Sunday, September 28, 2008

wrenchin'




I've never really had a car to work on before.  Our 2 Hondas are serviced by the Honda guy, I never touched my Ranger or Chrysler, not even an oil change.  With the Z car, I decided that I was not going to take it to anyone unless it was an emergency, and get as much practical knowledge as possible.  

I have the brake pads to do a brake job, but I decided to get a little more work time in before I tackled that.  I bought the Haynes manual, which tells you how to do everything up to and including rebuilding the transmission.    

So far I've - 
 - put a vacuum-molded dash cap on the dash, which covers up the cracks quite nicely and looks just like the original dash
 - added black leather seat covers and steering wheel cover.
 - removed the spare tire,  non-functioning a/c system, cruise control, and weird injector cooling fan.  This amounted to over 100 pounds of weight, which isn't really noticeable performance wise, but the engine is a lot more accessible without all that crap glommed on to it.  I also took out the perfectly serviceable air filter and put a ricer boy cone filter on, just for kicks.  

The spare tire was a brilliant design which was stored flat, and came with the (original!) can of compressed air.  You were supposed to inflate the flat spare tire, and then deflate it when you were done and put it back (and buy a new can of compressed air).  I replaced it with a can of fix-a-flat.  

Then I changed the oil, for the first time ever, and the fuel filter.  Lessons - the oil doesn't land where you put the oil pan on the ground, and change the fuel filter outside, because the garage smells like gas a lot now.    

So now it's all set up - next, changing the transmission and differential oil, then that brake job...