So, today’s been a day of doing car jobs. I had been intending, for a while now, to sort out Brick’s so called coolant. Having nearly had him overheat heading in to Oxford, and again heading into Reading I reckoned that nearly was close enough and it was time to bite the bullet and pull my finger out and get a round-tuit, as it were.
Oh, just before we do that, we saw a hedgehog last night, it was lurking ‘twixt the front door and the window. Awesomely cute, it was :)
Â
That was *blue* when it went in. Not only that, coolant generally has similar consistency to water, this was a bit like soup. And that’s not even what came out with the radiator flush. So; a flush with plain water, and then a load of radiator flush went in. I also noticed that somewhat disconcertingly one of the bolts that hold the alternator on had wandered off somewhere. So I fished around in my toolbox and found something just-about-long-enough, and threw that in, tightening the thing back up. That was actually somewhat alarming, but never mind.
Anyhow, while the car idled (to get it warm and allow the stuff to work) I tackled the non-functional indicator; the nearside one slowed down a while ago, and then stopped flashing completely. Having opened the cover, I thought the cause of this was instantly apparent…
I was completely wrong though; the inch of water sat in the indicator wasn’t actually the cause of the problem; the bulb had just gone. And the connectors were covered in shite, too, which I imagine can’t help. The offside one was just the same. I’m thinking of switching to LED bulbs now, actually, and having located the indicator relay am quite tempted. Especially after seeing the price of the normal bulbs in Halfrauds
Anyhow, having at least located the fault I headed back to working on the cooling system, and in a fit of insanity whipped the radiator out. The radiator, rather distressingly seems to have been attacked by Radiator Moths, which probably also goes a long way to explaining the barely adequate cooling the car’s had since I got it.
I need to make a decision on Brick’s future soon, because I suspect that if I want to keep him then I’m going to need to sort that radiator out. I straightened out some of the bent over fins, but really they’re disintegrating rather easily now…
 
Finally I put together the 8-track hack. I’ve got a little bored of travelling and listening to my MP3 player; it means I can’t have music on and chat to Kathryn, I have to have uncomfortable little earbuds in all the time, and I can’t here the noises the car makes to maintain my paranoia appropriately.
So, yesterday I started stripping down the 8 track; gone is the motor, gone is the tape head and most of the selector mechanism. Today I guestimated where I think the line-level part of the circuit starts (I think. I’ve connected it the other side of the preamp, I think) and connected that to a pair of phono connectors (because the in-car-entertainment project had to cost nothing at all, ideally).
Having butchered a broken 8-track tape to mount the phono connectors on (the least tidy external bit of the job), I put it all back together and threw it into the car. It looks very 70’s in there, and apart from the slightly distressingly not as good as I’d like job I’ve done of the phono connectors (really I wanted to do something much more complex, but I’ll save that for when I’ve got a bit of money), it’s all in and done. Unfortunately I blew the aux fuse on the car while I was fitting it, due to a moment of sheer unadulterated stupidity (having found the ‘auxillary’ line on the connector block, connected it up, and then gone to check the voltage at the other end, I neglected to turn the ignition back off before attempting to connect the tape player.
Even more unfortunately, it’s a 35A short glass fuse, of a type which Halfords apparently Does Not Sell. They do up to 7.5A in that size, so I grabbed some of them, as far as I know it’s the only item on the Aux circuit, so hopefully it’ll be okay. I need to pick up a new spare anyhow, because it turns out the 35A spare fuse is blown too…Â
Anyway, it being dark and cold outside I’ll test it all tomorrow… on the trip to Oxford :)
