. If it does the same thing again, it probably wasn't the pump.

We don't get those kind of cold+damp conditions here often (it's generally too dry), but I've occasionally had the problem with condensation and consistently solved it with a fresh coat. Also, do take the time to thoroughly clean wherever arcing has been noted, because it'll usually create carbon tracks that reinforce the problem.

Have you done your due diligence with dielectric grease?

No experience with US retailers; only observation is that they're one of the few things I don't buy from Rock because shipping that weight wipes out the price saving vs. local parts store (e.g. Auto Value). I do have consistently good luck with junkyard rotors, though.

For a seller, "fair pricing" is the highest price the market will bear. It's morally wrong to deny someone the right to overpay you for it.

Ed's version of that was "You could do it that way".

Buggah! Now I'm curious how it would work on something/anything older.

Well, if you're going to tip it up that far, you might as well just pour the oil out through the fill tube.

If Kelvin, I'd very impressed with the advertised flow rate.

Oooooo... I wike dat game!

File under: Nagware

As long as it's self-priming, I agree - for $17 it'd be stupid not to give it a try.

Sure, you're doing the best you can with what you have. But as long as the power control is "soft" i.e. there are still things in there powered when it's in the "off" state (vs. a "hard" power-off, which means a switch that actually disconnects the battery) and in some kind of low-power "sleep" state, it's quite capable of enabling the network interface periodically to transmit its location, etc. My point is that the OS - IOS or Android - is able to do things that you don't want it to do and you think it can't. And that behaviour tends to come and go. It'll be in there, quietly doing its dirty work without anyone noticing, then some security researcher will pick up on something odd, look into it, and blow the whistle, and then gapple (I just coined that - does it work?) will issue an update accompanied by a feigned apology, and it'll behave itself for a while, and then sometime later a new OS update will be broadcast, and...

Well... you told it to turn it off, and you think it's turned off, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's turned off. The OS may be turning it back on (and maybe back off again) in order to send whatever data apple or google wants to keep accumulating from/on you. Or they (or others) just keep accumulating that data in real time (including detailed location info), then sending it the next time communications are enabled. There's a well-documented history of this sort of behaviour. You just can't trust it to behave in a predictable or transparent fashion.

Absolutely. And even if that wasn't the original intent behind it (i.e. the old "If you're getting the service for free, you are the product" maxim), eventually everyone comes around to wanting to clean up in this surveillance economy. There are a lot of reasons for my not carrying a tracking device (or engaging in "social media"), but not wanting to participate as the poorly- or un-compensated source of what is ultimately very valuable data is a big part of it. And don't get me started on IOT, which is a network security nightmare. About 15 years ago I appeared on the first (and fourth, but I withdrew my permission for its airing) season of the Canadian version of Dragons' Den, pitching to a couple of the asshats who are now on Shark Tank (O'Leary made it personal, calling me "evil" for reasons that remain a mystery) et.al. . I was pitching a home server I'd designed that included an early version of what was later coined IOT. Those idiots laughed me out of the studio, but in retrospect (as much as I wanted to get that company off the ground), I'm much happier, seeing what a fetid cesspool almost everything associated with the internet has become. But, as they say, I digress. I strongly urge anyone interested in any of these subjects subscribe to RISKS Digest, a forum that's been around for nearly 40 years and rolls up, every week or so, all the worst things happening around the world thanks to the internet, badly designed and implemented control systems and user interfaces, etc. Over the last few years, unsurprisingly, Tesla has featured regularly. And though most of the contributors are computer scientists and engineers, it's very readable even by the nontechnical. p.s. And I wouldn't be caught dead with any of that alexa-smart-home shite in my house, either. In addition to the surveillance-capitalism aspect, that stuff's really about "reducing friction" in getting you to buy stuff, mainly from amazon and apple. My girls know that they're going to get yelled at if I catch them saying "hey, siri" within earshot of me. And see previous post about the EMP HARD '64 Rambler.