January 12, 2007 I bought a 'new' 12V-2A SMPS at the thrift shop yesterday, complete with an old portable Canon inkjet printer, and today I reinstalled that part of the preheating system. Works fine, except that the heater blower is shrieking sometimes. I _must_ get that taken care of soon before that blower motor gets ruined. Replacing those is extremely difficult. (Merely lubricating it is no picnic, either.)
The rear door my son usually uses was really quite messed up, and the latch was prone to freezing up. I took the door apart, and found that yes indeed the vapor barriers were non-functional. I removed the latch and solvent-tanked it to remove all the old gummy gritty lubricant, then blew it dry. All the moving bits got a nice coating of M1 5W20 from my oil can, whereupon it all started working _much_ nicer. Reinstalled, and with the striker adjusted a bit, the door now works perfectly. The vapor barriers are also glued back into place. As an extra bonus, I found that the reason the inside door release wasn't working is because the latch has a child safety switch, a small sliding (when cleaned and lubricated!) button on the latch plate. Who knew? This was in the wrong position. ...After sitting out in the cold all day at work (no noontime journey) it got in a pretty good cold soak: never above freezing today, windy, and probably about 10oF when I went to start. I had to glow twice, and crank for several seconds each time to get it started. Really I just needed to glow some extra the first time, but I don't have a lot of arctic experience with this type of system. Fortunately the weenie battery was up to it. In this kind of weather it takes a good long time to heat the cabin. When I got home I measured the head temperature, with the gauge at about 80oC the IR thermometer indicated about 150oF at the sender. At least one is reading wrong, but they're _both_ lower than they ought to be, which would adversely impact cabin heat, fuel economy, and engine longevity. Time to install that new thermostat! January 13, 2007 Brrrr! 1.8oF outside this morning, about 8oF in the garage: perfect weather for changing a thermostat. Not. With two space heaters pointed at me it wasn't too bad, so long as I didn't move ouside their sphere of influence. (One was an old-style radiant heater of a kind I remember my grandma had, it was definitely better for this purpose than the other one. $7 at the thrift shop.) Anyway, the job went easily, the thermostat housing on this engine is right out front and on top, I can't imagine this job being any easier. The most difficult part of the job was cleaning out the threads of the housing since the tap wrench didn't fit in there and I had to use an open-end wrench, which is slow. The housing was clean inside, no signs of bad corrosion. The old thermostat was German and marked 80oC, but it had no bleed hole. The new one was marked 79oC and had a jiggle valve, which I made sure was uphill. With all threads clean, bolts and housing, it went back together easily. I just re-used the (green) coolant, this spring I want to flush the system out properly. It's just too damned cold for that kind of thing right now. We'll see in a bit whether this fixed the problem or not. -- Jim
