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not quite the right alternator
Saturday, September 22 2018
This morning I got up before Gretchen and made french presses of both regular and decaffeinated coffee, which we drank in bed. Outside it was overcast and grey and the air was cool enough to make our bed the most appealing place to drink coffee.
Later I went out to do some work on the car. The first order of business was to diagnose why the battery and brake warning lights were illuminated on the dashboard. I checked the battery's voltage and it was a little over 12 volts. With the car on, that voltage sank to a little over 11 volts, suggesting the alternator was making little or no contribution to the car's electrical needs. Fortunately, I happened to have an old but probably-working Subaru alternator on hand. I'd replaced the alternator in our old 1998 Subaru for a problem that wasn't actually related to the alternator, so I'd kept the old one (thinking maybe I'd use it for a DIY wind power project or something). But today when I went to install that one into the 2003 Subaru, I found it was just a bit too wide in the front-to-back dimension. Fortunately, this problem only affected one corner, and so I ground that corner down with an angle grinder until it fit (doing so definitely weakened its chassis, but I had to do what I had to do). But then the bolt that holds it in the belt-adjustment slot turned out to fall a little short of that slot. Still, I managed to get that bolt in and the everything bolted in place. Only then did I discover that the connector was incompatible between the 1998 and 2003 models. Why? In earlier incarnations of myself, I might've tried to improvise a solution, but I'm too old and rich to play those games in 2018. So I drove out to Advance Auto Parts in Uptown Kingston and bought their cheapest compatible alternator, a refurb model that cost $140 plus a $50 core charge. (I've replaced a number of automotive alternators and generators over the years, and that struck me as more expensive than I remember these things being in the past.)
Back at the house, the new alternator seemed, if anything, to fit a little too loosely in the space provided. But I was possible to tighten it down solid, and with it all hooked up, I started the car and both the battery light and the brake warning light were off. Evidently they are both affected by a bad alternator, something someone said in some online forum (though, oddly, this important fact wasn't stated in other online fora).
The other Subaru-related chore was oxygen-sensor related. On further examination, I've found my Subaru has five oxygen sensors, which is three more than are found on most cars. Two are upstream sensor just below where exhaust leaves the bottom of the engine. Two are just downstream from a pair of catalytic converters. And then there is one just downstream from the place where both streams of exhaust merge on their way to the tail pipe. My hack of the most-downstream, of oxygen sensors had made no progress whatsoever at silencing P0420 errors from the OBD2 system, so I went back to hacking the one I'd been hacking just upstream from it. It had been semi-successfully hacked with just a 120 kilohm resistor and a crappy 10 microfarad Crapicon capacitor. This time I decided to increase the resistance of the hack to 330 kilohm and use a 1 microfarad capacitor. I left all the hack electronics exposed under the hood because I fully anticipate this not quite working. I've been logging the mileage of every error thrown so I can see whether I am making progress or going backwards.
This evening while Gretchen was off with her girlfriends at Bard College seeing a live orchestra perform the soundtrack music for Psycho as it was shown on a big screen, I painted a small painting of a snail as a gift for a friend whose birthday I would soon be participation in the celebration of. Here was the result:
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