Sunday, November 18, 2012

Sanctuary


A Sanctuary is a place set apart.
Sanctuary cities were set up by God in Israel as a place someone could flee to til things cooled down and they could explain their side of the story.
The medieval church claimed that privilege for the church building Sanctuary.
The meaning of the word really was that the room was dedicated or "set apart" for God.
A Sanctuary can be a place to get a way to.
This is my garage.

I bought that Ranger pickup late in 2009 with 60k on the odometer.
I gave $6k for it.
A couple years ago, my radiator went bad and I overheated it.
After repairing the radiator, it never overheated again, got 20 mpg, had good acceleration, but had a miss at idle.
I did a compression test and found a cylinder had 50 psi instead of over 100.
I couldn't see how overheating the motor caused a burnt valve.
The valves let the fuel in, seal the combustion chamber (where the ignited gasoline goes boom) and let the exhaust out.
A valve might have it's edge where it seals develop a hot spot (from low octane gas causing "pinging" or some other reason) and burn a small hole which would prevent sealing all the "boom" in the cylinder.

Well I've been planning on removing the cylinder heads which hold the valves and having them re-conditioned.
For two years.
Lately the engine has been acting worse and worse.
It has 138,000 miles on it now. The body looks like it came off the showroom floor.
Last week the "planning stage" was over.
Last Sunday afternoon my brother and I pulled the heads off the truck. 2 1/2 hours.
We were confused. There were no burnt valves.
Monday we took them to the machine shop to have them re-conditioned.
Tuesday we were told they were junk.
They were so cracked from the overheating that they were unsalvageable.
There were many cracks in the valve seats.
This made us question the condition of the engine block.
New heads and gaskets, chain and water pump would come to around $600.
My brother's friend found us a used motor from a friend of his for $600 with 98k miles on it.
So Friday we went to the yard and got the motor.
Saturday I spent most of the day preparing to yank the motor out of my truck.
It's all ready to be pulled today when I get home from church and the the church Thanksgiving dinner. The turkey for which, Scherie stayed up until 2 am preparing. And I stayed up with her.
I'm about to leave for church.
I'll have a choice when I get home.
Pull motor or nap.
We'll see.

By the way, there's a communist in the White House.
Actually, quite a few.

9 comments:

  1. Nap FIRST, then engine... Just sayin... :-)

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  2. No nap. Engine is in truck. Now I get to hook it all up.

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  3. You're a mechanic, Ed?

    My father was a mechanic, so I "grew up" in the garage that he had several yards from our house. That garage had a pit and, of course, an engine hoist ever at the ready, hanging from the garage's rafters.

    Dad's garage even had a heater in it -- not electric, but some other kind.

    And wouldn't you know it? When I grew up, I married a mechanic.

    Ah, the wonderful smells of an automotive garage! Varsol for cleaning parts -- and all those other garage smells, too -- smell like home to me.

    Hope that all works out well with your motor replacement. When she runs for the first time after you've got her installed in the engine compartment, you'll have justifiable feelings of success.

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  4. Used to be with the old cast-iron engines and engine blocks, if you overheated them you just turned them off, let them cool down, filled back up with antifreeze, and were good to go. With most of the components being aluminum these days once you overheat an engine, thereafter they're living on borrowed time. I too have had to go the rebuilt/used engine route after overheating one.

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  5. thanks, Dave.
    AOW: When I was a youngun, home from the service, I was working in my sisters garage and I came in to get a drink. She and her girlfriends remarked how manly and sexy a man looked working on cars.
    But looking like I just worked on a car never got me very far with the opposite sex :)

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  6. Good on you ED. I did a bunch of that stuff when I was younger. These days I'm not touching the naughty bits? of anything with a wrench. I just don't want to have to use borax and brillo pads to get my hands clean. And the good old days of swimming in trans oil.

    I hope it's running well for you when it's done.


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  7. Thanks, Kid.
    And thanks for stopping by.

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  8. The thing with radiators is that you wouldn't be aware of a problem until your car's suffering already. Engine problems, for example, can be checked without waiting for a cue that it's broken. How did go? I hope you were able to fix the engine. If not, I suggest you opt for replacement.

    Jody Blake @ Radiator

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