Seal replaced, back on the road!

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.

Gears replaced, leak found!

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. 

 

Leaky Transmission

Well after a horrible stay at La Guardia airport for almost 12 hours, I am home and thinking about my car problems.  Tried to get into it after work today, which usually goes something like this:

Pre-Winter, Auto Mechanic Intermission

I've been fortunate to have had a pretty long break from playing home auto mechanic, but lately things have been wracking up quite a bit, and for a number of reasons, I had to take action.  The most recent project was on my 2002 VW Golf TDI (for more about this car, you can have a look at my old blog, Veggie Golf).  I was going to hold off, but the oil building up in the driveway was an indication that I really needed to get on it.

Items to fix:  Leaking cam seal, timing belt replacement (maintenance interval reached), rear brake rotors and pads, and a few other odds and ends.  When I got into the timing belt cover, it was pretty clear the cam seal was doing very little to keep the oil in the engine.

This is the lower timing belt compartment after I cleaned it up a lot. 

Any doubts were sufficiently quelled when I drained the oil from the crankcase, and got about 2 qts. max out of it.  This is dangerously low, especially for a diesel, and even more especially for a turbo equipped engine.  Feeling lucky, I went ahead and ordered the parts for the timing belt change, including belts, tensioners, and bolts.  Most of the operation went pretty smoothly, although I don't remember ever having so much trouble getting the engine mount bracket in/out.  I probably spent about 2 hours screwing around with that thing alone.

The new cam seal went in pretty easily.  The old one didn't seem damaged, but rather appeared to have come unseated from the camshaft somehow.  I didn't spend too much time worrying about it, but I paid close attention to how I put the new one on.  All back together now, have to pressure wash the engine bay and then off to the muffler shop to fix the broken flex joint, which is causing exhaust to go into the car.  All told, probably about a 10 hour job for me (I'm definitely out of practice).

Repairing broken Kurzweil keyboard

In for repair we have a Kurzweil 88-key K2500X, with weighted keys.  This beast weighs about 80-100 lbs. It had reportedly fallen off a keyboard stand.  It came in with several "sticking keys", one chipped key, dented front, and a broken end cap.

E-Bike Rack Fail

Apparently my bike felt left out, and wanted to get in the game of things that are failing.  Riding home from downtown last night, very late, hit a sewer cover pretty hard (it was hard to tell how uneven it was at night) and busted my battery rack.  It was not a catastrophic failure, but the rack lowered down to the tire and started dragging.  Enough that I had to stop and figure it out.  So I was sitting on the ground in the parking lot of the Jolly, with the bike almost completely disassembled.

Bike rack, sans busted lower brackets.

Busted aluminum lower brackets.

The bottom part of the rack attaches to the frame via a tapped tab, and an L shaped, aluminum bracket with graduated tapped holes.  The aluminum obviously saw quite a bit of impact load when the 30 lbs. battery came slamming down.

This is the second rack I've bought, and I'm really not interested in spending more money to deal with this issue.  (But I probably will have to).  Wondering if maybe I can make a custom, tougher piece to clamp the rack right where I want it.  If I only had a welder...  Or a lighter battery.