Friday, June 08, 2007
my week driving a manual.
on tuesday, jon picked me up after lunch (in his new car) and we drove out past richmond, out past alphington, past coburg, kingsbury, preston and lalor until we got to epping.
for those that are wondering, epping is FAR FAR AWAY.
once there, we found 696 high street, which a website told me was the address of CustomLine motors. it clearly wasn't. the young men there kindly pointed me in the direction of customline motors and greased jon off lots. once at customline motors we checked out my car who had been admitted to hospital and was all fixed and ready to be discharged (after the $3200 doctors fee had been paid)
YEY! car was back.
on the drive home, i noticed that the car had a lovely grunt about it which made me feel proud to be a jeep owner. however, i also noticed it was idling a little too low. (around 500rpms.) not such a problem, as i thought it was just because the sensors were a little wet and it was a new motor, and there was a bit of water in the fuel tank still.
once i got home (after getting severely lost) i noticed i couldn't get the key out of the ignition. (i also noticed this at the petrol station, but it came out after a few attempts then)
as it turns out my gear shifty thingy isn't in the right spot. (it never was, but now its more not in the right spot) so it wasnt going into park properly. no biggie.
then later that night i needed to put the car inside the gates... i drove up the road so i could do a 3 point turn... and on moving from reverse to drive on the 2nd point, the car stalled.
how embarassing.
it also happened to be right outside my hardcore 4wd/dirt bike neighbours, who just weeks earlier had told me how they think wranglers are the most capable 4WDs on the market.
so, the stalling of an automatic car was a bit odd. but i didn't think too much of it, as it was still recovering after a motor transplant and all.
then the next day i had to do a few odd jobs around the place. i stalled 8 times driving to church street. now, this is just a 4 minute drive (make it 8, because finding parks in church is hell hard) the concern-o-meter was rising.
on my trip to westinghouse, i stalled another 3 or 4 times. one almost killed me.
so i decided i'd drive him like a manual. so since wednesday i've been so pedantic, but i've learnt to control the car so well. keeping the revs up, especially when changing from drive, to 1 or 2 or reverse.
so, i figured driving around in this manor probably wasn't so safe, so I downloaded a workshop manual for the wrangler and read it through... kinda. it didn't really tell me anything, except on how to change the globes, which i needed to do cos i got some rad narva plus 50's the other day.
the rest of the manual was far too confusing. bloody americans.
so today after my economics exam (fail btw.) jon picked me up and we went back to his to pick my car up (i left it there before my exam) took it for a spin back to my house to pick up the manual and globes, then went back to his for some fun times with nuts and bolts and tiny tiny tiny screws.
i fitted the new globes (which are so awesome) and we also emptied the lamps, which happened to be full of water and broken glass.
then i showed jon what i thought had to be fixed in order to fix my stalling problem. he disagreed and told me theres another way. but it's my car... so we did it my way. anyway, we knew what had to be fixed, but we didn't know how. so we undid all the surrounding bolts and sussed out the thingy that had to be fixed. once worked out, we did all the bolts back up and hey presto. car was fixed. i'm a freakin mechanical genius.
the end.
oh ps. when we took it for a test spin, we went down to caulfield park where there was this RAD pile of tanbark. so we put it in 4L and drove up it. it was so steep that we might have accidentally bent the exhaust, and the stuff that was floating around in the back of the tray hit the back windscreen.
Labels: jeep, jon, jose, uni
