Scamwagon

Amidst countless failures this month, most of which to do with my VW Golf, and will be saved for another post, I was successful at recommissioning my 48V bike battery.  And I'm pretty psyched about that, since a new one would have been well over $500 shipped.  Let's have a look at the story.

As I think I mentioned a few posts ago, my 48v bike battery seems to have a problem with cutting out under full throttle.  This is the case even immediately after charging.  I haven't known much about the battery pack, since I bought it used and it came with no documentation, but after reviewing lots of eBay auctions selling similar items, I have a pretty good guess at what I'm dealing with.  I think I've even figured out what happened, and what to do if there's any chance of fixing it.

Well just when I thought I'd finally gotten past this auto maintenance nightmare... What was only supposed to be an exciting couple of weeks in incoming baby-world (my wife is due next weekend), I have spent basically dealing with my cars.  I'll try to summarize the story as simply as possible.

Ever since I got my Windows 8 PC, I have been having serious problems with audio.  Basically all sound playback on my system experiences a brief  but frequent click, skip, glitch, stutter, whatever you prefer.  I can reproduce the issue on any sound card or firewire sound interface (devices tested include the onboard Conexant SmartAudio HD, my external Phonic Helix 12, and my Edirol FA-101).  All of them seem to have audio clicks, with the firewire interfaces' clicks seeming more harsh for whatever reason.

Last night things moved ahead considerably.  I was very happy to see that the replacement seal arrived priority mail (from idparts.com - they've never done me wrong) on Monday, after I ordered it on Friday night.  I also went out and found a seal puller (similar to the one pictured) at Sears, of all places.  None of the regular auto parts stores carry this thing for some reason. The elusive seal puller I finally obtained.

Well, I was going to update this the other night, but sometimes there's only enough time to work on the car.  So a few things have happened since my last post: for one thing, I got the old gears off.   

Dropbox .  It's becoming the household name for the way to transfer files, and I don't understand why.

Well today I got the transmission cover off.  There were two gears in here (5th gear and the selector gear) that were totally rounded (all teeth were sheared off).