So had anyone else noticed that when one car has a problem, it's
often the case that other cars in the family will have the same
problem soon after?
That's been a common theme this year. It started in spring, when
the M.G.'s batteries went flat on me and the car just didn't want
to crank over one chilly morning. I swapped out the two 6Vs for
a single 12V, a highly recommended change. Best of all was finding
a walnut wedged under the left-hand battery, held down by the force
of that battery's weight. I have, as Hemingway says about finding
the skeleton of a leopard at the top of Kilimanjaro, no idea how it
got there; Kim suggested that a squirrel might have been using my car
once as a winter storage bin, but he would have had to be the Arnold
Schwarzenegger of squirrels to lift the 40-pound battery high
enough to wedge the walnut under it. (Now imagine Chip and Dale
saying, "Hasta la vista, baby.")
Then the B got low on oil after an autocross and though I drove
it home, I left it in the garage for a few weeks (we had a wet
spring, and most of the days I would leave the house it was to
park in the CalTrain lot while commuting to San Francisco, not
a place I felt like leaving the M.G. even if I hadn't removed
the top to make it easier to work on the interior panels). When
a clear day came up and I had a local drive in store, I went to
start the car and, well, the net result is the almost-completed
engine swap still waiting for some time.
Later that summer, the GTI decided that it wanted some of the
attention I'd been paying to the M.G., so it took advantage of how
quickly it was losing oil from one of the many leaks in its gaskets
(so quickly that when you'd run the A/C, blue smoke came out the
dashboard vents). On the way home one day, when I knew I was a
little low on oil because I'd checked it only a week before, I
heard the telltale ticking of a nicked rod bearing. Damn.
The end of *that* story of course is that I traded the GTI in on
a white 280ZX as my commuter car. The weekend that I bought the
Datsun, Kim was in southern California with the '63 Volvo and both
girls visiting family. On her trip home, the Volvo's odometer
drive failed noisily -- or rather, it stopped turning but kept
squeaking. And squeaking. And squeaking.
In mid-November, we took the Volvo up to the Napa Valley for a
lovely overnight stay. On the way back from visiting friends in
the city of Napa, the squeak had become a shriek. The next morning,
in the parking lot of our cabin at Meadowood, I climbed under the
Volvo's dashboard, located the speedo drive cable, determined that
it really was held on with a knurled thumb wheel and removed it.
Silence... happiness... comfort... satisfaction. No speedo, but
I can live with that. I drive by closing rate and curve radius
anyway.
So for the past week, a mildly what-is-that-anyway ticking behind
the Datsun's dash has been getting louder. Two days ago it changed
from a rattle-scrape to The Submarine Dive Klaxon From Hell. I
came home in the kind of mood one might expect from someone who had
to ride in a truck full of amorous monkeys over the Khyber pass in
midsummer. Yesterday at lunch, on my way to O'Connor to buy the
last few gaskets for the MGB's revival, it got worse. I located the
source of the shriek: it appeared to be coming from beneath the
inlet of the climate control's temperature sensor. It sounded
like something in the process of running its bearings.
So I looked it up in the nearly worthless Haynes manual. Every time
I have tried to locate a piece of information about how to DO something
I want to do, this book says "That's too complicated for you so we won't
tell you about it." There's also a three-page index to a 200-page book.
And of course, every repair process ends with "Installation is the
reverse of disassembly." I'm with Egan on that one, though I think
my classic analogy dealt with the difference between removal and
installation as being comparable to that between childbirth and
conception.
So after 20 minutes of removing panels from the dashboard, I located
the source of the yowling horror: an aspirator fan used to draw interior
air into the sensor so that the air conditioner could do something I
didn't want it to do anyway. (There's the basis of a really epic rant
about this car's climate control in here, too; maybe later, but the short
version is that I don't want a car to offer me selections that somebody
thought I might like -- I want a car that gives me the control to do
*exactly what I want it to do*.)
I interrupted my repair process to get dressed and go to dinner -- we
had a babysitter for the first time in months. After a relaxing plate
of linguine with clams fra Diavolo and a so-so house wine, we returned
home, Kim took the sitter home and I dandled the children for a while
before finishing the job.
I was shocked to find that on this 1980s Japanese car, the nuts holding
the aspirator fan onto the dash support were not 7mm, not 8mm, but 5/16"
(well, they took a 5/16" wrench). I took the old aspirator out, pulled
the bullet connectors and made a leap of faith about the two wires. One
was black, and had an exposed head on the connector. The other was green
with some unremembered trace, and had a clear plastic shroud over the
head of the connector. Remembering the Austin connection to Datsuns,
I reasoned that the black wire was almost certainly the ground and
therefore could be left loose in the dash without fear of shorting to
some piece of metal. The car hasn't caught fire yet, so I must have
guessed right.
And... it's so NICE! No noise, not even the little incipient hiss and
rattle! It was in fact the bearings of this aspirator fan, as I was
able to verify before removing it -- it's a teeny plastic squirrelcage,
which I could stop with finger pressure, and doing so made the noise
cease. I've kept the part; someday I'll see what the dealer wants
for a new one ($75, probably, or some equally ridiculous figure) and
put it all back together.
The only casualty was the dashboard A/C vent, which I moved in an effort
to get to the little fan module before I figured out how to get the
glovebox out. (It's actually very clever! The box section has splits
that angle downward along the sides and little pegs on the upper part of
the split; if you pop the pegs out of the corresponding holes, you can
fold the top of the box down far enough to clear the U-bracket that the
glovebox door clips onto. Very slick indeed.) It's come loose from
somewhere deeper in the dashboard, I'm afraid. I'll have to spend some
time frobbing that before summer.
Funny, though. Not only did this car develop the same symptom that the
Volvo had been exhibiting, but it has a similar effect after having
fixed it. They're both a lot more *mine* now than they had been before I
dissected them. And on the Datsun, I've also maintained a perfect
record of doing all the maintenance and repair work it's required: in
addition to this, I added some oil once...
On the other hand, leaving them partially disassembled in this way, I
realized last night that I've taken the first step on the slippery slope
to Previous-Ownerhood. Of course, a truly grim Previous Owner would have
cut the wires to the box, preferably *upstream* of the connector, and
then stuffed a wad of chewing gum on the bare wires, and followed this
by putting the dash panels back with duct-tape because it was easier
than trying to remember which of the 27 different screws I'd removed
while opening up the dashboard went into which of the remaining holes.
The question will be resolved by whether I fix the vent correctly
before I trade the car.
But in the meantime, both these cars, even though they're not British, are
now more pleasant to drive because of my own effort -- and perhaps more
important, because I wasn't afraid to take the dashboard off and start
looking for the source of the noise. That fearlessness is a direct legacy
of the ten years I've spent hacking on M.G.s and the rest. It's hard to
say whether that or the corresponding patience and reason are the most
valuable legacies of British car ownership, but either one is the kind
of contagious disease that we should do everything in our power to spread.
--Scott
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