Family Life

It’s spring, and the damp has brought it’s seasonal troubles to the car’s electrical systems. A front-end collision many years ago (before our time) resulted in damage to the engine computer wiring harness. Several repair attempts left a hodgepodge of mismatched splices wrapped in miles of sticky, gummy, melted electrical tape. It’s a mess. The car is OK in the summer when it’s hot enough to bake out any moisture that gets into the splices, and it’s OK in the winter when there’s no moisture in the air anyway. Spring and autumn are a problem though. Lots of rain, damp, too cold to evaporate the drips, too warm to freeze them.

A while ago the engine started cutting out momentarily at unexpected times. We lived with it for a week or so it because it always started right up again by itself after a second or two. Until one day it refused to start at all. I sat in the car on a wet, windy afternoon at the parking lot at work, cranking the engine again and again, with no success. Sigh. Gotta face the music sooner or later.

I pushed the car into the warehouse and left it there overnight, hoping the dry warmth would get the water out of the wires. I tried to start it again in the morning, with no success. Sigh once again.

So I spent the weekend with the car up on blocks, testing the seventy-odd cables to the computer one by one. It turned out to be the main power feed to the computer directly from the battery. Well, no wonder it didn’t start. OK. We have progress. So how to fix it?

I went looking for another wire in the same circuit, trying my hardest not to take anything apart if I could help it. On a vehicle of this vintage many of the bolts are rusted solid. You don’t unbolt things–you snap them off, never to be the same again.

In the end the easiest (least risky) connection was under the main fuse panel on the other side of the car. There were a few tense moments undoing the brackets on the panel, but it came away mostly unscathed. The wires under the panel had been repaired and spliced before, and there was about 5mm of slack in the cabling. I could lift the edge of the panel just enough to shine a light in. Really big sigh. It just doesn’t get any easier, does it?

Judicious use of the wire cutters gave me enough space to lift the fuse panel out of the way. I wanted to repair those inferior splices anyway, or so I told myself. So I spent an hour repairing the repairs. No wonder the car had problems.

I ran a whole new wire from the computer all the way across to the fuse panel rather than trying to fix the old wire. It was easier and quicker that way, with a more reliable result. The car started up beautifully and has been fine ever since.

Until a week later.

Now the engine ran fine. It’s just that from time to time it wouldn’t start. This was different from before. Before, the engine would turn over, chugging away for as long as you held the key, but wouldn’t ignite and run. Now the engine wouldn’t even turn over. Turn the key and nothing. Not even a click. Lights on the dashboard, sure, but no starter. Stranded once again.

After another weekend of troubleshooting I narrowed it down to the Park-Neutral safety switch. This is a sensor that prevents the driver from starting the engine unless the engine is in Park or Neutral. In my previous car this was a switch built into the gear selector lever–fairly easy to get to. In my current car it’s a magnetic sensor bolted into the transmission housing–very difficult to repair unless you take the transmission off. This was not a job for an amateur. But I had to get the car running and spend as little as possible in the process. These are hard times.

So I put in a bypass switch. I ran some wires from the engine into the dashboard, with a toggle switch to close the circuit the faulty sensor was failing to engage. And it worked. Occasionally the car would fail to start and I’d reach over and flick the switch and everything would be alright. After a few weeks the sensor failed for all time. So now the car has a new custom-built security feature: it won’t start unless you know about the secret switch.

One day I’ll phone the dealer and order a replacement sensor. One day. These are hard times. On the other hand, it seems like the manufacturer may go out of business any day now. These are hard times indeed. Maybe I’d better get that sensor while I still can.

What’s that you say? Time to buy a new car? Yes, indeed! But these are hard times. Haven’t you been listening? So we make do with what we have, and are grateful.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 11th, 2009 at 10:24 pm. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.