25 July 2020

The Cougar Weight Loss Program: Want to lose 10 pounds in one day? It's easy! Just change your spark plugs in an abandoned, shade-less rest stop when it's 93F outside! But we'll get to that later...

    

The Best looking Spark Plug of the Bunch

    As those of you who have read the rest of my blog know, my Vintage Air HVAC system stopped sending power to my AC compressor yesterday afternoon. So after some Starbucks parking lot troubleshooting and a new relay didn't solve the issue, I spent a good chunk of time in my hotel room that night reading through the instructions for the installation of the system. It was all new to me since I had only installed the AC parts in the engine bay (compressor, condenser, and associated lines), whereas the previous owner had installed all the interior components. Now, if any of you had known the previous owner of this car, that statement would concern you. I'll spare everyone the details, but this guy really did not know what he was doing, and was a complete hack to boot! Relevant to this job was that both driver's HVAC vents were improperly installed, with one tube already falling off and one never even installed. The panel above the glove box, behind which hide all the wiring for the cars HVAC system, was duct taped on. I only figured out about the duct tape installation when the panel finally fell off under hard on-ramp acceleration. And let me tell you, it certainly gave my friend, who was in the passenger seat and had never been in an older car before (and was decently scared of the prospect), a fright when the car started dropping pieces in his lap!

    Because of his history, I was not at all confident in the wiring and suspected a loose wire was causing the issue I was experiencing. Upon examination of the wiring harness, I had noticed a gray wire with a female spade end that was not connected to anything, and I could not find anything to connect it to. Puzzled, but with no explanation, I let it be. But as I read through the instructions and came to the 'Control Calibration' section, the pieces all fell together. That gray wire was left disconnected on purpose; grounding it is the first step of calibrating the controls. 

    To properly calibrate the controls, you ground that wire and then move the controls through a movement sweep to inform the ECU of your control's total range of motion. Importantly, and of course neglected by the original installer, once this process was complete you are supposed to tape up the gray wire to avoid accidental grounding and a loss of calibration. Since my wire was not taped up, I concluded that this must have been what happened, and that now even when the slider was all the way on cold, the ECU wasn't recognizing that I was calling for air conditioning.

    So first thing in the morning, I went outside and went through the calibration process. And it worked perfectly! In fact, it worked better than perfect, it was an improvement! Apparently, the calibration that I had been running on before the accidental grounding yesterday meant that the ECU was seeing my call for full AC as about 75%. As a result, my air conditioning was never as cold as I wanted, and I was starting to get pretty disappointed with the system. But since I recalibrated it, the cabin has been much cooler; I would estimate as much as 5-10 degrees cooler! 

    So off I went, content in my victory and new-found coolness. Cruising down I-40 was going well; I was making great time, was nice and cool, and getting to the really interesting parts of the Illiad. Then, suddenly, the car misfired noticeably. About two minutes later, it did it again. I was a quite low on gas since I was trying to make Nashville with just one more fill up, so I slowed down and just hoped that it was a fuel-slosh related starvation issue. It popped one or two more times, but never enough in quick succession to convince me to pull over to the side of the road. So I filled up with almost 17 gallons of premium (I was A LOT lower than I thought! Getting cocky is going to give me issues later on, I'm sure...), and merged back onto the highway. Just as I became confident that it had been a low fuel issue, she misfired again. Then again a few minutes later. Then four times in quick succession. That was enough to send me diving for the nearest off-ramp. After finding some shade on a side road, I opened up the hood and checked everything I could think of. All the spark plug wires were still solidly attached, I had fuel in both bowls, the MSD connectors were still tightly snapped together, and the coil was still well connected. There were no melted wires or hose kinks either. How could nothing be wrong? Dismayed but with no immediate path forward, I pushed all the connectors and wiring together to triple-check that they were connected, closed the hood, and rejoined the highway.

    No dice; only a few minutes later I was met with several rapid-fire misfire bursts that once again sent me careening for the nearest exit. I pulled into the parking lot of a now boarded up truck stop and got out my tools. The only thing I thought it could possibly be was a clogged fuel filter that was restricting fuel at highway speeds, but filling up the bowls by the time I was able to pull over and check them. In my haste to see if my hypothesis was correct, I forgot the very important fact that the ~7psi of pressure that the fuel system is under during engine operation does not simply disappear the second the engine is turned off. As I cracked open my billet Holley fuel filter (it's important because it has a pretty large internal volume), a heavy burst of fuel shot everywhere, including on me. My entire face was covered with it, eyes included, and I had to feel my way around my car to the passenger door and grab a water bottle out of the cooler to flush the copious amount of 93 octane from my eyes. That's one of the good things about having a system and always keeping things in the same place; you can get to them without having to look. 

    As stupid mistakes go, that one it pretty high on the list. Super preventable and caused entirely by a lack of focus on what I was doing, it could have been a lot worse than it was. But seeing as I'm typing this about 10 hours later, at least there were no long term effects. But just know this; gasoline eyewashes are not doctor recommended! 

    One water bottle to the face and a few foul words directed at myself later, I was inspecting the marvelously clean fuel filter. There was nothing in it; not a spec of rust or a grain of sand. Well, there goes my clogged fuel filter hypothesis...

    As I stood over the engine flummoxed, I ran through everything that could possibly be causing a misfire/backfire. The only thing I hadn't completely eliminated at this point was spark. I have an MSD box, so it was entirely possible that the box was going bad. That was a scary thought because I am not carrying a spare box (who has the cash for that?!) and had no idea if anyone within a 500 miles radius would have one in stock (unlikely). Or, I reasoned, she might have finally fouled her spark plugs. After burning the amount of oil she has, she was probably due for a change anyway. So I pulled one of the easier to get to plugs, and BINGO! It was covered in a thick white powder that some quick Googling told me is ash deposits from burning oil in the combustion chamber. Well, thank goodness I was carrying 8 spare plugs with me! I was planning on changing them at some point, and it looks like she had just told me that the time was NOW! 

    So that's why, in 93F heat and directly under the punishing afternoon sun, I changed all 8 of her spark plugs. Can you tell which one was causing the misfire?

One of these things is not like the other...

    The worst spark plug, the one caked in oil and what looks like tiny bits of dirty crystal, came from the rear passenger side cylinder, the one that read low compression when I did a compression test on the car when I bought it. It was almost certainly the offender that was causing my misfire/backfires. Luckily for me, only one of the plugs caused me any issues to install. The second cylinder from the front on the drivers side was in the perfect place to block every attempt I had to install the new plug. All of my power steering, air conditioning, and several electrical lines run close enough to it to interfere with my attempts to get my get my hand in-between shock tower and the blazing-hot headers. Even with gloves, there was a definite limit on the time I could keep my hand down there before it got to medium-rare temperature. That plug took me longer to install than the entire passenger side, and I was sweating buckets the entire time. Leaning over a 210F+ engine bay in 93F heat in the direct afternoon sun meant that I was sweating enough that jumping into the nearby (and absolutely disgusting) pond probably would have dried me off a little. But I finally did get that plug, and all the other ones, installed. The entire process, from pulling over, to squirting gas in my eyes, to installing the last plug took about an hour. Luckily, my toil and sweat was not in vain! My misfire disappeared and the car ran great for the last hour that it took me to get to Nashville, TN, where I am spending the night. 

    I have to give a lot of credit to the man at the hotel front desk; I walked in there soaked in sweat, arms and hands lightly smeared with grease and engine filth, and smelling strongly of gasoline, and he didn't so much as blink. Either the hotel I am staying at has a very rigorous employee training program, or that man has seen some stuff. Either way, taking a shower when I got to my room felt amazing and very well deserved. 

    Now, getting to something a little more serious, my staying in Nashville is a tipping point for this trip and the start of a serious change to the plan that has been brewing for the last week. As everyone knows, new COVID-19 cases are once again starting to spike in several areas of the country, including several of the states that I was planning on staying in on the second half of this roadtrip. With the current state of things, and especially considering that I will be ending the roadtrip by rolling into a vacation with my extended family, high-risk grandparents included, I can not, in good conscience, continue the trip as I had planned it. 

    Instead, I my new route looks like this.

    The big game changer is not the route itself, but rather the activities I will be partaking in along the way. In order to be as safe as possible when I end the trip, I am going to be doing my best to do a rolling quarantine for the next 9 days (today was day 1 of the total 10 days I am shooting for). What that means is that I am going to be avoiding contact with as many people as I possibly can. This has meant telling many of my close friends that I won't be able to stop by or stay with them as I had planned.

    This also means that I won't be able to meet up with any of the gracious members of VMF and CCC who have invited me to stop by or stay over. Your offers are incredibly appreciated and I wish I could take everyone up on their invitations, but I have to take this seriously. Living right above NYC, I saw this thing get bad. Really bad. Taking this roadtrip was already a semi-irresponsible decision, and continuing on while ignoring the changing conditions would make it even more so. 

Hopefully when I do this again, I'll be able to stop by for those beers you all offered!

Thank you for following along!

Ken