Greasy Fingers

And on a lighter note! (yup, much needed around here)

I had a bit of a run-in with the Ford today. Since Xmas there's been a slight leak on a water pipe under the air filter, so while I was out getting the exhaust done, I also picked up a new one. Decided that seeing it was reasonably cheap I'd take the whole metre it comes in, instead of chopping off a section to buy. And that turned out to be a very good thing!

As soon as I detached the pipe, I noticed it was full of yukky stuff - sand and rust, hardly the kind of thing you want circulating in your system. As I was hauling it off, lo and behold - the entire darn system broke down. There's a metal connecter between that and the next pipe, and it had rusted through so completely it broke off in my hand!

After some initial swearing, I realized it's a whole lot better having happened now than burst on some long roadtrip...

Anyhow, detached second pipe, and then wondered what the heck the blue thing at the bottom of the connecter was all about. Used my "bother a friend" option (repeatedly...) to ask a lot of potentially stupid questions, and about 2 hours and much discussion / photo emailing / phoning of more friends & relatives later it appeared to have something to do with vacuum and starting.

But what to do with the broken bit?

Well I ended up taking one continuous pipe from point A to point B, bypassing the metal connector, which didn't seem to feed coolant/water to anything anyway, tying up the connector to the new longer pipe to keep it from flapping around in the engine, taking a deep breath - and turning the key in the ignition.

It worked! Sjoe! So far so good. I was having visions of two cars standing, and a commute about to kick in... But it's one more learning curve under the belt. And not a single long nail broken (though they are painted a shocking dark shade of pink to hide any lingering grease).

Although I really do enjoy fiddling in my cars, one day it will be nice to have one that doesn't threaten to blow up quite so often. :-)