April 19, 2009

..and then there was an Earth shattering....thwack

Note that said "thwack" is unrelated in any way to the accompanying picture ...

...which is probably more deserving of comment than the banality that is below the fold.
Saturday morning I headed to school to study, but took a detour through Churchland as I needed to drop some stuff off at the post office. As I related in the previous post, the Pickup of Peril is in the shop getting its gas tank repaired however, I had the good fortune to be able to drive my grandmothers seldom used van this week.

Around 11:30 I pulled onto high street I heard a sharp noise, best described as a "thwack". It didn't sound particularly disastrous...but it didn't sound good either..however, I only understood a bit of its implications a few seconds later when I tried to change lanes....and did so only with the greatest difficulty.
Power steering was gone.
OK this is not a complete disaster...but it is damned annoying. It is also really bad form to break the van belonging to ones grandmother. A minute or two later as I struggled to get the van in the proper lane I noted that the temperature gauge: The engine was getting very, very hot. I pulled into a parking lot, shut everything off, got out and confirmed that I had snapped a belt.

No....not A belt....THE belt.

This Dodge van has one belt that runs the fan/waterpump/power steering motor/ac compressor/alternator....everything except the drive shaft (which I am happy to say remains unbroken on this vehicle).

A big thanks is due to Advance Auto in Churchland for not only getting a belt from their Virginia Beach store by 3pm...but also providing a threading diagram and loaning me a tool to adjust the tension spool.

A pox, a curse and a plague of snakes, spiders and slugs is due to the people at Dodge who designed an engine space which made it unbelievably difficult to reach half of the spools to thread them if one is not a giant spider crab* and as an added bonus located the tension spool such that makes it almost imposible to use any leverage to fully move it. I had to call my dad out with the joyous news that I had broken his mothers van....and even with both of us working on the damned thing (this was most assuredly a 2 person job) I was under the van or hanging over/ in the engine until 9PM....the day was shot.

Completely beat and covered with grease, I had already missed the school library hours so I headed out to the cybercafe to make use of their Japanese fonts, working printers, high speed internet and iced mochas....only to be informed that they closed 2 hours early tonight in order to do maintenance.

The day being a total bust, I couldn't really do much studying by that point so I ended up watching the last disc of Lucky Star.....











...about which more later.







*Note: I am not a giant spider crab

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 03:29 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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1 Definitely a shrine.  No question about it.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Sun Apr 19 19:57:01 2009 (Cq4Jw)

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