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maybe the leak-stopping feature actually worked
Sunday, May 2 2021
[REDACTED]
A week or so ago, I returned home from town to find a cloud of smoke billowing from beneath the Subaru's hood. Some sort of fluid was leaking onto the exhaust system, which gets particularly hot after pulling the car 400 vertical feet up from the Esopus valley. I'd managed to capture some of the fluid, which was reddish and didn't smell like motor oil. I thought maybe it was some sort of hydraulic fluid. The brake system was an easy culprit, but the leak seemed to be coming from near the engine, not near any of the brake lines. Maybe the leak was of steering fluid. The other day I bought some with leak-stopping characteristics, which I didn't have much hope for, and added it to the steering fluid reservoir. Today I drove the Subaru up onto blocks and had a look from below while the engine was running. The wettest pipes seemed to carry coolant, though that didn't mean they were the ones leaking. As for leaks, there didn't seem to be anything happening. Maybe the leak actually had been of steering fluid, and maybe the leak-stopping feature actually worked.
I'd missed so much work on Friday that it seemed prudent to make up for it this afternoon, even though most of what I've been doing lately is waiting for very slow processes to complete or fail, only to try them again. Somehow my productivity is even lower than when I was mostly just goofing off, yet now I feel in competition with a couple colleagues and have to show something for the time I'm spending.
In the ongoing laboratory cleanup project, today I added low sides to a wheeled platform on which I store my sorted plumbing supplies (along with large lag bolts and other threaded hardware). That platform measure 60 by 20 inches and is the repurposed surface of an old coffee table onto which I'd mounted casters. Without some kind of curb, buckets and jars tended to work their way off over time. Today I used thin sections of two by fours (each 1.5 by 0.25 inches and however long) as strips to form a half-inch-high wall all the way around. I also added a handle to make it easier to pull the whole thing out when I need something (the original plan was to keep it tucked well under the table at the middle of the east ceiling-wall, but it had a tendency to stay pulled out for months or even years at a time).
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