UTMC

Blackstone Laboratories in Ohio
https://www.blackstone-labs.com/
For $28 they will analyze the chemistry of your engine oil looking for metals, unwanted fluids like fuel & coolant, and give you an overall breakdown of how your engine is wearing. I've never had them do one for me before so I can't say personally how the report comes back, but its fairly common in the tuner world (of which I am NOT a part mind you) as well as a general shadetree mechanic talking point. You go to their website, request a free sample kits which consists of a small sample bottle inside a larger cannister. When you drain your oil, slip the sample bottle in to the oil flow, seal it in the included ziplock bag, seal it in the cannister and put it in the mail. Supposedly takes about 2 - 3 weeks to get results, so I'll report on it by the end of the month I hope.

Fucking brake lights stopped working. Turns out this is a known issue, related to the hazard flasher switch. No idea how long I've been making people guess when I'm coming to a stop, though if anyone is patient enough to drive behind my slow-ass in this thing they could pretty much Flintstone an emergency braking maneuver if they needed to.

Minor disassembly & cleaning of contact surfaces and a little creative engineering to get it back together since some of the plastic was buggered.

No chance of a replacement. I'd be leery of not having brake lights. (of course that may be my particular paranoia talking.)

0l4fderstout wrote:No chance of a replacement. I'd be leery of not having brake lights. (of course that may be my particular paranoia talking.)

Replacements are available but they run around $60. I'll source a good replacement but this fix got me down the road.

Fair enough. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Damn, not exactly the most encouraging report. Then again, I have no idea if the PO ever used an additive in the oil so I'll probably change the oil at 2k as suggested, then again 2k later and take another sample from the 2nd change.

Finally had a chance to install the power steering pump rebuild kit this past weekend. Couldn’t find a write up anywhere so I flew blind with a parts diagram and a bit of moxy and sure enough, it doesn’t leak any longer. For the first time since I bought it there isn’t any noise when I steer, and the effort needed to turn it is significantly less. It’s the title things that we take for granted on modern cars that we don’t appreciate until we don’t have them.

My first car was a 79 GMC with 3 on the tree and no power steering. It was a bitch to parallel park but boy did I get good at it.

I officially lost some Death Trap points over the course of the past two weekends. Dug in to the brakes, replaced shoes, springs and cylinders on the rear which inadvertently turned in to replacing some hard lines back there as well because they twisted into rusty mud when I attempted to loosen their fittings. Then bled everything down, felt good and solid. A long term issue I have been dealing with is a hard pull to the left during braking, refurbishing the rears did not cause this problem to abate so up the fronts I went. Lo and behold the passenger caliper was frozen solid, and replacing it turned in to a bit of an ordeal because like the rears, removing the fittings from the caliper destroyed the hard lines, and a replacement caliper took several days for my local NAPA to get in hand. This scarcity had a bit of a silver lining however in that the core charge was greater than the purchase price, meaning I made money on the deal once I handed over my OEM caliper. But after some more tube bending/flaring, cleaning and even going so far as to replace the rubber lines (and pads of course) and finally bleeding in yet more new golden juice, the brake pedal is solid as a brick and I can hands free brake in a straight line!
I will try and add some pictures but photo-fucket is being a dick again and telling me I cannot add anymore images (something about a free storage limit vs a paid account) so I gotta sort out what free service (because who pays for shit on the internet?) can load onto a .php format forum.

Bigshankhank wrote:... so I gotta sort out what free service (because who pays for shit on the internet?) can load onto a .php format forum.

I've had good luck with imgur