Cynicallous

A light, airy, effervescent, blog of grave consequence. (NOT!) Dedicated to those of us who must respond to negative stimuli by Chernobyling (entombing in concrete) our innermost thoughts.

Name:
Location: Slaughter, Louisiana, United States

A semi-gruntled corporate reliability engineer trying to make ends meet while keeping my wife happy, and myself out of the asylum.

Friday, October 30, 2009

New lights for the Strat

Changed the turn signals back to the led bulbs & resistors. They still work well.
Bought new headlights and foglights as well. Both headlights were 09/02 build dates. Went with Silverstar Ultras. Foglights were 37.5w 896s. I upped them to 50w 886s.

So with my all-on relays I have 340w of light if I need it.

@nd tank through the Strat

391.7 miles on 13.361 gallons.

29.32mpg. Not too bad as the gauge hit the half tank line almost 30 miles sooner than the first tank.

Hopefully it has relearned the fuel map after the battery disconnect during the rebuild and will improve from here. (Still not too bad for a 7 year old car with almost 100k miles on it.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Local Boy Makes Name in Big City

News Story here.

Friday, October 23, 2009

Mitsubishis are touchy.

I gave the Strat a tune up today. Pulled the intake manifold so I could change the plugs, wires, cap and rotor as they had never been done in going on seven years.

Got everything back to gether and it restarted fine, but as soon as it warmed up it stalled and threw a code. I checked the code and then hunted for the connector I had missed. I found it shortly and reconnected it. THen I erased the codes and tried again.

Now it would run fine but wouldn't idle. I drove it around a bit but it still wouldn't idle. I pulled the Throttle body off and hit it with brake cleaner as it and the Idle Air Control solenoid were pretty gummed up. Put it back together and it still wouldn't idle.

Finally disconnected the battery and grounded both cables for about 30 seconds. Tried it again and when the key was turned on there was a lot of clicking as a bunch of solenoids re-homed. I turned the key and it started, almost stalled and caught the idle at 500 Rpm.

I turned on all the lights and the air conditioner to load the engine and it picked up appropriately and kicked back when the load was removed.

Drove it around a bit an played with pulling the clutch at different RPM. No issues and the hot idle seems to be very happy at just over 500 Rpm.

We'll see what it does tomorrow morning when it is dead cold.

The, "I can't believe this was running so well." Pictures

Pictures of the Distributor rotor from the Stratus. 91,000 miles has taken its toll. I'm interested to see what, if any, difference in Economy the tune up has made.

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First tank through the Strat

438.1 miles on 14.646 gallons. 29.91mpg. Not too bad, but not quite enough to only fill up once per week. I need nearly 33mpg to make a week with this tank size or I've got to carry a couple gallons extra. We'll see if my tuneup this weekend helps.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Welcome Home

Thanks for everything. Hope your trip home was uneventful.

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Love your IT guys.

Total IT outage at work today. Down since 0930. No ETR yet. Not good at all.

Saturday, October 03, 2009

Solving world problems, one animal at a time

I was watching a commercial last evening that featured some Hollywood dork whining about how few polar bears are left and then begging for money. It was just before dinner, and I thought, "What animals will never go on the endangered species list?" THE ONES WE EAT!

Who ever heard of a chicken or cow or pig on the endangered species list? We need to start factory farming polar bears and seals and spotted owls for edible consumption! Problem solved!!

I'll bet they're tasty, too.