Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   found art dashboard skeleton
Monday, April 21 2008
Today I was able to get the dashboard out of the Honda Civic hatchback after following some advice I found on the web. The key was to get the plastic off the ridge between the driver and passenger seats; the dashboard is braced here from behind. I'd already removed everything else holding it except for that one bolt hidden beneath a pop plate in the top middle of the dashboard. Once I had the dashboard out of the way, the heating system came out easily, allowing me to stockpile the heater core for some fun future hydronic project. I also thoroughly disassembled the dashboard itself, which left me with a delightful piece of found sculpture. It was the dashboard skeleton, a structure built of steel plates welded to a subtly bent steel pipe. I took this "sculpture" and place it front of the house, and it looked like something a not-entirely-clueless McMansion-dwelling homemaker might erect.


Sally poses with found art: the Honda Civic dashboard skeleton.

Later in the day I did what I could to remove all the bolts attaching the hatchback's engine and transmission to the frame of the car. These bolts attach to rubberized engine mounts, and some of the mounts support the engine from below even when the bolts aren't there. Unfortunately, though, the passenger-side mount does not cooperate with gravity, and the whole 500 pound engine-tranny combo sagged to the ground when I removed the last of the bolts there. (Doing so required enormous torque, the kind that can only be developed using a substantial cheater pipe. My cheater pipe was a four foot long piece of two inch cast iron sewer pipe.) To get the engine-tranny back in place, I was forced to use my massive steel posthole digging rod as a lever.

As I worked on the hatchback, I found myself coming up with an idea of how to eventually dispose of it. Instead of having it hauled off (and, at the minimum, losing perfectly good wheels in the process), I will simply disassemble and cut it into pieces small enough to haul away on my own. If I segregate the steel from the plastic, it's possible I can recycle nearly the entire thing. (The local dump doesn't charge people who dump scrap steel and certain kinds of plastic.) It struck me that dissaembling a totaled car should be a right of passage for everyone suddenly stuck with a useless vehicle, particularly accident-prone teenagers (who tend, as a group, to be dangerously ignorant of their ignorance). Instead of packing off their cars to be crushed into recyclingly-dubious cubes, part of the responsibility of owning a car should include disassembling it and disposing of it when you're done with it and can't sell it. By the time I'm done with the hatchback, I'll have the sort of intimate familiarity with Honda Civics that is rare outside of service garages. And I'll also have plenty of spare parts, some of which I can sell on Ebay and others of which I can use in the other cars or even in non-automotive applications. What I can't sell, give away, recycle, or reuse, I can discreetly deposit in various dumpsters throughout the greater Kingston area.
As just one interesting piece of the crash (har har) education I'm getting about cars from disassembling the totaled hatchback, I've developed a richer and deeper appreciation for the sheer complexity of the modern (well, eleven year old) automobile. It's not just that they have airbags, for example. They also have little controller computers mounted in the dead center of the front bottom of the cabin to continually measure G-forces so as to know when to fire the bags. There's another computer to control the engine and what not, two different sets of windshield wiper motors, a car-wide circulatory system just for window washer fluid, all connected to a reservoir that can hold over a gallon of blue juice. There are little cables, hoses, and wires going to all sorts of things, and it's all too similar to a nervous system for me not to suspect that there is a little emergent self-awareness in there somewhere. It's amazing that something which obviously takes so much human effort to assemble can be sold so cheaply.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?080421

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