modern spoilage

i’m sitting in my office at home as i type this…

…but i’m not supposed to be.

no, i’m supposed to be outside, in the heat, pulling apart the door on nik’s x1 to replace the outer mirror because the motor has gone wonky and does a weird clicking thing, then drops the mirror a bit so you have to adjust it again – but it’s the rapid fire motor click that’s the most annoying. and, it’s the passenger side mirror, so it tends to freak out the uninitiated that are just, quite literally, along for the ride.

but…yesterday the ac went out in the delivery van, in the hottest part of the day, when the ambient “feel like” hovered around 106° and with no air circulation the inside of the van felt every bit of that and then some, so i was a bit drained from heat by the time i got home and i’m still kinda feeling it this morning. that, however, is not (as abraham simpson would say) the onion in the ointment here.

that stems from lack of re-searchable knowledge. last year we did a car fix thing for her birthday, too, except it was a more fun stereo upgrade. granted, more work as well, since she had the version of the radio that required backing up the whole center console just to remove the deck and replace the wiring harness in the back. the bit i did about it was posted 25th of october, but the pics are actually from the sixteenth, which is still almost a full month AFTER her birthday, and i know we had the kit long before then. i can find pics i took showing myself the various wiring harnesses and shit behind the screen from a week BEFORE her birthday so the install took some research that, quite frankly, was almost fruitless because there was no all in one video for her type of radio set up. research had to be done. you had to take apart shit to force a question (some variation of “what the fuck do i do now?”) and then you had to look up the answer to that question. most of the time there was no video – just text descriptions and the occasional photo. the no video thing is quite a set back.

good thing she married a librarian’s kid.

so here we are again. the part came in over the weekend, but there’s no video on how to change the mirror on her particular set up. no biggie – i just looked at it. the mirror bolts are behind the tweeter pod, which in itself is sealed into the door with a seal that goes UNDER the door card, and around the whole top perimeter of the door frame itself. so step one would be removing the door card (and as you have to do that for so many different repairs there’s got to video on that somewhere), and then step two would be gently prying at said tweeter surround and figuring out how it’s attached to i can remove it without damaging it. from there logic should be able to take over.

now let’s see how this goes (but probably not today as it’s eleven thirty and i’m still feeling a bit run down from the heat factor yesterday!)