Today I reserved my time for doing a little playing around with a couple of the buckets in the yard, the 2001 Ford Explorer which belongs to my mom but is no longer driven due to the extremely high miles, and a 2001 Pontiac Grand Prix that I picked up from an old boss of mine for $200. These two vehicles fall into the "bucket" status, something you'd buy when in high school or college on a limited budget, or if you're just too poor to be able to do a car loan. I'm on a quest to get these two vehicles straight and give them a clean bill of health so I can put them up for sale and make a few bucks off of them as well as clear the yard of yet more shit.
Another thing that I was doing was also doing some basic tidying up, as usual since there's always some shit around that needs picking up. One of the things I had to do was get the old drum out of the back of the F250 and place it back over by the deck where I had it so I can more easily dump soda cans into it without leaving the porch. I have to fix another drum to use for regular scrap metal as well since the old one was rotted out and I left it at the scrap yard when we made a scrap haul this past Friday. I dragged one of the spare drums I had over by the new fuel shed over to the storage trailer. This drum was already opened up and emptied out, but it was turned upside down so the output was on the ground. I had to turn the thing right side up so it can vent out any vapors that may still be present since it did contain some hydrocarbon substances and we can't have those igniting when I'm trying to cut the top out of the drum. As for right now I did take a bucket that I had still in the aluminum drum after returning from the scrap yard and used it as my temporary scrap metal bucket. The other buckets that were in the drum were set back aside out of the way. They were really 5 gallon planter buckets so they're currently setting aside with some other planter shit awaiting use or disposal. Anyway, in the meantime I had to put the battery charger on the explorer's battery to juice it up some and give me some extra kick when I attempt to start it. I had to fight the thing to get it started but it seemed like once I pumped the pedal it made the ECU start firing the fuel injectors and eventually with some manipulation the engine finally started. I was able to do a little more manipulation to get the thing to level off and hold an idle. At that point it took the throttle pretty good without issue. The bizarre thing is the truck does not have a check engine light, ever. No matter what kind of gremlins I get that keep this thing from starting up fast every time, this thing will never generate a CEL to tell me if anything is going on. Those are the worst situations since that can mean any number of things that go wrong but are unable to generate a code due to it not being directly related to a faulty sensor or monitored component. Sometimes these old vehicles will have a faulty component but because the engine's ability to run at all depends on the component's function, the ECU will sometimes miss a fault. If a camshaft sensor decides to fuck up when you try to start it the ECU won't catch that fault condition. Same goes for crank sensors. Even a TPS (throttle position sensor) can skip triggering a code for the same reasons, or the variations in voltage when the TPS is manipulated are just enough to not trigger a fault but are enough to make the engine perform shitty. I will have to continue to investigate on this thing as time progresses. While the explorer was running, I started cleaning out the grand prix. I got a couple of bags and pulled out all of the burnable trash (which really wasn't much), which filled one bag, and the regular non burnable trash filled up another bag. Some scrap items found their way into that bucket I mentioned earlier for the scrap metal. There were a few usable items like hose clamps and a few tools as well. Under the hood I did find a 1/2" drive ratchet with an extension that has a ball tip to allow for the socket to angle a little for when you have to get into spots where you can't get a straight shot at the bolt or nut you're trying to remove. Score for me. The two back windows were always a problem for me because they were 2/3 of the way down, and all this time any rain and pine needles and bugs were able to get into the interior to make a mess. I had to remove a lot of pine needles and leaves from the floors because of this. The one thing that I noticed that kind of pissed me off were the small wedges of wood that were in the windows. Apparently these windows have broken free from their regulators a long time ago and my boss or whoever was driving the car used these wedges to keep the windows up while driving. After they parked the car the windows probably worked their way down and were never put back up since the car was technically junk. At least I was able to just remove the wedges and pull the windows back up and reapply the wedges to keep the windows up. I dodged a bullet with not having to pull the back door panels off to get into the regulators to do exactly this shit - disconnect the windows from the mechanisms to slide them up and wedge them in the up position. I pulled the protective cover from the top of the engine to make sure no rats made any nests under the cover on top of the engine, which usually means chewed wires. So far so good. My boss did mention that the radiator had an issue where it was leaking from the tranny lines going into the unit. I checked these out and didn't see any physical breakage, but because of how these fittings are not like the typical old school compression fittings, these things are probably just worn out. I will end up checking this shit out to see if I can remove these special fittings from the radiator and just replace them or have to replace the whole radiator. I'm going to have to make a list of shit to get for this car-filters, oils, a battery, some fuel, even some tires. I might first try to see if I can spray fix a flat into the tires to get them to hold air. I just need to be able to roll the car around the yard or if I can get it running, be able to drive it around the yard. I will also have to put a battery in the car because I will disconnect the fuel line from the fuel filter and bypass the fuel pump relay to manually cycle on the fuel pump and pump out any shitty fuel and/or water that may be in the tank. I really do NOT wanna remove the fuel tank if I don't have to. I have no problem replacing fuel filters a couple of times after allowing one or two of them to catch all the trash in the bottom of the fuel tank. In the meantime I will keep working on these things as opportunities present themselves. I will be planning on replacing the starter on the Chevy Tracker first chance since it's been sticking at times. I'd rather get that thing out while the car's at the house than to keep pushing until the unit fails completely and we end up having to have the car towed back to the house. I have a throttle cable en route for the Dodge Charger plus I got my blower motor relay for the Monte Carlo, which I put in in like one minute, literally. As I said before, this fall is going to be the work on cars season.
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