30 January, 2016

I've been away for too long... Shop cleanup. And a broken Saturn Intake Manifold.

Gentle reader, you might notice that there has been an excessive span between blog posts. Call it day job requirements keeping me away from my shop, and away from my keyboard, but the months of double shifts have at least slowed down for a few days, long enough to type out a blog post.

Really not a whole lot going on right now, i finished a bass players pedalboard a couple of months ago.

In the past few months, I have been slammed with projects, work work, the holidays blah blah blah...

The projects have been mostly automotive. We picked up a new to us 2006 Chevrolet Malibu that we straightened out the trunk lid, and painted it. I also got rear brakes on it.

The big news though is my 2001 Saturn SL2 had a conniption fit with a broken coolant fitting on the plastic intake manifold. Now first things first. What sort of nitwit engineer designs an engine with the coolant flowing through a plastic intake manifold? And worse, it is the purge line to the tank, so the whole thing is pitifully small and easily broken.

Well I found a milled billet aluminum repair part from this company called www.carsaturn.com

I would have shot a howto video on this, but Carsaturn did it for me. I did not remove the hood Doing so is really not all that helpful, and I am a big guy!

Anyway, they did it in 2 videos so there they are.



I also had a sad experience of a failed AC compressor that managed to blow out (NO refrigerant left now!) I have all the parts and supplies needed, I just need to get to it.

I want to mention, anyone looking to do A/C work, make sure you know what you are doing, and if there is still refrigerant in the system that you use a recovery system to evacuate the system. Even R134A is toxic to you and the environment! Since my system evacuated itself, I don't need to do that step, but I do need to vacuum it down... Some shops will evacuate and vacuum down for you at a cost. Check your local shop for prices and if they offer that service.