The Reluctant Mechanic

I hope I have a better day today than I did yesterday. While nothing went really wrong, not much went right either. It was a day when attitude fought patience, and created frustration.

I started working on the Harley while waiting for Sarah to show up. In retrospect that was probably not a good idea. In this case I decided to put the new ignition switch on it. I had just managed to get all the wires unhooked when she drove up. Great. Part of me screamed out, "Hook the wires back up... You won't forget what goes where that way" and part of me screamed out, "Don't worry about the Harley... Get started on the car right away because you don't know how long it will take."

That part of me won out.

I had gone over to their house and tested the charging system and found it to be a bad alternator, and I had her drive it over to my house where all my tools were. While I felt lucky that it was near the top of the engine, I still really had no idea how everything was mounted and how the belt was adjusted and so on and so forth. It took me a couple hours to get it off the car because of that.

$125 dollars later, I came back home with it's new alternator and put it in. It went in easily, but I still had no idea how to do the serpentine drive belt tensioning/adjustment thing. It took me over an hour to get that figured out. If I had to do it again, I could have the whole job done easily in less than an hour. I didn't bleed, but I definitely mumbled a few choice words every now and then. Oh well, it's done and works great. Sarah spent the whole time doing homework in the living room.

I made the mistake of trying to continue on the Harley switch afterwards. I guess I misinterpreted the sense of relief from finishing Sarah's car as the desire to keep working, but that didn't last long. I kept dropping little screws. When one of them fell down into an area requiring disassembly of one of the gas tank halves to retrieve it, I knew I made a mistake. I stopped, closed the garage door, and ordered a pizza.

At least that was good.