The Bards Will Save Us All

...is my prediction for this pandemic, because music and games perform the invaluable service of structuring human interaction just enough that it stays enjoyable without being overly stifling. If you're singing you're not forced face the awkward question of how much social interaction you really, really need with people who call it the China virus.

To that end, I have bought a guitar. It was $50 on nextdoor, it's a Yamaha 310-f with a warped neck and far too much action for my weak and flaccid fingers. I don't know the first thing about playing guitar, and a previous career in live audio has left me with too much taste and not enough skill, and I'll be teaching myself off whatever tutorials I can find on the internet.

I'm pretty sure they don't teach this style in Guitar 101.

But, whatever, I own a guitar now. I've had it for 2 days, I know 2 chords (D and A), and my sources tell me that with a third chord (E) and a capo*, I can work my way up toward a simplified version of Dire Straits' Walk of Life. And while I'm doing that, I'm not refreshing twitter.

So now, Jim has to live with someone learning a new instrument from scratch. It is a really good thing that I built the outdoor office. Please keep him in your thoughts during this difficult time.

*and a decent sense of timing and a lot of practice doing chord changes and more callouses and maybe a small miracle. 

The Home Office

We're all under a shelter in place order for the foreseeable future, so the Better Half and I are both working from home full time. This requires a rethink of working conditions.

To wit: I dial into a lot of meetings and I don't like wearing headphones to do it if I can help it. I don't like feeling "observed" while I'm trying to work. I fidget constantly. I walk around. I do push ups. I stretch. I talk to myself. I take 20 minute nap breaks. Sometimes I walk around the block. This is in stark contrast to the BH who can sit down at his desk for 8 hours and churn through code (helped by, as far as I can tell, a bare calendar). He certainly models what coding "looks like" to an outside observer. I don't, and I'm feeling self conscious about it.

Enter the new office. We've talked for years about tearing down some collapsing outbuildings and erecting a shed and I've talked for years about immediately turning that shed into studio space. But that's a far future sort of plan, and I have a near future need to get work done. So I'll be working from here.

Not shown: the 55 degree high temp.

What you're looking at here is a convention tent with sides, anchored down by surplus Fiesta wheels and a palm tree. It's floored with some sort of foam interlocking gym mat, the table comes from the side of the road, and seating is a yoga block. Climate will be provided by a heated blanket. I've cunningly accessorized with kettlebells.

On the one hand, whether it will work long term is anyone's guess. On the other hand, it, or some iteration of it, has to work long term, so I'll iterate toward a successful setup (helped, I'm sure, by the passage of seasons and eventual warmer weather).

I took yesterday off as a rebalancing day to deal with the new shelter-in-place reality and set up the new office. I had a mostly-successful video call (we'll need to move the wifi access point closer to the tent) and an extremely successful 5pm cocktail hour. Today is my first working day, and I'm sure I'll have more to iterate on tonight.

The view. Much better than inside.

Pandemic!

Well, it's either this or refresh twitter.

As of now, the blog is back.

Obviously

When we last left our heroes, the 3000GT was mostly working, with a few minor faults and a ticking time bomb of a transmission. Well, time’s up and the 3000GT is in Oregon, getting a full transmission rebuild. And sway bars. And a big brake kit. And some other stuff. So we’re not here to talk about the 3000GT. 

  

The 1991 3000GT was the first Japanese car to earn the infamous "Dead Sexy" award, given to those automobiles whose styling is particularly suited to being displayed on the back of a tow truck. The category had previously been dominated by Alfa Romeo and Jaguar, both of which companies redoubled their efforts. The Japanese, having tasted glory once, adopted a "spray and pray" approach by partnering with Takata.  Unfortunately, this led to a lot of "dead" and precious little "sexy" in the Japanese markets.

We’re here to talk about a 2001 BMW 540i. My 2001 BMW 540i. 

This is one of those decisions that, when fully surrounded by context and hours of explanation, is obviously correct. I’ll get into all that in a later post. The context-free version is that my dad bought a 540i in Pennsylvania, and now I’m sitting on a flight to Philly so we can drive the car back to California, where I’ll sell it, probably for a loss, to someone who is rightly suspicious of any car coming from the part of the country that solves all its winter problems with road salt. 

Our first planned stop is in Canton, Ohio to visit the boyfriend’s family, and already the car is making itself useful. The boyfriend, originally scheduled to fly to Canton last night and arrive this morning, fell victim to the vagaries of Delta’s poor data center management. So now he is also flying to Philadelphia, and he’ll drive with us tomorrow. Again, a decision that makes no sense normally, but perfect sense when you’ve been awake for 30 hours, wandering around the Oakland airport for the last 8, and Delta tells you that you may or may not still have a scheduled flight but they don’t know when, and they don’t know when they’ll know, and all the available flight information is, by Delta’s own admission, most likely incorrect. Obviously at that point, the only reasonable course of action is to book a flight on a different airline to a city 400 miles away from where you meant to go so you can sit in a car for 8 hours with your girlfriend and her parents. Obviously.

But I am assured by my parents that the back seat is comfortable for adults, which already puts it head and shoulders above any car I’ve owned in the last decade.

So, I’m resurrecting this blog for the purposes of documenting what promises to be an eventful cross country road trip full of questionable decisions and lengthy post hoc justifications that all reduce, eventually, to the unassailable “it seemed like a good idea at the time” argument. We’re off to a strong start. Obviously.

To whoever the asshole was that did the last timing belt replacement on this car: I hope you rot in hell

There's a certain amount of, for lack of a better word, forensics that goes on whenever we work on this car. It's over twenty years old and it's not exactly low maintenance. It has had four or five previous owners, at least some of whom did their own work, and it's not an easy car to work on by any stretch. So every time we open the hood, we play a game well known to software engineers called "Where are the bodies buried?"

Yesterday there were a lot of them.

We decided to replace the timing belt after we tried to do compression test and discovered that not only was the timing horrifically misadjusted, we couldn't correct it. We would get close, and then cogs would slip because there was so much slack in the belt. We never bothered to put the engine back together after the first compression test so we figured it wouldn't be too hard to continue taking pieces off, get to the timing belt, and put it all back together.

Well, I didn't think it would be that hard. If the BF had other thoughts, he kept them to himself.

1991 Mitsubishi 3000GT VR-4 Timing Belt Change Statistics

Start time	2:00 PM
Stop time	4:00 AM
Belts replaced	Timing, Power Steering, Alternator
Weight Shed	.5 lb - part of the air conditioning pulley
Fluids Replaced	Coolant
Fluids spilled all over the engine, the engine jack, the drop cloth, the floor, the people doing the work	Coolant
New spider webs built from car to ground during work, total	1
Mosquitoes squished, total	10, approx.
List of atrocities committed by previous owners and/or mechanics	See list, below
	engine bracket bolts not tightened
	engine mount bolts not tightened
	existing timing tensioner not adjusted
	existing timing belt not tight
Front Bank PSI before timing belt change, average	181
Rear Bank PSI before timing belt change, average	90
Front Bank PSI after timing belt change, average	165
Rear Bank PSI after timing belt change, average	163
PSI range across all cylinders before timing belt change	90
PSI range across all cylinders after timing belt change	10

We spent fourteen hours yesterday to get to this point. That's not a typo. The car was already partially apart for previous compression tests and we still have four to six hours of work left to get it back together. I took a bath in coolant. For a while it was looking like I'd have to Gojo my hair. 

This is what I looked like after about six hours:

If you are guests of ours and you always wondered why we send you to the bathroom at the end of the hall rather than the close one right next to the front door, this is why. We use the close one to clean up messes like the one in this photo.

But this is the only photo that matters:

Compression test results: EXCELLENT. Conclusion: ENGINE NOT AT ALL RUINED.

P.S. That bottle of Pink Soap in the first photo is for cleaning oil painting brushes. I use it to clean myself up after car work because it's not full of grit and it's a lot gentler and more effective than Gojo. And it doesn't smell like oranges. Yesterday I showered with it. I was that dirty.

More timing

First, the scope of the work. We have a spreadsheet to keep track of what we need to do. It looks like this:

As you can see, we have some work to do. 

When we last left our heroes, they (we) had just performed a compression test with less than stellar results. Then we had a bunch of weddings to go to and we didn't get time to work on the car for a while. But we finally got a few free hours to try to work out the timing and perform a new compression test.

The problem with compression tests is that they're worthless if the engine timing is off. You're not going to get much compression if valves are open when you don't expect them to be. So step one was fixing the timing.

This involved shimmying a piece of cardboard a cam shaft gear and the timing belt, sliding the gear into correct timing, and removing the cardboard. This had to be done for 3 gears. It took a while.

And then it didn't work.

We've suspected for a while that something is wrong with the timing belt tensioner. The tensioning changes when we turn the engine over a few times (slack moves to various different parts of the belt) and the belt jumps teeth at the lightest touch. When we adjusted one cam shaft gear, others slipped. We couldn't keep one gear in time long enough to fix the others, and even when we got close, we still didn't really know if we were at all in time with the cam shaft that drives the pistons.

So now we've spent a week getting endless boxes of parts, and before we do anything else we're going to replace the timing belt and all that goes with it -- tensioner, water pump, and anything else we can think of. 

Then, maybe we'll get a worthwhile compression test.

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Commence the biting of nails.

At this point, a vastly oversimplified explanation of engines is in order. In an engine, there are hollow cylinders (6 in our case). They are arranged in banks (2 in our case, and yours too if you’ve ever seen ‘DOHC’ on your car anywhere). These cylinders have valves that open and close to let in fuel and air and discharge exhaust. Each cylinder has a piston that moves back and forth inside it and its function is to, among other things, work in concert with the valves to control the density of gasses in the cylinder. The orchestration of this mechanical dance is called timing and it controlled by a timing belt mounted on timing cogs which control cam shafts running though the cylinder banks. 

A compression test is a commonly performed diagnostic procedure which provides a lot of information about the state of the engine and how well it’s doing its job of producing compression. 

So we did one.

As this is a blog about our experiences learning to work on cars and not a how-to, I’m skipping over all the irrelevant stuff about how a compression test is done (per cylinder: remove the spark plug, insert a special compression testing tool in its place, disable ignition, and turn the engine over for about 5 seconds) and the equally tedious recounting of all the stuff we had to disconnect and/or remove in order to get access to the spark plug banks. The tutorial on how to do this ran 16 pages* and it still didn’t account for the effects California’s special emission standards on engine design. We had some extra mystery hoses that we couldn’t identify for a while. 

Normal compression for this car is spec’d between 115 and 150 psi per cylinder. On a new car, we’d expect compression across all the cylinders to be at the high end of that range, with maybe a 10% psi variance from cylinder to cylinder, if that. If one cylinder were to drop more than about 10 psi from the group, we’d know something was wrong with that cylinder and we’d start investigating the spark plug more closely and worry about malfunctioning values. 

Front bank compression (psi): 180 178 182

Rear bank compression (psi):   92   93   88

What we can read from this is that all the cylinders within a bank are extremely consistent with each other but the banks themselves are wildly different. So, looking at these results, it’s very possible that there’s nothing wrong with the engine itself and we just need to adjust the timing.

Except for one thing.

This engine is classified as an interference engine, meaning that during normal operation, the pistons and the valves occupy the same space at different times. It is only by the grace of highly advanced mechanical engineering that they do not attempt to occupy the same space at the same time. 

Oh, and timing. 

The timing belt is the only thing preventing a piston from shoving itself as hard as it can straight into a valve. So if the timing belt were to break or become ill-adjusted somehow, the engine might bend all its piston rods or shatter all its valves or both. The failure mode is, to put it lightly, catastrophic.

So in that context, these compression results were terrifying. On the one hand, the internals of the valves may well be fine. On the other hand, the timing is way off (and steadily getting worse, because the timing belt seemed to slip a tooth every time we accidentally touched it). So in our quest to determine the state of the engine, we might have accidentally made things a whole lot worse.

*Just to get to the spark plugs. Not even to do the compression test.