Car Work

 Worked on my granddaughters Acura this morning with my grandson. I am glad he is mechanically capable of working on vehicles. If I can keep him focused on learning, he is going to be a very good shadetree mechanic. And with all of the damn technology in cars today that is going to be a valuable skill to have going forward.

My son in law had to leave for work before we showed up, but he got part of it done before he left to go to work. Believe it or not, to get to the damn alternator, he had to unbolt the power steering pump to access it! And to get it out of the car, we had to remove one of the cooling fans. 

Sunday her car said check the charging system and she just barely made it to a parking lot. Her dad showed up and jump started it with cables, and then I came in. I used my 10 year old Klein multitester I paid $50 bucks for 10 years ago, and her battery only had 11 volts while running and still had the jumper cables hooked up. 

And man those jumper cables were hot as hell, I burned my hand on them they were hot!

And then the damn multitester quit on me! I was hot enough to combust so I threw that thing as far as I could. Now I have a $7 harbor freight multitester.

Anyway the alternator was bad. Grandson got a new one at his workstore of O'Reilly's Auto and we got it put on finally. It took both of us to get the serpentine belt back on. Whoever designed these cars must have been smaller than a midget. My arms are small and I had a hell of a time getting into things.

I had to lay on the ground under the car, after we raised it, so I could hold the belt on the two lowest pulleys then my grandson was able to thread it back on the other 3 pulleys. 

But the new alternator worked. Yay!