The Elephant's Child

Warning: Car Posting.

Cross post over at Around the World With Pearl. 

Cross Post: Around The World With Pearl

Picture of tools and some good news about air conditioning over at  Around The World With Pearl.

Hydraulics on the clutch are finally fixed and working nicely.  I'll probably take my "little black dress" for the weekly grocery shopping tonight.  Sweet.

 

Cross Post: Around The World With Pearl

Some pictures of Pearl's naughty bits over at Around The World With Pearl. 

Safe for Work unless you're a car.  If so, then NSFW.

Also: only moderately technical, for my non-car-geek readers.

Cross Post: Around The World With Pearl

Post over at Around The World With Pearl.

 

Not too much technical stuff.  I promise.

 

 

Head of Parts Procurement

We're getting ready to change the oil, the air filter, the transmission fluid and the differential fluid (the differential is the ball-shaped dohickey between the back wheels on a rear-wheel drive car) on Pearl. She also needs a new cooling system thermostat. And in our under-car inspection weekend before this past one, we discovered some little bushings (rubber squishy bits) missing from part of the gear linkage (the little metal arms that connect the stick shift inside to the transmission).  Replace those, and the stick shift won't be loose and wobbly anymore.

I was in charge of ordering the bits we needed.  I'm quite proud of myself: I ordered the right parts.  I even faced down my terror of looking like an idiot and went into a small-town Napa auto parts (complete with bar stools at the counter and peeling linoleum on the floor) and bought the correct oil for the differential.

The bottle that says Napa on it is the differential oil. From there, going roughly counterclockwise: the yellow circle is the air filter, and the bushings for the gear linkage are laying inside.  The thing with the spring in the center is the thermostat.  To the right of that is an oil filter.  Behind the oil filter is a cabin air filter for the Saab, which is way overdue for new one.   We still need transmission fluid.  Fortunately, Mercedes Benz of the era of ours take plain old automatic transmission fluid in their manual transmissions, and we can get that at our local hardware store.

And we're also waiting on a 14mm Allen wrench, which is not to be found here in town.  We had to order it online.   My resourceful and creative Dad made us a temporary one by clamping a large bolt with a 14 mm hexagon-shaped head on it in his vise grip and whacking it over into a L-shape.  Ta-da! An "Allen wrench"!

So, this past Saturday, with my parents visiting and helping out with Sparkle Kitty, Mad Musician and I managed to get the oil changed, the new air filter in, and the new theromostat in. And my "Mad Musician and I" I mean Mad Musician did the work and I hung out with him, listening to him explain it all to me. 

The oil is easy to change on a 190e Mercedes Benz; everything is easy to get at, and the filter is even up on the top so you can remove it without spilling oil.  Ditto for the theromostat; it's located such that you don't have to drain all the antifreeze out of the car.  Now the car warms up quickly and the engine is running at the proper temperature. It's idling a bit better, too.

The transmission fluid and the differential fluid will have to wait until another time. As will the gear linkage squishy rubber bits.

A Scarf for Pearl.

Pearl has a few cracks in her dashboard.  For the moment, we're not doing anything to fix them.  We'd rather leave them as is than take on an ill-advised, tacky, or non-reversible fix *cough*carpeted dash*cough* that we'll regret later.  Eventually, we'll figure out either how to fix dash cracks or we'll hunt down a new dash.

For now, we are doing what we can to limit further cracking.  Garaging the car when the garage isn't occupied by another car-repair project, for example.  Wiping it clean with UV-protectant spray.  And, finally, simply keeping it covered (and therefore shaded from direct sun) when the car isn't being driven. 

Last week I finally got around to making a "dash scarf" for covering the dash when the car is parked.  I used some Sunbrella fabric I bought for this purpose last fall.  Pearl's new scarf has a flannel backing and the batting is heat-resistant Insul-bright.  Regular batting would have been fine, I'm sure, but I've been looking for an excuse to play around with some Insul-bright anyway.

Figuring out the pattern was quite the trick, as the dash is not flat and not a nice even rectangle.  I ended up stretching one tape meausure across the dash, side-mirror to side-mirror, and then I used a second measuring tape to measure the dash depth, windshield to front edge, every three inches, assuming the front edge of the dash was a straight line all the way across.  I plotted all those points on a sheet of paper as coordinates, transferred the points full-size to a piece of transparent pattern-trace, and connected the dots.  Yay! A pattern for the 190e dash!

It sounds way more complicated than it actually was.

I stacked up the backing, batting and print, quilted them together and then bound the edges with white bias tape and grosgrain ribbon.  It's a perfect fit.  It's soft and flexible, making it much easier to remove and replace than a cardboard or pop-up windshield shade. I love the dark red accent that I added along the edge, and the mod/abstract print seems to tweak this oh-so-serious black-over-black Mercedes quite nicely.

Now, if I could just find a leather wrap for the steering wheel in that same dark red. . .

Around The World With Pearl

Pictures of my first Official Car Repair over at Around The World With Pearl.