bring money whitcha? or not?

so, of course, ’cause i did a bit about my cheap-o beamer repairs it bit me in the ass…

…which can happen.

i can blame mercury being retrograde. or budnik not licking my piston necklace before i left to follow household superstition. but in reality i don’t know if what i did fixed the problem. some of the noise i thought would go away hasn’t. but hopefully the problem has – and if so, relatively (as in under twenty bucks out of pocket) cheaply.

a brief history…

when i rolled out of the ufc’s place on wednesday i noticed my car was making noises when i’d roll and worse when i’d turn. now i still owe my boss’ a good bit of dough for suspension so my mind went to the worst place and thought, “great – so now a wheel bearing?”. drove home (about fifty miles) from her place and all went well; but with the radio up who can tell? the next day it seemed worse and just for shits and giggles i checked the power steering reservoir and it was all but dry.

not good.

i hadn’t checked it, to be honest, in about a year since i’d replaced the pump, so i figured it was the missing o-ring on the lid and just topped it off. all went well for all my driving around thursday, friday, AND saturday. “fixed”, i thought. but sunday morning the reservoir was dry-ish again and leaving to get fluid (with the ufc in tact) the noise was BAD. put in half a bottle and got on the road to get to work. sounded good on start up, but the second i went to back out the noises started and by ten minutes down the road i had no power steering.

wonderful.

called autozone and got good and bad news – bad news was the part was $145 with a $55 core charge ($220 all in with tax) but that they had lifetime warranty, and since i had bought mine there i’d just have to bring the old one back in and i’d get all my money back.

i procrastinated today a bit and finally, after running morning errands and then letting the engine cool for an hour and some change went to start around 1:30 only to discover i didn’t have the right tools to remove the belt (which i fortunately discovered before i had the car in the air or anything apart) so i went to autozone and bought the right sockets, came back and had to let it cool AGAIN so i got started a bit after three. on the upside the removal of everything went smoother than last time when my boss helped (and a side note: HE did the re-install and two of the three bolts holding on the belt-drive wheel were only finger tight (one was half out, actually) and so was the high-pressure hose coming off the pump) but i had a bitch of a time getting the belt back on due to the right room. thanks to a bar-b-que spatula from the ufc i got it, and then secured the hoses but thought an o-ring was missing so i utilized one off a single flare 00g plug which hopefully did the trick. so for ten bucks in tools and six bucks in fluid we were good.

took a bit to bleed it but so far so good and to top it off shane was in town so i had two off days – sunday started awesome with the ufc, then had the car drama and the rough (manual steering) ride home. monday started lame since i knew i had car issues but i had to work so late i had to miss work but that worked out ’cause i got beer and tex-mex with shane. i’d say that went from awesome to lame to awesome pretty smoothly – so now if my steering says as smooth this should be a nice week with more ufc time on hump day!!!

(avoid the obvious joke on that last one)