The roadification of a car that’s been off the road for quite a while, there are bound to be a number of issues that will jump up and bite you. After correcting the pinging and dying problem by retarding the timing, Glinda’s actually been pretty reliable. That is, until this morning. With Victoria and the lovely Loriann off college hunting, I’ve availed myself of the use of Glinda for daily-driver duties. With the addition of dropping off and picking up Mikhaila, that means I’ve been putting roughly seventy miles a day on the car.Wednesday was uneventful other than I filled her tank with 93 octane and found she’d gotten 17 mpg during the last tankfull. I had a bit of a scare in that after parking her for about ten minutes at lunch time, I checked the engine oil level and found it at the ADD mark. As I reported in my last Glinda post, this was only after 150 miles. However, my dire news was premature since I checked the oil that evening and found it back near the FULL mark. I’ve had this same dilemma with Ringo – taking a long time for all the oil to drain back down to the crankcase. Regardless, she was still putting out too much oil leaving puddles and coating the engine.
Yesterday’s weather held true to prediction – rain starting soon after I parked at work and continuing through the late afternoon. Leaving work a little early so I could pick Mikhaila at school, I was very disappointed to find soaking wet front footwells. Water was dripping from a number of places under the dash. Looks like the seam sealer has given up in a big way. That means Victoria and I will have to pull the wipers and air grill off, scrape the old sealer away, and lay down new sealer before she can drive the car on another rainy day. When I got the car home, I used my shop vac to suck up most of the water and then, with both doors open, I set a fan to blow across the front footwells through the night.
This morning, after dropping Mikhaila off at school, I was cruising down I-70, going about 65, when I felt something from the engine compartment and the GEN-FAN light went on. I shut the car off and coasted well off the road. Thinking it was a broken fanbelt, I grabbed a spare from the trunk and the 9/16ths wrench out of glovebox and headed to the rear of the car. Opening the engine lid, I found the belt had not broken, but was sitting loosely off the fan pulley wheel. I looked further, down at the harmonic balancer, and saw it had come out of that groove as well. After loosening the idler pulley nuts to push that pulley forward, I tried to put the belt back in its Harmonic balancer groove. At that point I discovered the balancer had broken – part of the pulley portion was now a flopping ring. Since there was no way to drive the fanbelt, I lowered the lid and nursed her home. Fortunately, I was close enough to home that, with shutting the engine off on downhills, I made it without the TEMP-PRESS light coming on.
Great, now I've got something to do this weekend. Wait, I already have a BUNCH of things to do this weekend. Oh well, at least I’ve got a decent used harmonic balancer on the shelf to replace this one. Sadly, I just ordered the rear main seal, so if I discover the existing one is a source of one of the myriad of oil leaks, I’ll have to wait for the seal before I can put the car back on the road.
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