This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
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Notes -
In the spirit of hydroacetelyne's and Terracotta's conversation here, I've gotten trapped in car repair again. My daily driver's an older one -- and I strongly prefer decade-old used cars to start with -- so there's been some fun and !!fun!! involved.
This weekend had two targets.
I'd had a couple stalls on idle pop up recently, and that was the most critical; so far they'd only happened in parking lots while Christmas shopping and the car had restarted after seven or eight cranks, but 'tis the season for late construction and bad traffic and neither combine well with a dead car on a road. Nothing on an OBD-II reader, no check engine light, battery is older but still testing good, alternator power is good, wire harness is fine, spark plugs are less than six months old and were pregapped to this car (and had been fine for those six months), no obvious loose connections, issues do not seem to be tied to fuel level.
Crankshaft position sensor replacement. Bizarrely, it's actually easier to get to in this make and model than the oil filter, and while that's damning with faint praise (how do you get the oil filter wrench in there
ifwhen some hurried Jiffy Luber overtightens it?) , it's still a nice change from some other similar cars.Still managed to cut my hands working on it. You'd think I'd listen to my own advice.
((To nerd out, both Grok and ChatGPT were able to diagnose this specific issue from ""I had a <Year> <Make> <Model> which had the engine stop suddenly while in a parking lot. Trying to restart the engine took several attempts. A tester gave good battery, alternator, and starter electrical values. What causes are likely?" On the other hand, neither of them gave complete and correct advise on replacement, both warning that I'd need to get under the car to fix it and not warning about how important proper fit and tightness were.))
Other one was a stereo head unit. I'd bought the kit (and wiring harness, and a 'one-size-fits-none' adapter from asian to DIN rails) a couple months ago with the dual goals of some alternative to country music, and a working backup camera, then left them on a shelf. Already too late to work on it before the weather gets chilly, but I was already cold, so here we go. The wiring harness was easy enough, though I'm glad I bought a new soldering kit -- absolutely love these things compared to the typical Weller. Asian-to-DIN adapter was absolute trash: not only did it require random parts of the plastic be snipped off in the instructions, the instructions weren't even close to right, so I ended up spending an hour in the cold with an X-Acto doing fit tests. Backup camera was found hard and left untried for now: finding a path to get from the head unit to the license plate on a hatchback that doesn't risk wires getting pinched every time I load up on groceries or Lowes detritus is gonna be some doing.
Separately, also helped a fellow robotics mentor/friend out with his recent purchase. He bought what he accurately calls a 'clapped out' sedan with the intent to get it into normal working order and flip it, and oh my god there was so much spray paint. On the upside, whoever started working it probably wouldn't know hot to prep cardboard for a can of rustoleum, but on the downside there's enough plastic on this thing that it didn't always care and what the actual fuck. Light blue spray paint. I hate those walmart-grade LED strips on cars, the previous owner used sheetmetal screws to hold them on, and they still seem sane compared to the spray paint.
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