Shut it off, shut it off buddy now I shut you down

[austin_dern]

Probably I should talk some about my car, before I strangle it. About six weeks back it picked up a cheery new glitch where I would sometimes turn the key, and it wouldn't start. This seems to be due to the wires leading to the ignition being worn enough that they'll only start from some positions. My father getting under the car and fiddling with it got it going again and while I swore to buy a new, real, car, with this working acceptably I wasn't in any particular rush since I never rush to buy anything.

After a couple weeks of running fine, it started to pick up the noise that it made before it died (it's obviously not a healthy car noise), and then it refused to start in a supermarket parking lot (not the butter and Cool-Whip trip). Jiggling the wires got it going again, though, and I finally bought the flashlight I should have had all along. It was fine another week or so. Tuesday, I wasn't able to get the car started at home and had to have my father come out to jiggle it. Going home, too, it wouldn't start (although it was fine when, mid-day, I had to relocate it to let someone else out). So I crawled under, jiggled the wire, nothing, crawled under again, jiggled the wire, nothing, et cetera. Eventually one of the people I work with paused before she went home, to jiggle the wires, and we got it started.

There is a number of times in one person's life that he should be stuck, after dark, in a deserted parking lot, in a not-exactly-prosperous urban area, getting repeatedly on his back, in the light mist of 47-degree-Fahrenheit weather, shining a flashlight into rusted car parts and then jumping back to try starting the car. I have reached that limit.

This morning, it took me fifteen minutes of jiggling about to give up; my father was able to get it in one or two tugs. Meanwhile, unfortunately, I'm sure the next use I make of the car is going to have to be to the mechanic where seven weeks ago I got it checked and approved as probably ready for the winter. If I had been more diligent about buying a new car I could probably have had it already, or at least had only a short while until a new one was in.

Trivia: By 1876 Fall River, Massachusetts, had 43 cotton factories with over thirty thousand looms and housing over a million spindles. Source: Big Cotton, Stephen Yafa.

Currently Reading: Electric Universe: How Electricity Switched On The Modern World, David Bodanis. This is a curious book. It feels like some sections were ripped out rather than edited away, and what's left gives me a slightly uncertain feeling. It also refers early on to Joseph Henry as having been a surveyor in upstate New York near the Canadian border, but I had thought his job was for a projected Great Southern Road, giving to Binghamton the sort of benefits the Erie Canal gave Utica, but my reference on that is thirteen time zones away right now.

Comments

[orv.livejournal.com]

Intermittent problems like that can be really frustrating to fix, but hopefully your mechanic can figure it out. I had an intermittent starter issue with one of my cars once, but fortunately it had a manual transmission and my driveway was on a hill, so actually using the starter wasn't always strictly necessary.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

This is intermittent, yes, but it can't be hard to pin down -- jiggling the wires does bring the car back to working, and the wires are obviously in bad shape; they barely feel like they're covered in rubber anymore. As long as they have replacement wires they should be able to replace them in short order and with luck that'll get me enough functionality to get a real car.

[orv.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. I wonder if this is a variant of the "biodegradable wire insulation" problem Volvos had in the mid-80s? They switched to a more environmentally-friendly wire insulation, and for a time they didn't have it quite right and the heat of the engine bay would make the insulation turn brittle and flake off.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I suspect that it would be less degraded if the car had not spent several years straight sitting and rusting and getting tree sap dropped on it. I'm amazed more of the hoses haven't cracked yet, but the brake lines had clots of rust through them earlier in this car's sorry history this year.