I Love It When a Plan Comes Together

What the hell did we do before the internet? I mean, there were encyclopedias, but it's not like you could write Funk & Wagnall when the info wasn't there you needed, but I digress. I'm leading the cart before the horse. Let’s start at the beginning.

It was the best of times; it was the worst...oh wait. Someone has used that already.

My (old) new car has been acting up lately. Making some weird noises and doing a strange choking thing when idling. I am, what you could loosely call, a gearhead. Even though the past few cars I've owned have been new, I really missed tinkering and fixing them myself, and because they were new from the dealers showroom, I wasn't allowed to mess around with them (at least if I wanted to keep my warrantee). One of the things I was looking forward to, and call me a masochist if you want, was the first breakdown of my car, just so I could fix it like in the good ole days. Well, I got my wish, and damned if it wasn't a doozy. It was one of those sporadic things that would never make the sound when I wanted it too, so I couldn't diagnose it, plus it was one of those generic "bad" car sounds that it could have been anything from a vacuum line coming loose, to a transmission that was going bad. Yesterday was the final straw. Up until now it was just annoying, but the check engine light came on (WARNING, WARNING, APPENDING DOOM APPROACHETH) and she stalled out while I was coming home from work.

That would be enough of this happy horseshit.

I replaced a couple of minor things that could have been causing it, and while the nasty howling sound was less, it was threatening to stall more often.

Could it be? I had lost my touch? Maybe it had been long enough that I couldn't work in an engine compartment anymore. The horror.

And thus, I checked the internet. Thank God for the internet. I found a forum that is just for my kind of sports car, and wouldn't you know it, this is a known problem with my year of car, and the fix is something I never would have thought of (before you say I've lost my touch, I'll just add that before someone figured this out there were many car owners doing return trips to dealerships to try and figure this one out...not what you call a common problem in cars). The fault lies in this silly little valve that controls the amount of air going to the engine when you are not accelerating.

Good news, the part is only about 100 bones and easy to put in. Bad news, no one stocks the friggen thing.

So I read on (horatio?) and notice someone has given instructions on how you can clean it out and get a couple of extra months of life outta the thing until you can track the part down. Sweet. A couple of scrapes, a few expletives, some carb cleaner in the eye, and my car is running better than the day I bought it.

Now, I just gotta work out how to explain how I was stupid enough to get carb cleaner in my eye, and figure out how to reset the silly little idiot light saying to fix my engine. (And to the peanut gallery out there, I already pulled battery offline and it still has it. See, I have still got the touch, or maybe I'm just touched).