mschaos

The orange turd can try, but he'll never turn my HOMES into SHAME.

Spent about 3x as long on my car today as I'd hoped. The glove box removal was not nearly so easy as the videos had led me to believe. I finally got it out and swapped the motor on the recirc flap, verified it worked and then tried to put it together again. Couldn't get the long tongue threaded back though the center console closeout panels. Finally found another video with my exact model of dashboard (just right hand drive) and had to take out 5 more things. Tested again before buttoning back up, and it stuck again. New motor doing the same as the old, so there's probably an issue with the car. Took the old motor housing apart, but all looked fine inside. Tried both, and they would work a few times, then get stuck, but would sometimes move if I added a little starting torque with my hand. Finally gave up, manually moved the diverter to fresh air, and put the old motor back in, but unconnected so it can't get itself stuck in recirc again when I put it on full defrost.

Then, at some point in the several times I tried to get the glove box in and out, I discovered that instead of pulling the electrical connector off my tire pressure monitoring reset switch, I pulled the whole back off, and lost the spring inside. Spent a while trying to find that and determine how quick I could get another switch, but then I learned that the switch for turning off my traction control is basically the same model, and I use that very rarely. So I pulled it out (was in an already-removed panel), got the spring out, which was actually a rubber button type of spring with little hard bits to make a momentary contact on the tiny circuit board in the back of the switch. Got the tire pressure switch rebuilt, and then promptly found its spring on the garage floor. -_- Put it in the traction control switch, so they're both good again, though the tire pressure one might try to pop out the back of the glove box again.

Put the glove box back again, took a couple minutes to clean up the grotty bits of center console that I'd disassembled, and got everything put back together. Then realized I had 3 screws left and panicked for a minute. Finally realized I'd missed one inside the glove box, and forgotten to screw down one of the console pieces, so had to take a couple things back apart to do that.

Then I tackled the few inches of water I'd found in my spare tire well. I've been fighting that on and off for years and still haven't figured out where it's coming from. Managed to empty that between clearing the drain pinhole, bailing, and a towel, and I'm leaving it propped open, with all the car windows also open, to dry overnight.

Started the car to run to the auto parts store and get a new cabin air filter, so long as I was fixing things up, and discovered that I tripped an airbag error code. Most likely it was because I had previously started the car (to check the diverter motor function) with the passenger airbag disable button unplugged. So I finally ordered myself a low end computer code talker (OBD) that I should be able to use to reset that error. I'd love to get the expensive one that I could actually use to tweak my car software (and maybe make my glow plugs keep coming on up to maybe 75 deg instead of 50 and making the car crank forever all summer), but they're quite pricy and I'm not positive that's even one of the things I could tweak.

At least the air filter replacement was dead easy. And my car windows didn't fog up at all when driving to the auto parts store in the rain!