With the clockspring taken care of, there were a couple other things that I wanted to address on the Scion. For a while now, we've had a problem with the belt buckle on the driver's seat having a problem with latching the seatbelt. We would have to force it in a way where it will force snap the latch in place. This had to be addressed. One of the things we grabbed from the junkyard was a replacement belt buckle from the driver seat of the donor car. This had a length of wires connected to it so I had to take care to unplug everything and remove the buckle in one piece, as I did not want to go through the extra work of splicing wires from the old assembly to our junkyard assembly. First thing I had to do was remove the driver's seat from the car.
After removing the bad buckle and the associated plugs/wires, I bolted the new unit in place, using some zip ties to secure the wiring in the same points where the old wiring was snapped in place. I also had to take care of another small problem that I had when we first got this car, which was disconnecting a couple of cables that went to a couple of levers on the seat. I took time zip tying the cables together to tuck them away neatly under the seat before remounting the seat. Before remounting the seat, we took time to clean up on the floor under where the seat mounts. Never let an opportunity go to waste. After the floor was scrubbed and vacuumed clean, I remounted the seat, testing the buckle successfully. With that taken care of, I moved on to another problem that needed to be addressed, which is the brake rotor. When I changed the brake pads on the car before the engine was deemed shot, I found that the right rotor was damaged due to the worn-down brake pad digging into the surface of the rotor. I put things back together for the time being as there wasn't much of a choice and buying a new rotor locally wasn't my idea of good economics. This is where the rotor from the junkyard came into play. The unit, besides the surface rust, was thicker than our old unit and of course not gouged out on one side. The brake pads will scuff clean the surface of this rotor through use so all will be fine. To remove the rotor I had to pull the brake caliper and pads, then the bracket that holds everything in place. From there, the rotor just slides right off. Nothing more. The new used rotor went on and everything went back on in reverse. With that taken care of, another little task was taken care of on the car. The last big thing that I need to do on this car is replace the wheel bearings in the pair of spindles that I also picked up from the junkyard. Theoretically the driver's side spindle has a bad wheel bearing on the car so hopefully the replacement of this spindle will fix that problem, otherwise I may need to revisit the idea that the new CV axle may be a faulty unit. I might even swap out the junkyard spindle on the driver's side just to see if it changes the noise that we're hearing and if so, then I might leave that spindle on and just replace the wheel bearing in the old spindle after removal. We'll see.
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