| For the want of a nail |
[Jan. 22nd, 2008|10:32 pm] |
Today, while I was driving to class, I noticed that the truck in the lane next to me had a really loud engine noise. "Dang", I thought, "He needs to replace his muffler." A few minutes later the truck turned left and drove away. Unfortunately the noise stayed with me. Damn! My car needed a new muffler! @_@
For the next 20 minutes, as I drove noisily to school, I groused about having to take time off work to bring the car to the shop. I was already behind getting my 40 hours in this week thanks to a traffic snafu on Monday so I wasn't looking forward to having to stay extra late at work to make up the time lost on the car repair. I could wait until Saturday for the repair but I didn't relish the thought of driving a car that sounded like a love sick Banshee every time I shifted gears (at one point on my trip to school the noise was so loud it hurt my ears).
It turns out it wasn't as bad as I thought. It wasn't the muffler that was bad. Instead it was the coupling that joined the catalytic converter to the muffler. The good news was the disconnected pipes were not touching the ground. They were lower to the ground but there was plenty of clearance.
This exact same problem occurred with this car some 8 or 9 years ago. The weld joining the pipes failed. Back then I took the car to Midas and they worked on it. It took two hours because the tech tried to weld the pieces while they were in place and he realized he couldn't do it without melting the floor of the car. He had to take apart the whole assembly and then weld the pipes together.
So in my OpenGL class I was still grousing about taking two or three hours waiting for them to repair the car. I was also thinking I could repair it myself by holding the pipes in place with a metal sleeve and hose clamps. I was hesitant about the job, however. That's because, in my experience, a simple thirty to forty minute job - like this one was promising to be - most likely would turn into an all night disaster.* I was conflicted because I didn't relish the idea of driving to work with a car that sounded like a sick fog horn.
In my Linux class I mentioned my problem to a classmate and he said "Heck, that's easy! Just use a soup can and hose clamps!" That decided it for me. On the way home I bought the parts (two hose clamps and a sheet metal furnace pipe - I didn't have an empty soup can handy) for about $7. That took five minutes. Next I parked the car in the garage and propped the passenger side up with some jack stands. Another ten minutes. The furnace pipe was too long so I cut it with some tin snips. Five minutes. Getting underneath the car, attaching the clamps and the sheet metal, reconnecting the pipe and tightening the clamps. About twenty to thirty minutes. Removing the jack stands. Five minutes. Not bad. Maybe an hours work.
Here's the result:
It's only temporary. But it will hold me over until Saturday.
So that was easy. It turns out the hard part was posting the above picture. With my Agfa 1680, the normal procedure is take the shot, turn off the camera, pull out the smart media card, put it in the computer and transfer the files. It turns out the media card was flaky. I could see the pictures fine on the camera but when I put them on the computer, I get nothing but errors. Fine. I'll transfer it the old fashioned way: with a serial cable (it's an old camera). I can't do that with my laptop (no serial ports). No problem, my printer server has plenty of DB-9 ports. Where's the cable? Damn. Couldn't find it. It wasn't in my box of audio/video cables. Not in my SCSI, VGA, RGB cable box. Not even in my box of parallel cables (I figured why not). I did find some SCSI cables in the audio cable box and some audio cables in the SCSI box (no wonder I can't find anything).
A reasonable person would probably stop at this point and simply retake the picture with a different smart media card. Not me, I knew I could solve the problem my way. Beside, the jack stands were already removed and I couldn't take the shot without putting them back in place.
Anyway, it took over an hour to find the damn cable (it was sitting next to one of my Atari STs - WTF?). I plugged the cable into the back of my desktop and, as I tried to start the camera software, I discovered that I accidentally dislodged the mouse cable. Damn. Had to reboot the computer. After that it was easy-peasy (peazy? How do you spell that?). Taking the damn picture took longer than the repair job.
By the way, the flaky smart media card is now marked: "DO NOT USE". I should probably toss it but I never throw anything away (besides it works on the camera, right?).
*The first time I changed the oil on my car, it took all afternoon. Draining the old oil and pouring in the new oil was easy. The hard part was figuring out how to elevate the car safely (propping it up with a single tire jack did not look like a safe method - I ended up propping the passenger side tires on the curb. It worked.). Replacing the oil filter took hours because I didn't have the right tool and it was very difficult to reach. The second time I changed the oil was six months later (I procrastinated by three months because I dreaded the ordeal the task promised to be) and it took less time. I had jack stands and an oil filter tool. Still took two hours (damn filter was still hard to take out). After that I went to Jiffy lube and never looked back.
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