Ness' Outpost

I got out the tools to do an oil change on the Vibe tonight before it rains. 14mm box wrench, oil filter and filter wrench, 3/8″ ratchet and extension. The brand spanking new rino ramps were cut free from their packaging and I was all set to go.

The Vibe is a standard and I drive an automatic every day. I can drive standard — it just isn’t pretty. The rino ramps aren’t that high, only about 8 inches or so but became obstacle number one. I couldn’t get the vehicle up on them since our driveway is sloped too that extra slope made it really hard to get her up on the ramps. Lauren put the car up on them no problem for me.
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Lauren’s 2006 Pontiac Vibe (aka Matrix in sheeps clothing) has a pretty standard breaking system. The front are discs and the rears are drums.

Today Kevin and I did a front break job. New pads, rotors and fluids. It was a pretty standard job and is really well explained over at Generation Vibe in this post. They don’t talk about bleeding the brakes — and you probably don’t have to do this if your fluid is regularly changed anyway. We did bleed the brakes when we were done, but that isn’t included in the post above.

The only thing to add is that I used a 19mm socket to push the slide pin rubber boots back into place after removing them to clean and grease them.

Parts came from Napa and cost about $175 for rotors, ceramic pads and some brake grease. Be sure to have lots of brake cleaner on hand since the rotors were oiled and bagged. They need to be cleaned off before they can be installed – I do this anyway even for dry rotors. I tend to get greasy fingers all over them.

My uncle donated his old 2 stroke gas string trimmer to me when he found out I was looking for one. I finally got sick of dragging out two extension cords to try and reach the front and the back of the lot.

He had a Weed Eater GTI-16 sitting in his shed for the past 2 or 3 years. It looked like it was in pretty good shape, the starter rope extended and the trimming line turned as the starter rope was pulled out. I didn’t try to start it since I wanted to check and lube the shaft first before it got up to speed. The engine probably would have fired up without any work though.

This time my adopted small engine came with an owners manual that covered the GTI-15T and the GTI-16. I had some basic instructions to work off of – how to tune the carb, replace the starter cord, etc.

The basic plan was to:

• Lube the drive shaft
• Rebuild the carburetor since I was going in to see how the diaphragm and pumper valves were anyway
• Replace the fuel lines and filter
• Clean everything up and lube the air filter
• Check the spark plug

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I did some work on Lo’s Vibe this weekend. Kevin kindly invited me over to his dads to enjoy the comfort of a two car garage even though it was pretty warm around here for January.

We did an oil change and replaced the spark plugs. She had 120k km on the vehicle and it was a little early for the plugs but it made sense to do since Lo was concerned about a drop in fuel mileage.

I should also replace her air filter and clean the MAF sensor but I’ll leave those jobs for warmer days it’s now dipped back down into the negatives.
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My neighbour had an old snow blower in his side yard just sitting there basically uncovered except for a wooden shelf above it. I asked him if it ran and he said it didn’t – I figured that might have been the case as we both were shovelling away last year in the winter and there was a lot of snow last winter. I asked him if it was ok if I had a look at it to try and figure it out. We’d both have a much easier winter!
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I took our Ariens mower out of the shed last week to give her some love. We inherited the mower from Laurens Dad when we bought the house. It had sat in his garage for at least 3 years as their backup mower.

I took the blade off, sharpened it, cleaned the spark plug and air filter and put them back in. Then after a lot of pulls on the recoil starter it finally sprung to life with a sputter and didn’t sound right at all. After a few minutes it cut out for some unknown reason. I of course didn’t do the proper maintenance to put the mower to bed for the winter so I was hoping this wouldn’t happen.

Every time I tried to mow the back lawn when I got to the corner and turned the mower it sputtered and died. If I tilted the mower forward a bit it sometimes saved the stall and ran but that is no way to mow a lawn. I figured it was bad gas from sitting all winter but I had topped up the tank with fresh gas so who knew. At this point I had the oil hot enough to do an oil change so I did that too but I knew it wouldn’t help the problem. Oil won’t make the mower stall unless it’s way too full which the machine wasn’t.

Some internet reading suggested I clean and inspect the carburetor (where gas and air mix before being combusted) and possibly rebuild it. I didn’t even know where the carburetor was so I had to download a bunch of manuals. I started with the Ariens manual for my mower serial number 911014. But mowers can have multiple engines installed on them so I had to go get the engine serial number to look that manual up too. It was a Tecumseh TVS120.
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Kevin and I got all geared up to change the front pads and rotors on my Cavalier this weekend. Since I was jacking the car up and I was close to my 135K oil change we did that as well.

Things went really well for a bunch of novices. Labour took probably 4 times as long as a brake shop, but it’s fun to get in there with a wrench and have a go. We’ll only get better. The big problem of the day was when we were missing the 3/4″ hex socket to get the caliper pins off so a quick trip to Canadian Tire was in order.

What wasn’t very good to see was that my pads wearing unevenly. Which means the caliper pins were seized – they were pretty hard to turn through the bushings but they moved. I cleaned and lubed them up and along with the bushings in the caliper itself and hopefully these new ceramic pads will wear better.

I decided to replace the rotors instead of machining the OEM ones again. They’ve been machined 3 times now and warp every pad change (40-50K km). But I think they warped even more this time because of the uneven pad pressure, just the piston was pushing outward on the rotor with a single pad instead of both pads grabbing the rotor.

The next front brake job I’ll have to replace the calipers since it’s about the same cost as rebuilding them on the Cavalier.

But up next in the home mechanic maintenance is trying to figure out the rear shoes and drums, then doing a brake fluid flush.

My 2002 Chevrolet Cavalier had squeaking hub caps. It was rather embarrassing, especially in the beginning and end of summer when the carpool and myself tend to travel with the windows down. Getting the vehicle up to 40 km/h is approximately when the squeaking would start. Then I needed to answer the question, “What’s that noise, is something wrong with your car?”.

The problem in my case is not that the hub caps are deformed, but that the little rubber pads along the outer rim of the hub cap have been lost in the natural life of the hub cap.

You can buy new hub caps, but a cheaper solution exists.
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A month or so ago when I set the blower in my Chevrolet Cavalier (named Penelope) to settings 1 or 2 the blower didn’t run, but settings 3 and 4 worked just fine. That told me the blower motor was fine after a quick inspection of the HVAC electrical diagram in my Haynes manual. It also told me that it must be the resistor block since there is only one power line from the battery which loops through the 4 signal wires and the resistor block.
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