little drummer boy
My friend Lew keeps bees. Today is his birthday party. I don't know how to make a bee, so I made this for him instead. He plays drums too.
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February 19, 2011
February 5, 2011
HOT CAR
Hot as in it has heat now. Above is a picture of the interior of Elizabeth's 1990 Honda Accord with the dashboard and heater unit removed.
I'm told this car has never had good heat, even when it was new.. so it was kind of a leap of faith, in myself, to tackle this job. It acted like it needed a heater core. There is no way to prove it in this scenerio except to replace it. I tried to flush it. I spent a bunch of time to prove every other thing to be working correctly. I reached the end of my internal diagnostic flow chart, as well as several of Honda's charts, before I decided to spend a weekend replacing the heater core in this car.
After I got the heater core and heater unit in I put some new foam around the vents and some new sealer on some parts where the dash fits. You know how sometimes when you tun on the vents in an old car and little bits of foam dust comes out? I replaced that foam with new foam. Yayy!
So at this point Elizabeth came over to help. I asked her to come over to help me get the dash out, but I got it out myself earlier than expected. There's no way I was putting it back in by myself when there was help available.
She saw the car as in the above picture and asked "Is it supposed to look like that?" I said "No. It's supposed to have a dashboard in it." She was just in time to help put it back in.
So here it is now, with heat.
Using process of elimination and gut experience only feels good once one is vindicated. Then it feels Great!
oops- forgot to add the indicative red squiggly heat lines coming from the vents.
There we go.
Click for bigger. The squiggly heat lines are small but powerful,
Elizabeth is very happy. She called the original owner (a friend) after our test drive to tell him her trusty black steed is hot (on the inside).
The cup holder works now too. I filed down the lock pin which was sandwiched between old sagging plastic pieces. The little "PUSH" tag works now. Push in, push out, it works like that.