Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Car Ports and Car Noises

What a difference a week makes. In my last post, I mentioned that I had helped T moved some stuff out of the one garage bay. Since then, K got the rest of his stuff, so Oliver is back in the garage. Also, the 2 carports from Harbor Freight arrived. So, I quickly moved from all cars out in the open and no sheltered space to work to 3 cars under some kind of roof, creating all kinds of work space. So, today's brief post if about getting the car ports up, and some diagnosis into the noises coming from Nemo.

Car Port Assembly x2
400 sqft of not raining
I have a small 2-car garage. I underscore small because Oliver (1978 MGB) barely fits between the garage door and the walkway along the opposite wall. Considering the MGB is one of the shortest cars out there, I couldn't imagine parking a Caddy or one of those big pickup trucks. Simply put, it wouldn't fit. So, when I think about how I'm going to complete Zed (1979 280XZ) this winter, I shudder. It's way too small to shoot paint, and with the gas furnace in there, I couldn't paint while heating the house, so the plan unravels fairly quickly. So, I got a couple of those 10' x 20' car ports that Harbor Freight sells (~$120US each). My driveway has a slight tilt towards the garage, but it's otherwise fairly flat.

V between
While I would have preferred a purchase ship-to-store option, the harbor freight website doesn't offer that. Instead, they offer $7US to ship it by FedEx Ground. That sounds like a cost-loss on their part, especially for a pair of these car ports, but they arrived before the primer from Eastwood (which still hasn't arrived). The assembly is actually very easy. The instructions have only a handful of steps and the exploded drawing is not as bizarre as IKEA furniture. I used a rubber mallet to get the pipes to fit together quickly. I was able to get each one assembled in about 2 hours, measured from when I walked out my garage door with a full box to walking back in after set-up and recycling/throwing away the packaging.

I set one over the top of Zed, and the other right next to it. I would rather not have a 20' dripped seam between them, and pushed the posts right next to one another. I took the 8-inch-or-so hangdown from one, and flipped it up over the top of the neighboring car port. The other hangdown, I pulled across and clipped to the tie-down seam, which runs along the inside, above the bottom rail. Then, I forced the pipes together and cable-tied them. This created a small V shape of car port tarp between the rails, running all the way front-to-back. My plan is that this will direct the water down to the lower end of the carport. I think this will work except for those super-heavy rain events we get sometimes. We'll see.

A4 Front Clunk
top of front strut, example
Now for some car content. After getting all the little things fixed on Nemo, I took him for a short test drive to see how he felt. He felt pretty good. Lots of boost, and plenty of power, but he made lots of noise. I could hear a clunk pretty much on every little bump. I figured it was the sway-bar bushings and replaced them: 13mm bolts hold the clamps on, and the bushing has a slit in it so you just need to remove the clamps, pull off the old bushing, slap on the new one and put the clamp back on. Times 2. The noise got a little better, but after pushing the fenders up and down, I believe the problem is in the strut-mount. From what I've read, after market struts that lower the front end (like Nemo has) put more pressure on the strut-mounts than the stock ones do, transferring some of the burden from the springs to the mounts to hold the front end up. This causes them to wear prematurely. So, I will be looking to replace those. Since I have a very healthy fear of strut springs, I will probably remove the struts and have new mounts installed by one of the shops around here. Better to pay with some hard earned cash than with some body damage.

A4 Rear Hum
Also on that test drive, I noticed that the rear end would make a humming noise once I got above about 30mph. I figured it was the wheel bearings, so I put the back end up on jackstands to confirm. The wheels had no play in them. None. Curious, I pulled it out of gear and spun the wheels, listening for noises (that would translate into a hum at speed). I heard clicking coming from the inner CV joints. So, that means at least removing one or both rear axles. Fun. Of course, with the AWD, I can't be 100% sure the bearings aren't bad. I may not have gotten the wheels spinning fast enough to make noise.

the diff oil fill, example
I intended to drain and fill the rear diff while the rear end was up in the air, but the fill plug is stripped. While I was under there, I got to see just how much caked on grease could remain attached to the outside of a differential without falling off. The answer: a LOT. I am really concerned about the health of this diff, and the whole rear-end, for that matter. Before I go any further with it, I will collect a second opinion. After that, I think it will have it's ass-end in the air for a while as I replace CV joints, and/or wheel bearings and fight off the fill plug so I can refresh the fluid. I'm not sure a 20+ year old 230k+ mile A4 is worth terribly much, but this is how we learn, and this could be a useful daily-driver for someone, maybe, eventually.

Well, that's it for today. I have not gotten back into the Zed paintwork since I put up the car ports. I really wanted to get Nemo road-able first. With the car ports up, I have more paint prep to do, and I need to figure out some sides for the car port space so I can heat and paint. Thanks, as always for following along-

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Enter Rainman

In much the same way Metallica describes the arrival of Sandman, we in the great Pacific Northwest greet the seasonal rains. Today, I describe alternatives to prevent the rain putting a hard stop on all of our projects.

Tarp
We start with the most obvious water protection: the basic tarp. I tuck you in, keep you free from sin... til the (Rainman) he comes. A tarp thrown over your made-of-steel project works great if you are trying to hide it from the neighbors. The benefits end there, however. No matter how awesome-fantastic your tarp is, it will capture / trap / hold moisture.. against that made-of-steel project. Your best-case outcome is that you have lots of mold or moss growing under there come spring when the rains stop. Your worst-case scenario is your project acquired a new rusty patina or one or more of your seals leaked and now you have mildew inside or rust inside. In the end, I think throwing a tarp over your project is possibly worse than nothing at all. At least when it is uncovered you will feel motivated to do something about it. A tarp just hides the truth from you.... until you remove it. All winter you're sleeping with one eye open.

Car Cover
I got one of those fancy $200+US bus covers from BusDepot a few years ago. It worked great the first year or two. After that, the UV light or something caused it to not work so well anymore. Last year, when I pulled the cover off, there was moisture all over the inside of it, mold on the fiberglass poptop, and a slime on the rest of the bus. Yuck. I know my seals are good, so this year, he is going without a cover, and I'll just cycle the cabin furnace (See Parking Heater 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, final) more frequently to keep him dry inside. Recall from Seasonal Cleaning, I use a desiccant as well. In the end, a car cover is little more than a collection of tarps that have been sewn into the shape of your car. They may last a little longer than a single season, but for the price, it just makes more sense to invest in something more.

Instant Canopy / Sun Shade
So, we can't have some plastic sheet draped over a car for 7 months and expect the car to be better for it. Who knew? So, we try one of those $99 pop-up canopy things. These are great in the summer when you're working in an otherwise sunny spot. They go up in minutes and you can do it by yourself. Most excellent. Of course, they are only 10 feet square, so the only kind of vehicle that could completely fit underneath it would be a motorcycle. Not even Oliver, the MGB, or the old corvette pictured here can completely fit under one. But it's close. So, you move it around to create shade where you're working. Enter Rainman. These things cannot withstand rain. I mean 0 rain. They are not designed for water to run off the edges. If you look at the picture on the right, you can imagine this scene: it pools up along the lower edge, slowly stretching the top until you have these large pools of water suspended over your project. At $99, the structure is not terribly strong, so something bends and then another thing breaks and suddenly, you have gallons of water dropping onto your project all at once. And, your canopy is trash.

Farmer Market Canopy
How about an upgrade? The canopies that the vendors use at farmer's markets and music festivals, for example, are great. They can withstand some wind, and some rain. They come with detachable sides. So far so good, except they cost about 3x an instant canopy. Of course, they are also 10 feet square, so no normal car can fit inside, just like the $99 deal above. I got one of these a while back, and I am using it for now, while I await my next solution. I have removed the front clip (front fenders and hood) from Zed, so the rear 2/3 are covered by the canopy, and put a tarp (yes, I know they are not great) over the engine compartment. No pooling water. The wind doesn't seem to touch it. Still, the 10 feet deep part makes it fairly unusable for working on a car in the rain, unless you don't mind either having half of the car sticking out into the rain while you and one end are dry or having the other end nice and dry while you and the thing you're working on out in the rain. The latter of those seems silly, especially since you just spent $300US on a rain-capable covering.

Temporary Carport
My last effort to foil the Rainman is a Harbor Freight temporary carport. These are 20 feet long by 10 feet wide, have no sides, but appear to be able to withstand rain. I don't know about wind. The videos I have seen online are unclear since most of them show a carport that is mostly protected on the sides by trees and/or shrubs or by a more permanent structure like a shed, garage or house.

Unfortunately, getting one of these things is becoming quite an undertaking. It seems that every restaurant that wishes to remain viable during the rainy season has concluded that these are the best way to keep their patrons dry during the CoViD no-inside-seating thing. As a result, as soon as a truck arrives in the greater Portland area with some, they are gone. So, I went online and ordered from their website. In a normal world, delivery is about a week. In this modern dysfunctional dystopia, I can't get an estimated delivery date. Why? Between COViD and the wild/forest fires, FedEx has effectively ground to a halt in the Portland area. For example: I ordered primer for Zed in early September. It took 2 weeks for it to get to a Portland FedEx warehouse, and it has sat there since. I called FedEx and asked about it. The response? Forest fires. They could have said "sunspots" for as helpful as that was. We still have no idea when it will move out of the warehouse. I may have to take a Saturday and drive out to the airport to collect it in person.

Temporary Garage
Similar to the carport, this is a Harbor Freight item which costs more ($170US versus $120US), but it includes sides and a roll-up door. Based on what I can see in the videos, however, you can't assemble them without the sides, so that reduced flexibility turned me off to them. Recognizing that I could roll up the sides, I looked for them at the big Harbor Freight in Tigard, and they were out of them just like the carports. So, either the restaurants are getting desperate or lots of folks decided that it was time to fight off the Rainman this year. Or, maybe, the supply chain issues we are all experiencing with seemingly everything has hit Harbor Freight as well. Regardless, I will wait for FedEx to get their act together since I'm already into this solve with an order, and my packages will eventually all be at the airport, waiting. I suspect these garages are fairly good, though the reviews indicate that they are not as weather resistant as their carport brothers. Maybe the sides catch more air, causing the structure to fail.

Car Content
After the last post about Zed's Bondo (See Bondo Zed), I continued to perfect his body with cycles of Bondo aplication and sanding for another couple of weeks. I found a technique that worked very well for getting the patch fairly perfect: on my sanding block, I had an old 320 grit paper. I held some some 80-grit onto the sanding surface and sanded down until I got to where I wanted to evaluate it. I then set the 80-grit aside and did a quick cuff with the 320 already on the block. This got the Bondo as smooth as the body so I could check for dips without getting false feels from the rough Bondo. And, this allowed me to use one block with 2 different grits, speeding the process.

I guess that's it for today. I have some winterization for Hapy to do: pulling the luxury battery, removing the cushions and fabrics, etc. Of course, that's hardly post-worthy stuff. There are things that need doing on Nemo, the A4, and Oliver. I just need to create a workspace that will keep me and the projects out of the rain first. I helped T load out of one garage bay, leaving just a few of K's belongings blocking up Oliver's spot. When the carports arrive, I'll get those up and get the projects moving again. Until then, we sit and watch Rainman have his day. Thanks, as always, for following along-