RE: When it Rains, it Pours (Or, BlackAeronaut's Automotive Woes, an Ongoing Saga)
08-01-2020, 05:17 AM
08-01-2020, 05:17 AM
Almost forgot that I had started this thread. Time for an update.
The water pump replacement on the Saturn went well, though not without some ire on my part. See this reddit post I made on r/justrolledintotheshop to see what kind of insanity I had to resort to. I made sure to coat the felt gasket fairly well with the Permatex Ultra Black sealant. It's gonna take something really unusual for that thing to start leaking again.
As for the Burbie...
Well, the rebuild had hurdles of its own. The biggest issue we came across was that there are chipped gear teeth in the planetary gear set for the 1st/reverse gear. I'm not terribly concerned about it, and with good cause: there were no signs of unusual metal shavings in the transmission.
Near as I can figure, this was a preexisting condition from the last time it got rebuilt. Apparently the guy doing that rebuild just said "fuck it", cleaned everything up, and then threw it back in there. If it's lasted this long since then, then I have few concerns. However, let it be known that another rebuild is planned in order to replace that gearset, but not yet scheduled. I'll also take that opportunity to make some minor tweaks that will make the transmission work even better.
There was a bit of an unwelcome surprise in that once we got everything back into the Suburban, the transfer case shift was... well, loose and floppy. We had to tie it down in order to keep it in four-wheel-high for the drive back home from my Uncle's place.
Some research had be worried that the shifter forks inside the t-case had worn out, but then a bit of related info that I caught just by sheer chance revealed what I had done wrong.
The NP241 transfer case has a spring loaded detent for the shifter, which is located behind a cap-bolt on the bottom of the case.
And I had mistaken that as a drain plug.
A quick trip back to my Uncle's place to search the bucket of nasty old transmission fluid yielded the needed spring, and then I spent a few hours cursing as I fought against the actual drain plug (because that bastard did not want to come off, even for all the tea in China, and I didn't have enough space under the Burbie to use a pipe on a breaker bar), reinstalling the detent spring, refilling the transfer case, and then making sure that the damn thing actually worked.
Which it does.
I'm happy to say that after all this time and effort, the drive train of our Suburban is now fully functional.
Next up was the radio.
Sadly to say, the dumb-fuck that broke into our Suburban and ripped out the radio that was in there before had cut the antenna cable. Now I get to repair THAT.
Otherwise, the install went well... though as with anything I undertake, Murphy saw fit to throw me some curve balls.
See, the Burbie is old enough that it follows the old GM standard for color coding of the radio wiring. But the replacement pig tails we got? They use the new standardized color coding scheme.
* Black Aeronaut sighs in exhaustion.
Fortunately, I had come across a PDF-scan of a shop manual that specifically dealt with the electrical systems in the 1993 model year C- and K-series pickup trucks and Suburbans. Fucking score! Still took me a while because I had to discern exactly which package our Suburban originally had. (Turns out it was the DELUXE sound system with six speakers instead of four, a power amplifier, and a graphic equalizer in the head unit.)
Once I did, though, it just became a matter of carefully rationing out my butt splice connectors (because I am absolutely NOT manually splicing that many fucking wires!) in order to get the pigtails all put together.
It went like this: Original Wiring => Replacement OEM Pigtails => Installation Kit Pigtail => Radio Pigtails
It's a bit convoluted, I know, but the advantage here is that we now have the original equipment style connectors, so if we ever change out the radio, we can get the specific adapter harness. And as a bonus, the replacement OEM pigtail now acts as a sort of Rosetta Stone between the GM wire color scheme, and the standardized color scheme. My hard work shall not be in vain.
At first I hit a snag in that the new radio wouldn't power on. I go straight for the multimeter and start checking the pigtails and I find that the "Memory" wire (supplies low current to the radio so it remembers settings and such) is dead. This is an issue because without power to this wire, even if the radio does have primary power available, it's brain-dead without memory power and thus will literally not even think of turning on. This is the drawback of modern radios.
Turns out that this wire gets its current from the courtesy lighting circuit, though God only knows why. And for some reason, that fuse is missing. So I go, buy new fuses, install new fuse, and all the courtesy lights come on... and will not turn off. I didn't have any time left to work on it, so I left it for later.
Later comes and I realize that I made a stupid. I didn't realize the thumb wheel for the instrument panel dimmer was all the way up in that notch that keeps all the courtesy lights on. PROBLEM SOLVED.
Now to test if this thing actually works. Trouble is all the speakers got ripped out. While the cops had recovered everything from the thief (he was just working his way down the rear-most row of cars in the complex, thinking this was safe enough, not realizing that the complex next door had apartments with a great view of his activities), there was a lot of damage done. With only a couple of working speakers, I checked each set of wires left in the speaker wells.
Wouldn't you know it? Two of them are dead - the two in the middle. Again, thanks to the electrical shop manual I found, I got a very strong idea of where the issue is. It's just a matter of me digging in there to root it out. Worst case scenario is that the power amplifier has gone bad, but I doubt it. GM built those things to last.
No work on the air conditioning yet. After the radio is up and running on all speakers, Dad wants me to look into what is causing their Elantra to constantly stall out. It's throwing codes to the tune of "Camshaft Position Sensor Miscount". Except we've replaced those already. I seriously doubt the connectors in between there and the engine computer are faulty, given the car is relatively new (2018). However, this was car was purchased from a car rental company. And I have reason to believe that the cylinder head might be gummed up with god only knows what.
Why do I think that?
Intermittent valve tappet sounds accompanied by a VERY ROUGH IDLE, but they go away if you gas the engine good.
That only happens if there's some kind of blockage in the oil passages/galleries. Combined with the miscounts on the camshaft position sensors? Yeeeeaaaahhhhhh....
Wish me luck.
The water pump replacement on the Saturn went well, though not without some ire on my part. See this reddit post I made on r/justrolledintotheshop to see what kind of insanity I had to resort to. I made sure to coat the felt gasket fairly well with the Permatex Ultra Black sealant. It's gonna take something really unusual for that thing to start leaking again.
As for the Burbie...
Well, the rebuild had hurdles of its own. The biggest issue we came across was that there are chipped gear teeth in the planetary gear set for the 1st/reverse gear. I'm not terribly concerned about it, and with good cause: there were no signs of unusual metal shavings in the transmission.
Near as I can figure, this was a preexisting condition from the last time it got rebuilt. Apparently the guy doing that rebuild just said "fuck it", cleaned everything up, and then threw it back in there. If it's lasted this long since then, then I have few concerns. However, let it be known that another rebuild is planned in order to replace that gearset, but not yet scheduled. I'll also take that opportunity to make some minor tweaks that will make the transmission work even better.
There was a bit of an unwelcome surprise in that once we got everything back into the Suburban, the transfer case shift was... well, loose and floppy. We had to tie it down in order to keep it in four-wheel-high for the drive back home from my Uncle's place.
Some research had be worried that the shifter forks inside the t-case had worn out, but then a bit of related info that I caught just by sheer chance revealed what I had done wrong.
The NP241 transfer case has a spring loaded detent for the shifter, which is located behind a cap-bolt on the bottom of the case.
And I had mistaken that as a drain plug.
A quick trip back to my Uncle's place to search the bucket of nasty old transmission fluid yielded the needed spring, and then I spent a few hours cursing as I fought against the actual drain plug (because that bastard did not want to come off, even for all the tea in China, and I didn't have enough space under the Burbie to use a pipe on a breaker bar), reinstalling the detent spring, refilling the transfer case, and then making sure that the damn thing actually worked.
Which it does.
I'm happy to say that after all this time and effort, the drive train of our Suburban is now fully functional.
Next up was the radio.
Sadly to say, the dumb-fuck that broke into our Suburban and ripped out the radio that was in there before had cut the antenna cable. Now I get to repair THAT.
Otherwise, the install went well... though as with anything I undertake, Murphy saw fit to throw me some curve balls.
See, the Burbie is old enough that it follows the old GM standard for color coding of the radio wiring. But the replacement pig tails we got? They use the new standardized color coding scheme.
* Black Aeronaut sighs in exhaustion.
Fortunately, I had come across a PDF-scan of a shop manual that specifically dealt with the electrical systems in the 1993 model year C- and K-series pickup trucks and Suburbans. Fucking score! Still took me a while because I had to discern exactly which package our Suburban originally had. (Turns out it was the DELUXE sound system with six speakers instead of four, a power amplifier, and a graphic equalizer in the head unit.)
Once I did, though, it just became a matter of carefully rationing out my butt splice connectors (because I am absolutely NOT manually splicing that many fucking wires!) in order to get the pigtails all put together.
It went like this: Original Wiring => Replacement OEM Pigtails => Installation Kit Pigtail => Radio Pigtails
It's a bit convoluted, I know, but the advantage here is that we now have the original equipment style connectors, so if we ever change out the radio, we can get the specific adapter harness. And as a bonus, the replacement OEM pigtail now acts as a sort of Rosetta Stone between the GM wire color scheme, and the standardized color scheme. My hard work shall not be in vain.
At first I hit a snag in that the new radio wouldn't power on. I go straight for the multimeter and start checking the pigtails and I find that the "Memory" wire (supplies low current to the radio so it remembers settings and such) is dead. This is an issue because without power to this wire, even if the radio does have primary power available, it's brain-dead without memory power and thus will literally not even think of turning on. This is the drawback of modern radios.
Turns out that this wire gets its current from the courtesy lighting circuit, though God only knows why. And for some reason, that fuse is missing. So I go, buy new fuses, install new fuse, and all the courtesy lights come on... and will not turn off. I didn't have any time left to work on it, so I left it for later.
Later comes and I realize that I made a stupid. I didn't realize the thumb wheel for the instrument panel dimmer was all the way up in that notch that keeps all the courtesy lights on. PROBLEM SOLVED.
Now to test if this thing actually works. Trouble is all the speakers got ripped out. While the cops had recovered everything from the thief (he was just working his way down the rear-most row of cars in the complex, thinking this was safe enough, not realizing that the complex next door had apartments with a great view of his activities), there was a lot of damage done. With only a couple of working speakers, I checked each set of wires left in the speaker wells.
Wouldn't you know it? Two of them are dead - the two in the middle. Again, thanks to the electrical shop manual I found, I got a very strong idea of where the issue is. It's just a matter of me digging in there to root it out. Worst case scenario is that the power amplifier has gone bad, but I doubt it. GM built those things to last.
No work on the air conditioning yet. After the radio is up and running on all speakers, Dad wants me to look into what is causing their Elantra to constantly stall out. It's throwing codes to the tune of "Camshaft Position Sensor Miscount". Except we've replaced those already. I seriously doubt the connectors in between there and the engine computer are faulty, given the car is relatively new (2018). However, this was car was purchased from a car rental company. And I have reason to believe that the cylinder head might be gummed up with god only knows what.
Why do I think that?
Intermittent valve tappet sounds accompanied by a VERY ROUGH IDLE, but they go away if you gas the engine good.
That only happens if there's some kind of blockage in the oil passages/galleries. Combined with the miscounts on the camshaft position sensors? Yeeeeaaaahhhhhh....
Wish me luck.