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oxygen sensor hell
Sunday, September 30 2018
I started working on the Subaru first thing when I got out of bed, cutting neat little slit holes along both sides of a rectangle of bicycle innertube just the way it is shown on a YouTube video mentioned in Friday's entry. I'd bought some cheap grease at the Advance Auto Parts on the way to La Florentina last night, and I used that to refill the damaged boot on the passenger-side front CV boot. The damage was fairly severe, almost cutting the boot in two at one of the latitudinal indentations. Unfortunately, my bicycle tire patch was too small in both dimensions to make for a proper fit, so I soon abandoned it and wrapped it up with Gorilla Tape instead. I'd found a split-boot fix online that looked like a better, more permanent fix, so this patch really only had to be good for a few days. With that rigged to my satisfaction, I turned my attention to fixing the oxygen sensor system. I figured this would be the easiest part of the repair, since all it seemed I had to do was to splice four lengths of wire between the remainder hanging off the oxygen sensor and the connector and wire that had gotten wrapped around the axle during Friday evening's disaster. To make it so future oxygen sensor hacks would be easy, I spliced in extra-long wire, though I carefully secured it all with zip-ties so the connector would dangle down to where it attached from above and, even if it slipped out of the socket it was supposed to plug in to, it wouldn't be within reach of any moving parts. I was confident this would all work great, but when I turned on the car and cleared all the OBD2 codes, the check engine light came right back on within seconds, and when I checked for errors, it was the same seven that indicated a serious problem with the oxygen sensor. Perhaps it had been severely damaged when the wires attached to it (they're unusually thick and tough for low-voltage signal conductors) were yanked away by the force of the rotating axle.
Now, though, at least I had a drivable car. So I loaded up the dogs and drove to the Advance Auto Parts in Uptown Kingston. When buying the oxygen sensor, I asked if they also stocked a split CV boot kit. It turned out they did, so I bought one of those too. There was something about the connector on the oxygen sensor that didn't look quite right, and when I opened up the hood there in front of the Herzog's to see if it would fit, I saw that its gender was wrong. I'd told the guy who fetched that part for me that the car was a 2003. So when I took it back, I asked for a part for a 2004, and this time the gender was correct. I immediately attached it to the car and started it, hoping it would be enough of an oxygen sensor to clear the errors. But it did not. Either the oxygen sensor actually had to be in the exhaust stream in order for those errors not to happen, or there was a problem upstream from the sensor. Perhaps some electrical problem had manifested in the brief moment when the axle grabbed the cable and it was still connected to the engine control module, destroying a small part of that. In any case, the day was not going well.
Back at the house, I opened up the split boot kit hoping to find the directions promised, but there were none. I tried to find them online, but I couldn't find anything there except for some shaky YouTube videos with like forty views. This was how I learned I would have to completely remove the old boot and that I might have to cut the new one to fit. Other than that, I was left to figure things out myself. I got the old joint cleaned and packed with new grease and then glued the two halves of the boot kit around it (this wasn't easy, though I made less of a mess of things than I expected to). The new metal clamps designed to hold the boot in place were a joke, but fortunately there was enough clearance around the axle for me to use standard hose clamps (the kind tightened with a screwdriver). The biggest problem was the small end of the boot, which was much larger than the axle it had to seal around. There were some plastic pieces in the kit designed to form a cone around the axle that was large enough for a hose clamp on the boot to clamp around, but it turns out that hose clamps cannot be reliable clamped down upon a cone-shaped surface. Lacking other options, I wrapped black electrical tape around the narrower part of the cone until it more resembled a cylinder. It seemed like a pathetic hack, but with that tape in place, I was able to seal the joint pretty well.
With that part of the disaster behind, I returned to the problem of the oxygen sensor. The only way I'd know whether simply replacing the old oxygen sensor with a new one (and installing it in the exhaust stream) was going to fix my "7 error code" situation was to remove the old oxygen sensor and put the new one in its place. But I've never owned a car where removing an oxygen sensor is an easy job; they're all either hopelessly rusty in the places where the oxygen sensors live or they were designed for mechanics with extremely long arms and extremely narrow wrists. I was able to put my special slitted oxygen sensor socket on the oxygen sensor in question, but I couldn't develop enough torque on it to back it out. Its environment was too cramped for the various tools I have (and, mind you, I have a nice variety of tools).
Later I tried a hack where I wired up the signal from the good driver's side exhaust oxygen sensor so that it also went to the input from the oxygen sensor on the passenger side, thinking I could fool the system into thinking everything was awesome based on the forked signal. But that didn't work at all. By this point it was getting dark and Gretchen had just come home. So I did something I rarely do: I gave up. The car was drivable, so I told Gretchen to just take it to a mechanic and have them replace the oxygen sensor.
While I'd been working, I'd been listening mostly to the YouTube channel of Dave Ramsey, a businessman with a popular radio show that advises people on how to get out of debt. Ramsey comes at it from the perspective of an Evangelical Christian, though much of what he says is essentially common sense. (YouTube injected it into my feed unexpectedly, showing yet again that the algorithms know more than any mortal.) It all boils down to the following: don't go into debt, and if you are in debt, impose some austerity on yourself and get out of it. As someone who never pays interest on the credit cards I routinely use and who always buys the cheapest used car necessary for my transportation needs, it all makes perfect sense to me. But we live in a country where it's common for people to go into debt to live a flashier life than they can afford, a path that isn't sustainable. I found the show surprisingly entertaining, though most of my amusement came at the expense of people who had made some shockingly bad life choices. There was, for example, the woman with nearly $30,000 of debt making less than $30,000 a year who had just bought a $20,000 car. And there were plenty of people with six figure incomes who were drowning in so much debt that they couldn't afford basic amenities. Listening to such misfortune was pleasurable for the same reason watching To Catch A Predator is pleasureable. People were doing stupid things and suffering as a result. It's the way the world is supposed to work. But we also, sadly, live in a world where one can be a serial liar, obvious conman, and run all manner of rackets only to fail all the way up to being President of the United States of America.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?180930 feedback
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