When it Rains, it Pours (Or, BlackAeronaut's Automotive Woes, an Ongoing Saga)

[Black Aeronaut]

So, some of ya'll have probably heard about the accident my brother got into with my Jetta.

No worries, no one really got hurt.  But my Jetta is a mess now.

Video of the accident, courtesy of my dash cam.



Fortunately, it's pretty much all cosmetic.  The only thing really keeping me from driving it a busted headlamp assembly.  But it does mean that I am down by a vehicle.

Oh, what's that now?  A bad water pump in the Saturn?

Okay, make that TWO vehicles.  FFS.

At the very least, I got the funds available to me, and the water pump is readily available in the local parts stores, and I have the tools and know the procedure...  But I'm probably still gonna be unable to work on a day that I'm scheduled.  Dammit.

In other news, I've managed to clear out the vast majority of what Mr. Electro did to the Suburban in their misguided effort to turn it into a cut-rate ghetto show car.  The amount I've pulled out so far is... Impressive.  I'll take a picture later on to show you.

The transmission is another issue, though.  It turns out that the 3-4 clutchpack is indeed burned out - no one mentioned the fact that  the engine runs away when it hits 3rd Gear.

We have ordered the appropriate rebuild kit...  At least, I thought it was the appropriate kit.  But it only came with one piston, and not the full set.

See, thing is that these transmissions were originally built with aluminum pistons to engage the clutchpacks.  But while they worked when they were new, time has shown that they become brittle and crack, letting hydraulic fluid slip past.  And rebuild kits meant to replace these pistons have steel replacements.

So now, we're waiting on a complete set to arrive before I can get started.

I've also ordered a full set of plastic check balls.

This is another shortcoming for the transmission.  They have steel check balls, and that sounds great, right?  Except that some of the ports tend to come under very high pressure - enough that the valve separator plate (a thin sheet of stamped out steel in the valve body that helps separate the individual valves) winds up getting deformed at the ports these check balls are located on, and the steel check balls eventually wind up getting lodged into the plate.

Lovely, eh?

So, we have these plastic check balls (which have been used in many other transmissions for many years with no issue at all) which have just enough give to them so they absorb the impact instead of deforming the separator plate and getting jammed.

I've got my work cut out for me, but I'm still confident in my abilities to do this right the first time.  If anything does come out as being too worn, I won't be half-assing it.  The rebuild will go on pause, pending the acquisition and arrival of new parts.  It might be an inconvenience now, but my parents have assured me that they want this to be done right so it won't be an even bigger inconvenience later.

Other things to fix on the Burbie...

I got a solid shot at fixing the rear air conditioning system on this beast.  A preliminary check shows that while the front AC system seems to work just fine (with a stuck damper up front that will be fixed as well), there seems to be no flow of refrigerant to the rear AC evaporator coil.  This means one of two things:
-There is no power and/or signal going to the expansion valve, thus it won't open
-The expansion valve itself has gone bad
The first is easy to fix.  So is the second, really, but that will also necessitate the discharging of the entire AC system, followed by a purge and recharge afterwards.  However, Mom and Dad have deemed this a worthwhile expense if it gets the rear AC working again.

With me having made so much progress on the Burbie's electrical system, Mom and Dad have asked me to look into the feasibility of installing a basic Bluetooth-capable head unit in the Burbie.

It can be done.

In fact, there are even complete after-market kits that let you install a single- or double-DIN head unit in place of the original tape deck.  They even come with a specially made pigtail that plugs into the OEM pigtail...

... except the OEM pigtail isn't there anymore.

Fortunately, some wonderful people make replacements, and they're available on the cheap.  So I'll be able to make this a thing that happens for my folks as well, and they'll be able to use their phones hands-free in The Burbie.

(Unfortunately, I'll have to rewire the speakers, because that fucktard messed that up as well.  This idiot wired the after-market amp directly to the power supply for the trailer brake system!!!)

And also, I will want to replace the shock absorbers because holy hell this thing wallows worse than a pig, but that's an easy thing to do on these trucks.

Like I said before, I got my work cut out for me, but I have confidence in my abilities to accomplish our goals here.

[classicdrogn]

Yikes! All I can say is good luck with your shadetree mechanic projects. Hopefully with three waves past the worst is over?

[Black Aeronaut]

Yikes! All I can say is good luck with your shadetree mechanic projects. Hopefully with three waves past the worst is over?

It's kinda like what I would say to my mom some days when I was still in high school: "The dishes are never done."

There's always going to be something that needs doing.  The day there isn't anything that needs to be done to the vehicles will probably be the day I die. 

[Black Aeronaut]

Update: We just got in the new steel pistons and plastic checkballs today, so we're pretty much good to go on the transmission rebuild.

Still pending delivery is everything we need for the radio install. Good news, though: the original plugs and wires for the original speakers are still present, so as long as I wire up the replacement pigtails properly, I should be able to get everything working right.

I have the water pump for my Saturn on hand, and it came with a gasket, so that was one less thing I needed to buy. Still picked up a tube of RTV sealant, just to be safe. I'll be taking care of that today provided I don't feel like death warmed over.

[Black Aeronaut]

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.

[classicdrogn]

My knowledge of automotive mechanics barely encompasses checking all the dip sticks and filling anything that's low, or in extremis "RTFM and follow the instructions;" otherwise looking under the hood tells me nothing but that there is an engine present. (I have made a car saleswoman laugh when she popped the hood to show me and I said "Yep, that certainly is an engine!" Apparently I had been coming across as a performance enthusiast somehow. Probably because I wanted at least six cylinders and a manual shift?) So, good luck! You definitely have a better chance than I would!

[Rajvik]

the Burbie's tranny reminds me of the transmission on the old 4cyl tow tractors that we use on Marine airbases. There is a spring that modulates how hard the gears shift, (they are automatic) and there is an adjustment bolt to the outside to allow you to adjust the tension on the spring. YOU ARE SPECIFICALLY INSTRUCTED NOT TO TRY AND REMOVE THIS BOLT. doing so will not remove the bolt but will cause the spring to fall down in the transmission pan causing you to have to pull the damn thing with it up on a lift and put it back together as the tow tractor is at that point stuck in first gear.

[Black Aeronaut]

News about the Burbie Restoration Project.

As we left off before, we had the front and rear speaker wiring functioning, but not the middle row.  Which is really awfully specific when you stop to think about it.

A little bit about the original setup.  In the deluxe sound package of the 1993 Suburban, there's a small amplifier that sits under the driver seat.  It picks up the signal going to the rear speakers through a splice in the wiring, amplifies that signal, and sends it on to the middle row speakers.  In essence, it's just acting as signal booster so all of the speakers in the back don't sound weak.

Possible causes of no signal in the middle row:
1) A bad connector
2) An open or short in the wiring somewhere
3) The Amp isn't getting power
4) The Amp has gone bad

I start with the easy one and test to make sure that 1) the relay that send power to the amplifier works, and 2) that the relay itself is receiving power and signal.

Relay checks out fine, so the next step is continuity checks on all the wiring going to the connector at the amplifier.

Everything except for the wiring for the middle row of speakers checks out.  Which leaves only the possibility of a bad connector in the B-Pillars (not likely since both the left and right side are out), or... the previous owner did something stupid.

PIN-PON!  It was the previous owner!

Rather than use the existing wiring, he cut the wires just shy of the connectors in the B-Pillars, and then ran some tacky looking wire OVER THE UPHOLSTERY and into the center console...  Which had the after-market amplifier, just sitting in there with no securement, and getting its power off of the trailer brake power circuit.

Fucking hell.

So, it was a fairly simply matter to just re-splice the original wiring back together again, and now we have working middle row wiring.

Next, Speakers.

You would think that an outfit would know exactly what dimensions that such a common platform as the GMT-400 would require for the speakers.  But unfortunately, it seems that some of these folks are about as bright as a 5-watt light bulb.

The speakers themselves work... but it's going to take more work on my part to get the properly mounted.  Right now?  They're improperly mounted.  Secure, for certain, but still improper.

The biggest hassle of them all is the front-passenger side speaker well.  It has an air duct running right underneath it and I have no friggin' clue how the stock speaker fit into such a small space.  Although I have heard that the original speakers in these vehicles were absolute crap.

The only way I'll be able to fit the damn thing in there is by taking a heat gun to the air duct and warming the plastic just enough for me to deform it so the speaker will sit in the well properly.  So that's what I'm gonna do as soon as I get my hands on a heat gun.

Another wrinkle in the saga is that there seems to be an issue with the torque converter on the transmission.  Namely, the lock-up on the TC doesn't seem to be properly engaging.

I'm hoping that it's something that I goofed up in the valve body like I used the wrong spring somewhere inside the thing.  But in reality?  I strongly suspect that when the 3-4 clutchpack went out in the tranny, it somehow also took the lock-up clutch inside the torque converter with it.

And all torque converters are sealed units.  This will mean a new torque converter, which will run us about $200-$300.  It's not the most expensive single thing my folks have bought over the course of this restoration, but it's still nothing to sneer at unless you're making that kind of money every hour while you sleep.

So, the next step will be for me to bring the Burbie over to a transmission shop of good repute that I know of, have the man there give it a quick road test, and tell me for sure if it's the valve body (which means I goofed, but in a way that even a pro might do so) or the torque converter (I didn't goof, it was a cascading failure).

Let's see which one it's gonna be.