Finally, a real, actual, Midlana car post! The new belt tensioner parts on the way, so hopefully that’ll take care of that (note the shiny water pump pulley, which should have tipped me off months ago). Today was spent again removing the intake manifold, in preparation of upgrading the oil/coolant heat exchanger and dealing with the suspect clunking engine mount.
The new heat exchanger is a lot bigger than the previous one, so time was spent moving it around to find the best location, which turned out to be flat on the engine bay floor. The third picture is a top view of the front side of the engine, with the shiny new heat exchanger sitting down at the bottom. It’s not going to be pretty to service since there’s currently no easy way to access it without removing a lot of stuff, note to self about adding access holes in the engine bay floor…
Looking at the front engine mount, it was odd that I’d designed the chassis with so little clearance. It wasn’t until it was removed was it clear that A. Yes it was definitely hitting, and B. The mount is broken, hence the lack of clearance. The mount is an interesting design, with a soft “A-arm” subassembly, bracketed within a rigid box to keep the engine from moving too much. Since it’s broken, and because the rear mount is a stiffer aftermarket unit, the front mount is being left out for now.
In other news, a coworker recently quit her job at out company in order to do something she’s been planning to do for years, hike the Pacific Crest Trail, from the Mexican border to Canada… alone! She started her odyssey last week and is maintaining a daily blog, which I check every morning 🙂 Don’t forget to click on the “Where am I” tab to see a live updated map showing her progress. I’ll admit that I’m living the adventure through her, because if I’d thought of it when I was her age, I might have done it myself.
And a tidbit from some other news, regarding the Malasian airliner search, there’s a cool website that gives live position updates on all world shipping traffic. If you go to marinetraffic.com it’ll show a world map. Zoom in on the Indian ocean west of Australia, then in closer to the smallest of the three purple search areas. Click on the ship icons to show the name, pictures, and you can even click on its path to see where its been recently. It makes the whole search thing suddenly seem a lot more real, with the ship Ocean Shield dutifully and persistently keeping at it.