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easy exhaust system fix
Wednesday, September 22 2021
At the end of the workday, I decided to try and fix my Subaru's exhaust system, which had recently broken at a point of corrosion and metal fatigue (perhaps accelerated by my having bought an exhaust pipe from the wrong model year, which was a little too long). On careful inspection, it seemed the exhaust pipe carrying exhaust into the muffler had broken off about 3/4 of an inch from the muffler. I used a reciprocating saw to cleanly cut off the exhaust pipe and then I used an all-metal hose clamp with two separate tighteners and two inches of tighten-able metal cylinder material between them to connect the two, using furnace cement to seal the gaps that I was aware of. This seemed to work, and once I was done the Subaru no longer sounded like it had lost its muffler. I'll have to see how long this fix lasts, but overall I am surprised how easy this fix was.
Before Gretchen got home, I took a bath. But that was cut short by Gretchen thinking we'd go somewhere to look at tile. Then it turned out the tile place closes at 5:00pm.
At around 7:00pm Gretchen and I went over to Ray & Nancy's house for dinner. It was the first time I'd seen them in weeks. Sarah the Vegan also attended, and the dinner was made by Nancy. It was bits of vegan sausage cooked up with kale and mixed with not all that much pasta, and though it didn't really have a sauce, it yummy, and I kept grazing on it long after the others had stopped eating. I'd eaten a dose of cannabis earlier, so I was little loopier and more extroverted than usual. I was also drinking those big Fear.Movie.Lions double hazy IPAs.
A little before the end of the evening, Nancy showed me a weird leak in their bathroom that was somehow going through the wall and ending up in the basement. It seemed to be coming from a water dripping from the shower faucet onto the tub faucet, where it would then spray against the wall and even get some on the floor. The amount of water sprayed this way wasn't much, but it was constant, and it looked like it was working its way between the tiles into the wall and floor. Normally the tile protects the surfaces it covers, but not if the water is unrelenting. We opened up a panel behind the tub and I could see a wet spot on the wall were the water was coming through. But there was no water anyway on the pipes, strongly suggesting the leak wasn't coming from them. I told Ray and Nancy to put a plastic bag over the shower head to catch the drips until it can be fixed and that there wall would probably dry out once constant drip-spray stopped. I also told them to be more proactive about asking me for advice about such things, that I'm happy to help and can probably save them some money. I also told them I'd hook up a resistor and capacitor to one of their Subaru's oxygen sensor to fool its computer into thinking the catalytic converter is working, saving them a $9000 replacement expense (which makes zero sense on a car with a 140,000 miles on it).
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