Well it is Monday again, so time to recap what was done over the weeke- oh... well whatever. I had Wednesday and Thursday off work, so I knocked out a few car projects during my mid-week-weekend.
First off, I finally fixed the liscence plate lights on the Alfa. Sort of. First off the plastic carrier piece that holds the light assemblies (3 in the diagram below) in was shattered. I’d ordered one from Classic Alfa on my last big order, so that was an easy swap. While I had the light assemblies out, I went ahead and cleaned the connections and lenses.
Everything reassembled and... they still didn’t work.
Alfa, in their infinite wisdom, decided rather than get power to the trunk lid via a wiring loom, they’d use spring loaded pins that connect with contacts on the trunk, 1 and 7 on the diagram beow. Why do it the easy way when you can do it the hard, unreliable way, ammiright?
After greasing those up, the lights STILL didn’t work so in an act of desperation I removed the pin assembly and lo and behold, the wire broke out of the pin.
I drilled out the old connected and re-soldered in a new one. Naturally the heat of trying to get a good solder joint damaged the connector, so now that pin doesn’t return fully.
Par for the course really.
But I finally had plate lights!
Next up we were just knocking little items off the TODO list.
The Land Rover’s intake system got leak checked (All good)
The Saab got new gearbox and power steering fluid. The former, smelled terrible (like a dead animal) and was a milky brown color. Also due to the placement of the power steering pump the stuff got everywhere. So much kitty litter.
Most of the rest of the weekend was spent playing Salt and Sanctuary and obsessing about motorized bike kits.
After writing that article, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out which kit it “best”. The conclusion was “anything 4-stroke” but also that they’re all kinda bad.
Further research required... or I just need to drop it.
For the actual weekend, I think we’re planning on breaking the Bumblebee out of car jail (it is boxed in by crap in the garage) and going for a mini-road trip.
Also this super long baby carrot I found last night makes me deeply uncomfortable, so I thought I’d share.
