Things that make you go hummmm.....

When working on these cars you always seem to find things that confound the imagination. Sometimes it is something a previous owner did as a cheap fix. Other times it is a factory decision that makes you curse the engineers who designed it. And other times it is just facts of life type stuff.

Last night I had two out of the three. First I have my fact of life moment. I get all ready to work on the car, snap on some gloves, grab my drop light, and.... wait, why is the drop light not working? Let's see, it's plugged in. It worked last time. I have not dropped it recently. Hmm. Must be a bad bulb. Zoom, zoom in the spider to the store, come back with a new bulb. New bulb does not work. Well, this new bulb has a weird rattle to it. Go back to store, exchange bulb for model with less rattle. Still no dice. $#@$, must be something else. So not I figure the ballast in the light must be bad. I can probably get something like that from radio shack right? Let's take this light apart. Oh, wow, why use a regular off the shelf ballast when you could use and entire circuit board with microprocessors and stuff. Gotta love those engineers at Sears!! Oh wait, I guess I had three out of three after all! Anyways, I put it all back together and went back to the method all mechanics have used at some point in time.... I beat it on the work bench! And darn if that did not work... sort of. Not to mention that once the light came on it was all yellow instead of white. Grrr!! But at least I can work now. Until I accidentally turned it off an hour later...

So finally I resorted to taking the surface of the sun halogens off their stand and setting them under the car where I would be working. Whew, those things are bright!! Either way, that leads us to me being confounded by the previous owners. Or at least their mechanics...

I was rebuilding the front section of the shift linkage on the Milano. Once I got into it, I found piles and piles of bearing grease. The stupid part of it is that there is nothign in there requireing so much bloody grease! I ended up taking it all apart, wiping up the grease, regreasing, and putting it back together. If you have ever done this job, you know it is slightly more complicated than that, but you get my point. Either way, I used alot less grease. I also fabbed up a shim from some sheet rubber to take the slop out of the ball joint in the shifter. And with new o-rings in the lower joint it is as good as new. Now I just need the $160 kit from performatek to rebuild the rear part!

The end result is, now I have a shifter that works and a drop light that doesn't. Hey, you cannot win them all!!