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manifold welding
Thursday, April 10 2008
I'd been putting off getting the Civic hatchback inspected since the last day of January, when its inspection sticker expired. (In New York State, inspection stickers' expiration month is shown by a tiny little punch hole, which, though invisible in traffic, could put a car owner at risk if his car having an expired inspection is parked on the street, particularly in New York City.) Recently, though, Gretchen cranked up the pressure to finally get the inspection done. So today I worked on the one problem that might still cause it to fail: the glowing yellow check engine light.
The problem is either from a faulty oxygen sensor (an $85 part) or from the cracks in the exhaust manifold (though both of our cars have similarly cracked manifolds). I didn't want to replace the oxygen sensor unless there was no other choice, so today I decided to try a new technique for sealing the cracks in the manifold. In the past I'd used products such as furnace patching paste, but today I escalated to more serious firepower. I put on my autodarkening helmet and fired up the wire-fed welding kit. The exhaust manifold appears to be made of cast iron, a material I'd been led to believe is frightfully difficult to weld. But I didn't let that stop me. After about a minute of blasting away at the cracks at maximum firepower, they seemed to have disappeared beneath heaping puddles of brand new steel. Perhaps I'd fixed it!
Later, after clearing the error messages on the car's computer, I took it on a shakedown cruise out to 9W. Along the way I picked up a hitchhiker standing on US 209 at its intersection with the road into Hurley. When he climbed in, the dogs in the backseat initially barked ferociously, but they immediately fell silent when I told them to. The hitchhiker was a scruffy middle-aged man with stained clothes, body odor, and a bottle of orange-flavored vitamin water and he claimed to be a stone mason living in Hurley. I made the mistake of telling him about all the bluestone behind my house and he insisted on getting my phone number in case he ever needed some. Not knowing how to get out of this thing having the feel of an obligation, I gave him a number, but it wasn't mine. He wasn't content to be dropped off as far as I was going; he asked me to drop him off at the door of whatever place it was he needed to be in Lake Katrine at least a mile out of my way. I've done a lot of hitchhiking in my day and I've never asked anyone to go out of his way. It's not like it was a big deal, but in this case it seemed to indicate a personality flaw, the kind that would keep him from, in the town where he lives, from having either a car or a friend to drive him somewhere.
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