Yesterday was a no truck day. I did manage to get the trash out before pickup, ride the stationary bike for all of 15 minutes, work 9 hours and then 6 more doing a project for a neighbor digitizing a landscaping plan for them. That makes for a long day, but Today I am planning on getting down to the shop to put the last few parts on the truck. I just heard Alexa announce a delivery has been made, unfortunately since it is not at the front door, i am going to have to venture up to the gate or worse look behind the large bolder we have our house numbers on up by the street. When delivered to the door, deliveries are awesome. When chucked in a random area up the hill somewhere in the 100 yards between the front door and the top of the driveway, they SUCK.
Well this post went off the rails. Turns out that the notification from Alexa, was old and the part was delivered to the door an hour later. I never did get down to the shop due to a couple of work emergencies. I had to reset flags for all records for specific customers who are signed up for specific products that needed processes re-run. Then I found out one of our critical queuing processes had stopped working over 30 hours before. While I am CTO of this company, I don’t know every command for every process we have created. It just so happens that our documentation repository, the wiki is down this week, and the developers were not as available as they normally would be due to a rocket attack on their city the night before. Some things really can’t be foreseen. I managed to get it running again but had to babysit it for the next couple of hours. The long and the short of it was I didn’t get down to the shop.
The next day I did manage to get down there for a couple of good hours. I don’t have a ton of time after work and I am not as motivated being mentally tired from the days issues. So when I run into issues sometimes they seem to be bigger than they actually are. I immediately tried to figure out how to get the damn power steering pump pulley back on. I need the tool to be all the way in but not stick out too far to be able to get the other part of the tool on. Since I had already destroyed the sort one. I decided to take the medium sized one and cut it down. I clamped it down in the cutoff saw and made it just slightly longer than the small one. I then used a series of files to make sure it didn’t mess up the thread as it is threaded into the pump shaft. After threading it in I added the second half of the tool and starting turning it. I saw the same thing happening again. As the second half of the tool gets tightened, the first half tries to back itself out. To fix this I decided to take a cheater bar (handle of my floor jack) and put it over the handle of the ratchet and jam it under the frame. This holds the inner bolt from moving along with the pulley. Then the nut can be turned with an adjustable wrench, because it is a ridiculous size like 19/32″ or some crap like that. I kept cranking on it and then moving to the side of the truck to eyeball if it was in line with the lower pulley and the compressor pulley. When I was finished I removed the tool and saw the shaft flush with the pulley end. I never got a good photo of how it was aligned before removing it. (Note for next time- MORE BEFORE PIX)
While that job was frustrating and cumbersome to deal with, some jobs are just infuriating. The new oil pressure sensor I got to replace the one with the wrong wiring plug, is also wrong. It has the correct plug for the wiring harness, but the damn other end is the wrong size and will not thread into the hole. So I ended up having the pay the price. This usually happens when I have to make a trip to one of the local parts stores. This time it was O’Reilly’s I like the store and the staff is capable of looking up parts and also recognize when you know more than them and don’t bother to argue. Having worked at NAPA auto parts “Back in the day” I know have much the damn markup is on parts sitting in a store and especially for the poor wrenchers who don’t have an account. I managed to get the correct oil pressure sending unit. But instead of $25 like they are on Amazon, it was $46. I did manage to look around and find some antifreeze that was only $13 rather than the name brand they were pushing for $24. That done I called it a night and decided to try to get on it on Friday after work.
