On a cold January morning, I stepped out my front door and made my way down to my car. As usual, I attached the face plate on my stereo and started the vehicle. I gave the car a couple of minutes to warm up while I read a newly received email on my Blackberry.

In the back of my mind, I thought the car seemed to be idling a little rough this morning. I assumed it had something to do with the bitter cold it had been exposed to throughout the night and put the thought out of my mine. Once I felt the car had sufficient time to warm up, I shifted into first gear, let out the clutch and pulled out of my parking space.

As I accelerated down the street, the car felt as though it was bucking. If you have ever driven a car with a manual transmission, imagine putting it into first gear and gently tapping your foot on the gas pedal. The bucking wasn’t violent, but a gentle surge and drop in power as I held the gas pedal steady.

When shifting into second gear, the car continued to buck, although it was more difficult to notice. My immediate thought was that I had a dirty fuel injector which was limiting the supply of fuel, causing the car to surge instead of maintaining a steady flow of power.

More than nine hours later the morning routine was reversed and I hopped into my car to make the drive home. I experienced the same rough idle, but things were much different when I attempted to pull out of my parking spot. As I let the clutch out, there was an immediate reduction in power and the car almost stalled. I quickly stepped on the clutch and watched the tachometer climb.

Giving it a little more gas than usual, I was able to pull out of my parking spot without much trouble. The earlier bucking in first gear was now much rougher. When shifting to second, the reduction in power was more noticeable and again made me think that I was dealing with a fuel shortage problem due to a filthy fuel injector.

On my way home, I swung into an auto supply store to pick up a can of fuel injector cleaner. I wearily made my way over to the gas station to top off my gas tank and help mix the injector cleaner with my fuel. Once I finished filling up, I continued on my journey home.

The following mornings trip into work seemed as though it was slightly better, as was the trip home that afternoon. I assumed that I guessed correctly and the fuel injector cleaner was slowly doing its job throughout my ten-mile daily commute.

When Friday rolled around, I experienced a brand new problem which had me second guessing my fuel injector theory. About a mile into my five-mile commute to work, my check engine light popped on. When the yellow light came into view, I let out an audible sigh and began dreading how much this problem would cost to repair.

After returning home from work, I made way for my limited supply of mechanics tools to retrieve my code reader. Once connected, I discovered the warning behind the check engine light. My problem was a P0171 OBDII Code. After some research I learned that this was a problem with the engine running too lean.

With mixed signals, I picked up the phone to speak with my father. While not a mechanic by trade, he has forgotten more about cars than I know about them. The consensus was that since my research pointed to a dirty mass airflow sensor, we should start there and simply clean the unit. Being able to do this in a few minutes, it was the fastest and least expensive attempt at resolving my problem.

The following day my father and I got together in an attempt to remedy my problem. While trying to remove the sensor, something caught my eye. On the hose running from the air cleaner box to the throttle body, there was a rather black spot on a rather dirty hose. Upon further inspection, we found a large split hidden within the ridges of the hose.

Knowing immediately what my problem was, I called the nearest Mazda dealership for pricing on this dealer only item. I was happy to learn that the dealership had four hoses in stock, but I was disgusted to learn that they were nearly $100.00 each.

Without much choice in the matter, we drove over to the dealership to pay the insane rate for an intake hose. After returning home, my father had the new hose on before I could even tweet a photo of my problem.

Fortunately, the fix was simple and didn’t require much time or effort. The obvious downside was that the part practically cost me an arm and a leg, considering what it was that I was buying (a short length of hose).

Post from: Walt in PA

That length of hose costs how much!

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photo credit: booleansplit

A couple of weeks ago my wife was visiting her parents and got to talking to her sister. My wife mentioned that I recently had a bunch of trouble with my Windows Vista laptop and finally got it mostly straightened out. This promoted my sister-in-law to ask if I wouldn’t mind fixing her old college laptop. My wife brought it home for me to take a look at.

The laptop has long been replaced by a Windows XP desktop for playing games, using iTunes, and general internet surfing. The laptops role was simply going to be for nothing outside of web surfing and word processing. Back in college my sister-in-law went to insert the power adapter and found that the plastic housing that holds it in place was broken free and laying inside the case.

Being aware of what the problem was, I ordered the new $4.00 part online and waited for it to arrive. The following day I got to talking with my father, who coincidentally just repaired a similar problem on my brothers ex-girlfriends computer. Having experience with this issue, he offered to take care of it for me.

I happily accepted his offer and moved to the cleaning stage when he was finished with it. At some point in time a virus infected the computer and my sister-in-law asked that I take care of it for her. Before being stuck in a closet, the computer was looked at by someone else. This became apparent when I logged in and found virtually no personal data on the PC. It seems that this person felt that deleting anything non-critical would rid the computer of the virus.

Once I got a few things straightened out, I loaded Malware Bytes and ran a scan. The results showed a couple of Trojans and a mess of registry infections. Those were taken care of by the software and the next step was to load the free version of AVG Virus Scanner and take a peak at what it could find.

Before long I had the computer up and running like it should. While the deleting of so many files may have possibly solved part of the problem, I think its a shame that they were removed prior to scanning for infections.

While the old Gateway SB1200 is obsolete, its running smoothly now. I can only hope that the next time a computer problem pops up, my sister-in-law will ask me to take a look at it before someone hastily hacks away at files in attempt to solve the problem.

What was the last computer
problem that you took care of for someone?

Post from: Walt in PA

Can You Fix My Laptop?

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As you are aware, from yesterdays post, I had a little bout with car trouble and required a tow. On Friday I left work, skipped the cigar shop, and got some things together to meet up with my father so that we could try and tackle this car problem of mine.

In the image above is the culprit of my woes. The piece of equipment is a crank position sensor out of a Volkswagon Jetta. I was a little concerned about getting it out of the car due to all of the reading I have done. Some people said that it required removing the starter, oil filter, and several hoses. Others said that all of the above needed to be removed with the addition of a motor mount and the motor would need to be supported with a block of wood.

I’m happy to report that with a little contorting, it can be taken out without removing anything except the shroud that covers the motor. The catch is that you’ll need a second pairs of hands when it comes time to break the bolt free holding the sensor in place.

While my father was under the car getting a 5mm allen wrench onto the bolt, I took over from above the motor and broke it free. From down below you have to twist around a bit, which makes it difficult to turn the wrench, so the extra set of hands comes in handy as there is more room to maneuver from above. The reason you can’t just remove it from above is because you can’t really see the head of the bold to engage the wrench.

Once that 5mm bolt was removed, it took a little finagling to pop the sensor free. The most difficult part was removing the plastic connectors from a rail holding them in place. When it was all said and done, it took us a little over an hour to get the car finished up.

Once the new sensor was installed, I used my OBD II reader to reset the error code then took the car for a spin. I drove it long enough to get the engine up to normal temperature then brought it back. Everything seemed to run just fine. A few hours later I took the twenty-five minute drive home without issue.

To sum things up, the repair costs me roughly $200.00 and about an hour and a half of my time. I’d say it was well worth doing it myself as I can imagine a mechanic would have easily charged me more than $300.00 to do the job.

Post from: Walt in PA

Car Trouble Resolved, For Now

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