Engineering (automotive) and the depths of my....


 
Bob Bailey said:
I was in Albuquerque in '79 and never even heard there was a fuel crisis.
Was in SoCal in '73. We bought gas by the drum on the black market and didn't have any problems with either price or availability. Kept a half dozen drum at the shop.
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I was in high school in 1979 and my after school job was working in a gas station.

It was an interesting time.

Everyone was complaining about the $5 limit (gas was still less than a dollar a gallon if I remember correctly) cars could only fill up every other day based on the last numeral on the license plate- odd and even days.

I so clearly remember the day one of my friends father pulled up in this little Japanese tin box of a car- it was a very unusual sight- most everyone I knew was related to a WW II veteran. Animosity towards Japan was still a thing- remember Pearl Harbor.

Anyway, people gathered around this tiny machine looking and commenting- when he said what his gas mileage was, everyone was quite.

I myself was a buy American person and people in my family would not approve of buying any foreign vehicle, but I could feel things were changing when the brave souls who did buy these Japanese imports weren’t having any mechanical failures.

I think that this forced American vehicle manufacturers to cut the crap- literally.

Fwiw
 
BFletcher said:
Battery in an Escape. Remove wiper arms, unbolt brake fluid reservoir, remove cowl.

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That's just plain wrong.

A buddy of mine works for a Tier 2 automotive supplier and was telling him about the aforementioned brake caliper. He told me that he's had conversations about design for serviceability with the Big 3 engineers. Absolutely none. They're not allowed to add a nickel of cost for maintenance concerns.
 
John_NJ said:
I myself was a buy American person and people in my family would not approve of buying any foreign vehicle, but I could feel things were changing when the brave souls who did buy these Japanese imports weren’t having any mechanical failures.
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When my g/f bought that '99 Civic, she was getting all kinds of crap from her family about buying that Japanese PoS. They really weren't happy when I pointed that it was built in Marysville, OH and had more domestic content than the F150s they all had parked out front.

She made me promise to wait 24 hours after she brought it home before I started to make fun of it. I failed. Utterly. Parked it outside her apartment, and popped the hood. "hmmm...... gotta make a new cable for my cell phone." Why? "I'll need it to jump start this thing when the battery runs low. That's the smallest automotive battery I've ever seen."
 
And back to the '99 Civic..... ruptured a 280k mile radiator yesterday.

The radiator is held in by 1 bolt. *ONE* bolt, at the top. Bottom rests in a slip in bracket. It'll take longer to remove the plastic shield below the lower radiator hose and transmission fluid nipples.

Side note: where to get a radiator..... RockAuto has them as low as $32, but I don't think I trust package delivery services to get anything like a radiator to me in one piece and unbent. It'll cost rather more to get it locally, but it'll get shipped via truck freight and the chain's own trucks. Oh, and I can have it tomorrow at no charge.
 
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