Odds and Ends

There's a NW region FCA picnic tomorrow, so there were several things that I needed to address.  In particular, the first two as the forecast is for the high 70s (that's hot here in Seattle) and my wife stated she wouldn't go unless it would be cooler in the car.

The first problem was that the heater lever wasn't moving the valve in the engine compartment.  Since it was stuck in the open position, the heater boxes were delivering hot air.  After reaching up under the dash and adding a few scrape marks to my hands, I found that the arm that should hold onto the cable housing was broken off.  The cable housing had some electrical tape around it, so evidently the previous fix was to tape it to the remains of the arm.  So moving the lever was simply pushing the wire and housing together rather than moving the wire inside the housing.  This is clearly a problem for another day as I'll have to remove the lever assembly, fabricate a new arm and fitting to hold the cable housing.  So my immediate solution was to use a long screwdriver to push the valve closed in the engine compartment.

The second was getting the passenger window to go down again.  It worked a couple of trips ago, but had stopped working.  I had looked at the switch a few days ago and found that it was working properly.  The window motor would draw power (by watching the ammeter) when pushed to raise the window.  But when pulled to lower the window, the ammeter didn't change.  So I came to the conclusion that there was a problem in the wiring in the door or with the motor.  Taking off the door panel is a chore because you really have to pay attention to the clips and not break the door panel backing trying to get a clip free.

Door panel clips	Holes in door for clips

You can see two types of clips in the picture on the left.  The lower one is an original the the upper one is the best fit replacement I could find.  It works, but it quite a bit tighter.  The holes where the clips go have nylon bushings in them.  The one on the right is an original whereas the one on the left is another best fit replacement.  It works, but it's loose in the hole, so I had to glue it into the door.  (Since I wrote this, I've found original clips).  You can also see the piece of plastic that is taped down with double stick tape.  This is very important to keep the moisture off the back of the door panel.  Over the years, this gets torn, lost or no longer sticks to the door.  The solution is to get some heavy duty plastic (10 mil or so), cut a new piece and then tape it to the door.

It turned out that the 'down' wire had just come unclipped from the motor.  A quick fix except for all of the time necessary to remove and install the door panel.

Now the passenger compartment should be quite a bit cooler.  Of course I could also have the air conditioner recharged, but since I've never tried to get it working, I would probably find another set of problems to address including dealing with the conversion to the new Freon.

Since I had the door panel off to fix the window motor wiring, I elected to replace the rubber gasket under the lock.  I had originally used o-rings since they were easily available and come in a variety of sizes.  However, the gasket should have been a flat cut piece of rubber.  Since then I have gotten a hollow punch set.  This allows you to cleanly punch various hole sizes in leather, rubber, etc.  The punch set has a variety of dies and first punching the smaller hole out of the center and then using a larger die, leaves one with a nice gasket to go between the door and lock.  You can also see a different style of hollow punch in the center of the punch set.  This is a one piece punch that typically come in smaller sizes (< 3/4").

Punch set	Assembled punch and finished gasket

Now the next time I have the driver's door panel off, I'll be ready to replace the gasket on that side too.