#SaveEddie, Part V: The Fragility of Fasteners

This is the fifth part in a series of articles chronicling my illogical attempts to repair and restore my long-time owned Pontiac Sunfire, affectionately dubbed "Eddie." Do not anticipate expert repair advice. Trust me, an actual mechanic would have sorted this all out years ago.

Previous entries:

Part I: The Coefficient of Friction
Part II: The Consequence of Inertia
Part III: The Inconvenience of Arithmetic
Part IV: The Agony of Without

Perhaps it’s separation anxiety. I’ve had this Sunfire for nine years, which is twice as long as you have a kid before dropping it off at preschool. At least I think that’s the age for preschool. Given the mental maturity of some individuals I’ve met, preschool could start as late as eighteen, for all I know. Regardless, I’ve had time to grow attached to this little scamp, and now I have the urge to keep it for eternity.

Eternity will have to wait, however, until I can get him put back together. First off, nothing is getting done at my apartment complex, since the lease doesn’t permit on-site repairs, so I’ve set up shop at my parents’ house. It wasn’t hard to do, since most of my repair shop is already stored in Eddie’s trunk. That’s the reality of my situation: my daily driver is also my project car. At any point, Eddie could break down (though he rarely does), and I want to be ready for the occasion. True, the hundred and some-odd pounds of tools and a hydraulic floor jack add unnecessary weight, which spoils handling, fuel economy, and performance in acceleration and braking, but Murphey’s Law dictates I will break down within 12 hours of relocating these tools to a less mobile storage option.

So the tools stay in the trunk, where they also come in handy when something needs fixing when I’m at work, where there is a limited selection of repair implements. Luckily, my coworkers haven’t figured out I always have tools with me, and therefore they aren’t constantly asking me to fix things.

First thing to come off is the bumper cover, albeit, with some convincing. Once that’s off, we can see the crushed absorber and folded bumper reinforcement. Taking those off, the radiator and AC condenser are untouched. Some quick measuring shows the left corner of the unibody is pushed in and slightly up. The left headlight is toast; we didn’t need any disassembly to tell us that, but the right one has damage from the previous owner, which is yet further evidence of Eddie’s careless history.

I wish I could remember the name of the guy who owned this little Pontiac before me so I could occasionally swear his name in vain. A front-right collision damaged many things that weren’t addressed, not limited to a bent front-passenger door frame, shattered inner fender and splash guard, damaged wire loom conduit, and (most recently found) headlight assembly. I don’t know how I lived with it, but the damage to the bracket meant the right-side headlight couldn’t be aimed properly. Perhaps it’s dumb luck it was already pointed in the right direction.

Throughout all of this, of course, we must pop loose those plastic fasteners. This is the aftermath of the corporate ecosystem Bob Lutz had to contend with when he took over as vice chairman of product development at General Motors, as detailed in his book which I’ve started reading, Car Guys vs Bean Counters. Eddie was built during an era of saving a penny here only to wind up losing a dollar there. As such, many components of the J-Body are held together with cheap plastic push-fasteners designed to go in easy and hold well, but destroy themselves when subjected to the forces necessary to remove them. If you’re mentally deranged, you can try and save these fasteners for later installation. Or you can take the path I did and order them by the gross on Amazon, knowing you’ll just break more of them down the line.

As we dig, some things worry us. The windshield washer pump and reservoir are in that general area, and since it’s a very interconnected system, might be a hassle to replace. I thanked my lucky stars it was undamaged. Same story with the battery. But key is this bent frame.

So first the entire front end is removed, then the car is repositioned, aligning with the decades-old maple tree at a similar angle as the impact. 1,200lb-test mule tape, a small square of pine to distribute the load, and a steel cable come-along from Harbor Freight are arranged to reposition the front left corner, and employed with marginal success. But at least it’s straighter than it was.

My work schedule at this time has me working most days during the week, but my dad works nights, so when he gets home in the morning he takes on some repair work while I sling beers at thirsty craft beer aficionados. In that time, he’s done well to hammer out the crumpling in the left fender, as well as fashion out of steel a little-known small bracket used to align the headlights. On my end, I’ve ordered parts to be delivered straight to the house instead of my apartment. As such, Dad cant help himself, and takes to the packages like a kid on Christmas, installing them post-haste. So by the time I can come down on Friday, he’s already put on the new headlight and reinforcement bar.

I’m still waiting for the replacement bumper absorber, so the old, damaged one will have to suffice now that the insurance money’s run out on the rented Jeep. (Damn, that Jeep was nice…) Eddie is road legal now. With one clear headlight lens and the other oxidized, he looks a bit like that that guy with the cloudy eye from Legion. The bumper is also a different color, now that Dad’s sanded off the chipping paint and given it a quick coat of a green shade from Ford.

I kind of wish he hadn’t told me it was a Ford color; feels wrong doing that to the nose of a Pontiac…

In the end, Eddie is put together. He ain’t pretty, especially with the hood still a bit cockeyed, but he can be driven. There’s still some work to do, and I won’t be satisfied until it’s done.

#SaveEddie, Part II: The Consequence of Inertia

This is the second part in a series of articles chronicling my illogical attempts to repair and restore my long-time owned Pontiac Sunfire, affectionately dubbed "Eddie." Do not anticipate expert repair advice. Trust me, an actual mechanic would have sorted this all out years ago.

Previous entry:
Part I: The Coefficient of Friction

I’ve been in traffic collisions before. Never at high speed, only ever in stop-and-go traffic. That’s when you’re paying less attention, because there’s less at risk.

Nearly ten years ago, I failed to stop my hand-me-down ’93 Dodge Caravan. Normally, a 10mph collision would be nothing. But I drive in an area with pickup trucks, which just happens to be what I hit. And this pickup just happened to have a trailer hitch mounted perfectly level with the Caravan’s front grill.

A trailer hitch needs to be strong, so they tend to be forged from substantial steel and either bolted or welded directly to the vehicle’s frame. This makes them very immobile compared to the rest of the car or truck, which is why there is no flex in them when you whack one with your shin. It also makes it much stronger than the ABS plastic that makes up the crosshair grill of the early-nineties Chrysler AS platform minivan. And the air conditioning coil behind it. And the radiator behind that. So much stronger, in fact, that it pushes said radiator far back enough to punch a hole in the battery.

Nowadays, I might have tried to salvage my Caravan. It might have been easier then, given automotive engineering at the time of its manufacture. Instead, we, the insured, accepted the insurer’s verdict of a total loss and surrendered the minivan to the wrecker. Some time and a Craigslist search later, we found Eddie.

Flash forward to today’s age on that slick road in Arlington. Friction has failed to overcome momentum, and carnage is the result.

Time doesn’t really slow down like in the movies. Instead, it’s just over. Expletives are uttered and on go the hazard flashers as I step out to check on the other driver. In hindsight, it’s curious the other driver was on his phone before even opening his door, but Eddie is my primary concern now, as it was then. He’s up and moving around, not complaining of any injury, and I’m fine, so I get on the phone to my insurer.

While I’m describing the event and damage in triplicate to the claims agent, a county cop pulls up behind us, confirms we’re okay, and instructs us to turn onto a side street, out of the way of traffic. He takes our information, writes it up on an incident report, gives us copies, and goes on his way. I’m on the phone another twenty minutes, if feels like, before the agent asks if I need a tow truck.

Eddie isn’t leaking any fluid and there’s no apparent suspension damage or misalignment, so Eddie is drivable, even with only one headlight properly aligned. I drive him the remaining two miles to my apartment’s garage, where I take multiple pictures with my phone for an initial damage assessment.

Immediately noticeable is the driver’s side headlight lens, broken free from its mounting points, is tucked up underneath the hood, which has crumpled under the stress of impact. Paint flicks off the bumper in spiderweb patterns at the whim of a slight breeze. The left fender is creased at the leading edge and bows out above the front wheel, and the black plastic inner fender is in two pieces.

These are all relatively easy fixes, and good news is the windshield washer reservoir and the battery, both in close proximity to the impact, are untouched. However, some measuring shows the subframe is bent back, so new parts may not fit properly if we attempted to install them.

Two things worked as advertised, however: the bumper reinforcement, a tube of steel protecting the radiator from damage in all but high-speed crashes, and the front absorber, which is a grid of plastic designed to collapse before any structural metal takes damage.

All signs show relatively minor damage, save for the bending in the subframe. I’m not a professional mechanic by any means, so I suspect I won’t be able to fix that by myself. Doesn’t mean I won’t try.

Leadfoot: Water Conducts Electricity

When you drive an older car day-in and day-out, you learn to deal with the things that are wrong with it. Things like slow oil leaks, broken air conditioning, loose steering, that funny squeak the door makes when the right-side tires go over bumps.

Then the day comes when the oil puddle in your parking space has expanded beyond the painted white line, and your wheels roll over it, leaving more oil marks all over the lot as you head off to work. That’s when you sigh, slip on some work gloves and break out the floor jack.

You also go out and buy as small a bag of kitty litter as possible. Because you don’t have a cat, but the conditions of the lease say, “You spill it, you clean it.”

I must confess, I did a bit of that work without telling the world. Back in early June, I decided to flush Eddie’s coolant system, since he hadn’t had the coolant changed since 2008, shortly after his purchase and we found a bolt on the water pump had worn a hole in the radiator.

A proper job of it is done by draining the antifreeze and filling it back up with water and a helping of coolant flush. Seriously, that’s what it’s called. You just ask for it by that name. A few weeks are then spent driving normally with the heater on while the flush works through the system and cleans it up. The water and all the crap that got picked up is drained again and new coolant is administered.

But because it was the start of summer, I didn’t want to drive around with the heater on. I’ve had to drive without air conditioning in the humid August days of the mid-Atlantic coast, and the last thing on my list was adding more heat to that equation.

I also only get one day at a time to work on Eddie. My lease also prohibits automotive work on the premises, so I venture to my parent’s house, where there is a tree providing shade, a fridge full of cold drinks, and a hose to facilitate radiator filling. I do wonder how I got away with working on that scooter, given the lease terms.

Draining the system is straightforward enough; find the drain plug and open it. Old antifreeze is collected in a bucket, and the hose fills the system back up. I run the engine with the heat on, letting the water get hot and start dissolving the crud, then it’s drained again.

What a lovely shade of brown it was.

Fill, run, drain, repeat again, only this last time with coolant flush, just to get the very last of it. By the end, the water coming out looked almost as clear as the water going in. Close enough for me.

Between doing these fills and drains, the engine was running, so I had little to do while internal combustion did its thing.

You may recall Eddie was in a front-end collision before he came to me, specifically the front-right.

It must not have been major, or else the car would have been totaled. But it was obviously enough to bend the front-right door frame, such that there is terrible wind noise on the interstate, and necessitate a new front bumper. I know it’s not original because the new one had to be painted, and the shop didn’t use the correct primer, so the paint it’s got is flaking away bit by bit. Flex primer is not an option for painting plastic parts, I’ve decided.

The collision also tore up the forward fender liner and splash guard. These serve only small purposes: mitigate the water that splashes onto the serpentine belt and support the ABS wire as it leads to the main loom. Being shattered into five separate pieces where there should only have been two connected ones, they didn’t perform well in either duty.

Being harnessed to the splash guard, the ABS wire ended up being crushed by the fractured pieces. That was enough to puncture a small hole in the wire’s insulation. And you remember those oil leaks? Yeah, oil loves small holes.

Oil also corrodes copper, which is what wires are made of. This eventually meant the ABS module had lost the connection to the front-right wheel speed sensor. For a system that monitors each wheel’s rotational velocity, a speed sensor is kind of important. So important, that losing one sensor means the entire system shuts off and a little light on the dash glares at you. You still have brakes, of course, but you should be wary in slippery situations.

It’s been an issue for a while, if I’m honest. I’ve got decent tires, and I know to limit myself in the rain or snow, but warning lights bug me. Even if it’s not really a problem. Besides, I had the time, a bunch of spare wire (courtesy of dear ole Dad) and I’d already jacked up the front-right wheel.

(The radiator drain plug is on the left. I wanted gravity to work with me on this.)

What makes oil awesome is that it penetrates into the tiniest of spaces, worming its way in and breaking metals loose from other metals. That’s great, unless you’re talking about wires.

The small hole punctured into the ABS wire’s insulation made a nice entryway for Eddie’s leaking engine oil. The corrosion runs all the way from the sensor plug to the main loom. It’s not as bad near the loom, but it’s still there.

So I’ve got the time, I decide to replace the bad wire. It’s something I’ve already done before, but that was four years ago, and the oil leaks hadn’t been solved back then. So new oil got in, basically at the same spot as the old wire. Time to put new wire in.

Up until recently (not recent enough to do this for the fix, unfortunately), I had no idea the wire connectors I was using will heat-shrink. That would have been very helpful, considering I was trying to keep oil out of the connections. Electrical tape only does so much.

So the ultimate goal is to stop the oil leaks. For that, I turned to a coworker for assistance. A master technician for Toyota in a previous life, he suggested starting at the top with the valve cover gasket. It made sense, I decided. Gravity being the funny thing that it is, taking things that were up high and putting them on the floor, a leak up top would cover everything below in dead dinosaur juice.

My coworker-come-Sherpa enlightened me to the wonders of Scotchbrite pads and brake cleaner that day. Mating two metal surfaces with a molded rubber gasket works best when said surfaces are clean and smooth. Scotchbrite is like a hand-operated pressure washer. Those pads felt like they could scrub off skin, if I was inclined to do so.

But I’m not into exfoliating, so I focused on the valve head cover. When the two surfaces were all shiny, the new blue gasket was wedged in and the bolts were tightened up. I gave the block some more cleaning around the joint to make potential new leaks show up better and crossed my fingers.

Staring at those broken pieces that once were fender liner solidified my resolve to finally replace them. After all, they’d been in my way when the radiator hose needed replacing, when the AC compressor needed work, and the three times I’d replaced that torque mount. If I didn’t replace them, I’d be running new wire for this sensor again in about a year.

These being somewhat unique parts, the local stores were unlikely to have them. To the Internets I went, and was able to find the ones I needed. Had to get them from two separate stores, because each of them had one of the parts but didn’t carry the other. With that, it turns out there’s a bit of ignorance in the “All the parts your car will ever need,” slogan.

And, of course, the parts had a cheap feel to them. I wasn’t expecting carbon fiber from McLaren, just something a bit thicker, with more substance. It’s of small consequence, since the parts are function over form.

The funny thing about finally seeing how the part is supposed to go together is that makes you understand things. Like the fact you’re missing a few fasteners.

Times like this make me grateful my dad is a packrat (sorry, Mom). If I need a nut, bolt, and two washers to secure the splash guard to the sub frame, I’ll find them. It’ll take almost twenty minutes of picking out likely candidates from three different bins marked “Assorted,” but by Grabthar’s Hammer, and the Sons of Warvan, I shall find them.

But why am I having to look for a fastening solution? Because whatever shadetree shop Eddie was taken to after his crash decided to take shortcuts. And who could blame them? The Sunfire is hardly going to be a collector car, so why endeavor to preserve it? This is a daily beater, both in my hands and the previous owner’s. As long as it runs, who cares if the splash guard is really connected at all six points?

After seven years, I care. It’s not David taking down Goliath with a slingshot. It’s David’s next door neighbor with asthma coming out of nowhere to thrash Goliath to a pulp with his bare hands. It’s not a long bet if the bookie never put odds on it.

But David’s neighbor still needs his inhaler. That’s why I then turned my attention to a puddle of red fluid that’s started to appear now that I’ve cleaned up the leaked motor oil.