The Silver Buick's well Silver Buick!

[TheSilverBuick]

Warping the space-time continuum!

[TheSilverBuick]

Finally did some maintenance and repairs to the car this last weekend. Had a bunch of miles on the oil, which I changed right before Drag Week, so finally got some fresh, and thinner oil in the car since it's getting quite cold out now. Got the cooling system anti-freezed up for -40ºF days, then swapped on a new throttle position sensor finally and reset all the MegaSquirt settings to honor the throttle position sensor again, though I have to say I got it running dang good off the vacuum signal.

The rear seal on the TKO-600 had started leaking right before Drag Week, and I figured it being on there for ~80,000-90,000+ miles and then me installing and removing the drive shaft four or five times in a month when I was having the rear main seal leak issue had damaged it. Sure enough, there was about a 1/8th inch tear in the seal when I popped the old one out. It was more a pain in the rear to get a new seal than it should have been. Getting a tremec seal, while not impossible, isn't common, plus it wouldn't cross reference to any other seal number (it was a Tremec number). My gut instinct said to try a C6 rear seal since the yoke is a C6 piece, but a few places on the great "internet" said its the same seal as Mustangs with manual transmissions used after 1996. So I got one of those first and it was very very close, but definitely not right. So I went back to NAPA and got a C6 seal from a late 80's truck and it seems to have done the trick. Unfortunately my NAPA doesn't seem to carry syncromesh fluid anymore, so I got a couple quarts of the latest synthetic Dextron fluid since Tremec recommends either Dextron or syncromesh.

The parking brake had starting giving me trouble as well, or rather not really holding. So I pulled the calipers off and checked them out, and double checked the adjustment lever on them. It seems to be working quite well again.

I've removed the car computer that ran my digital dash as well. I opened it up and don't see any visibly burnt or damaged components, so the next step is to drag a car battery into the house and hook up the computer to the TV (my only monitor..) to check its software settings and troubleshoot the USB ports from the software side. The USB ports provide power to the things plugged into it, but none of them seem to transmit any data. In the mean time, since I don't have an external temperature gauge in the car I've set the two LED "shift" lights up to give me a low and high coolant temperature indication. The orange one is on below 130ºF and the red one comes on above 205ºF, so I'll know when I can turn the blower fan on for some warm air, or if I do run into an overheating situation. I've also maintained their shift light function too I shouldn't be revving the engine high when its cold for the orange light, and the red one shouldn't come on for temperature unless something is quite wrong

Driving the car to work lately has resulted in quite the muddy mess.

[DanStokes]

I think they should pave the mine roads for you! Tell 'em I said so.

Dan

[TheSilverBuick]

It was paved!! Then the damn county tore it up

[DanStokes]

Send them the detailing bill! (Good luck with that)

Dan

[Deaf Bob]

It was paved!! Then the damn county tore it up

Why? Chip seal not work?

[TheSilverBuick]

There were a couple dozen pot holes in it and the county didn't want to patch them, so they spent a month tearing it up and making it a dirt road.

[Deaf Bob]

Pencil pushers saving money yet again...

[Russell]

There were a couple dozen pot holes in it and the county didn't want to patch them, so they spent a month tearing it up and making it a dirt road.

I was always told it's cheaper to maintain a paved road. Depends on who is pushing the pencil. The pavement structure was more than likely not up to the truck traffic. Just adding more on top does not fix (unless you add a whole lot) some times you have to start over from the bottom (like a frame off restro )

[CDMBill]

Yes, because we assume that government folks know best.

[DanStokes]

Bill, Russell knows this stuff - it's what he does for a living.

Dan

[TheSilverBuick]

Finally got around to troubleshooting the computer that runs the digital display and it appears the solid state hard drive quit. I finally plugged it into a regular monitor and the bios came up and then reported no bootable device. I pulled a hard drive out of an old laptop and plugged it in and it booted up. So it looks like I need a new hard drive. Looking on Amazon there is a SanDisk one that has twice the memory and a SATA III (higher speed than this SATA II one) for $39. I'll check on it tomorrow to see if it's further discounted, and order it.

[squirrel]

newegg has them for under 30. How much storage do you need? a few GB?

or get a SATA to SD card adapter, and use an SD card.

[TheSilverBuick]

Oh, I'll have to look. The one that was in the car was only 60GB. Hmm, I'll have to look up those SD car adapters, never heard of them, but would possibly be cheap enough to image it to another card and keep it in the glove box as backup.

[squirrel]

60gb is way more than you need, isn't it? I was looking at 16gb drives