Thursday, November 5, 2009

Chevette

Did some more work on the chevette a few weekends ago. Moved it from our house to my mom’s house to get it out of the way for winter. I bought a master cylinder for it.

Me and brother working on chevette

I put the new master cylinder on it, and went to bleed the brakes, blowing a rear brake line in the process. So now I have to wait to get the brake lines done.
The master cylinder removal was unhooking lines, unbolting the master cylinder, unhooking the linkage under the dash, bleeding, and reversing the process.

Chevette Master Cylinder

I bled the master cylinder in the car, by pumping the brakes with plugs in the master cylinder, took about an hour and half to get the air out of the master cylinder.

Three hoods up

I hooked the lines up, started to bleed the brakes, and blew the rear line.

My brother’s car was up in the air, waiting a transmission swap. My mom’s car needed a thermostat. And the bronco needs the fuel lines fixe, a brake line tightened, and the tranny put back together. So lots left to do. Bad thing is the cold weather is on the way hard and fast, so I am going to have to start picking my battles on what to fix.

Waiting on a transmission

Electrical Outlet

So last week our microwave stopped working, and we smelt burning plastic. So I unplugged it until I could look at it. I plugged it back in without the cover on, it threw sparks inside. Not surprising, it was from the 1970s and microwaves don’t last forever. So I left it plugged in and we started smelling the plastic again, the inside was hot. You could actually see a capacitor arching to a screw in the board.

So it was unplugged, and we got a new microwave.

Plugged in the new microwave and it didn’t work. Tried the new microwave in another outlet and it worked perfectly. So I took the plug cover off. The microwave surging had cooked the plug. The outlet had melted in the wall. The box was a little melted but still served its purpose so I left it.

Bad wall plug

It wasn’t as bad as it looked. I had an old surge protected outlet to replace it with. I’m not a fan of them, had them in my garage and just plugging in a welder will set them off.

Open box

So I took the old one out, the wires were not that bad, I wrapped the live wire in some electric tape. It had some bubbles in the plastic coating. But I wrapped it up and hooked up the outlet. I'm replacing the wiring from knob and tube and old strand wires to new ez pull wires piece by piece anyway so it will get changed in about a year.

Wall Outlet naked

I turned the power back on and nothing burnt down. Or shot sparks. So I plugged the microwave in and it worked. I left the cover off for a day to make sure the house wasn’t going to burn down, and then I put it back on.

Wall outlet finished

I like to think I saved the house from a fire.