Fucking up a radiator job so wildly that I've got transmission fluid in my hair

Here's the problem with car repair, or the problem with machines in general to a lesser extent but especially with cars and other machines that live outside. The how-to vids are all done on nice clean machines that aren't rusted to buggery

California youtube man: 🐰 ...and that's how to replace a radiator on a 2005 Honda Element! It's a fairly easy DIY, budget an hour or so.

My Pittsburgh ass: 🦝 I spent that long fighting with one rusted-to-fuck radiator hose clamp and when I finally got it off I made the exact same sound as when I cum

Dan Fuckses Cars Up

Got a more appropriate tool for whizzing those hose clamps off and this last clamp came off muuuuuch easier, now to wash the grit and coolant out of my eye

The top DuckDuckGo result for what to do if you get coolant in your eye:

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Step 2: Neutralize the Coolant

Once you’ve flushed your eyes, it’s essential to neutralize the coolant. You can do this by applying a small amount of baking soda or white vinegar to your eyes. These substances help to neutralize the pH of the coolant and reduce its toxicity. To apply baking soda or white vinegar: (See Also: Does Radiator Coolant Evaporate? The Truth Revealed)

Mix 1 teaspoon of baking soda or white vinegar with 1 cup of water
Soak a clean cloth in the solution
Gently apply the cloth to your eyes, avoiding the eyelids

Leave the solution on your eyes for at least 15 minutes before rinsing with water.

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The internet is over folks

FINALLY fucking BASTARD

I'm glad I'm not a car mechanic 'cause pins and vids can be tricky to work on sometimes but at least they're usually not so... wet, y'know?

Like even if a coin-op's had mice (so so many of them have) they're usually not still in it and still ejecting fluids

Pinballs are mercifully dry things to work on, cars are all 🚙 woUld yoU like soMe of my FLUIDZZZZZ

Arcade games: 🕹️ oh no I got a bit damp in a corner and now my MDF is turning to a crusty dusty crumbly tragedy

Cars: 🚙 schlorp schlorp look at all my goo

Guys used to doing electrical work: 🦝 Now we really don't wanna get anything wet on or near this thing

Cars: 🚙 great tanks of juice, all different sorts, some is thick and some is thin and some cools me down and some explodes and some is super super slippery and all of it smells weird, hurry up with your cup of tea because I want so desperately to leak and spurt and trickle and squirt it all over your skin and hair and face

Cars are just... unpleasantly wet, that's all. Always pumping and squirting the juice around, sloshing, gurgling, bleeding, dripping, they can't help it, they're just Wet Machines. It's their nature.

But boy oh boy am I not used to it

If I go to open up a Pac Man and it's wet, something's badly wrong y'know, it makes me think OH NO WHAT THE HELL, it sets off the Unusually Bullshitty Bullshit detectoring parts of my brain

I go inside a car and it's all 🚙 squish squelch schlup slipslipslip mmm I love being ickystickyslippery all over, and I know consciously that this is how they're supposed to be, but that "Machines should be dry" part of my brain is... not quick on the uptake

Electricity only leaks out of the circuit if something's gone REALLY wrong, it takes far less trauma to accidentally release The Substances

The impetus of doing this job was The Goo Is Falling Out and yaknow what happened all throughout the job? You know what happened? To the goo? Do you know what the goo did? It fell out

Now that the old rad's out I gotta put a temp switch in the new one and put the new rad in and then d'you know what I gotta do? With the goo?

I gotta put, the goo, back IN

Not the same goo! Same TYPE of goo, but not THIS goo, this goo's bad 🙂

Imagine if the other machines in your life needed as many different sorts of fluids and pastes as a car

Imagine topping off and draining out and flushing through all the chambers and tanks on, like, your phone

This is literally the stuff of nightmares, this is creepypasta territory

So taking the old rad out took like a day and a half and putting the new one in took about half an hour lol

I just saw down the Bad Leg of the Trousers of Time and narrowly avoided this series of internet searches:

Radiator coolant in eye
Safety goggles fogging up
How stop safety glasses fogging up
Prevent safety glasses fogging forum
Transmission fluid in eye

Rad filled up, battery reconditioned and now she purrrrrrrs

Gotta get some screws to replace the rounded-off or broken ones from the old rad (fan was held on with zip ties wtf) and then I can run it out for an inspection

🦝🎵for the first time in forever,

🦊💻 what's this on my computer now
🦊💻 looks like a guy doing his own repairs on a 20-year-old car
🦊💻 what a silly thing to do, why would you do that
🦊💻 I know how to help
🦊💻 "You should buy an electric vehicle!"
🦊💻 There, that'll help put him on the right track
🦊💻 Honestly, how are so many people this oblivious when the solution is so obvious

🦊💻 "If an EV is unaffordable for you, why not simply send your butler to mechanic school"

Much like nobody on fedi has a normal relationship with technology, nobody here has a normal amount of money either. Fedi is either stripeysocked people who don't have two pennies to rub together because they'll give their last fiver to a starving artist and forget "oh shit wait I'M a starving artist" and so they have keep passing the same wrinkled fiver around in a big stripey circle, or it's Computers People who've been doing Computers Things so long they don't know how to live on less than a hundred grand a year and there's nowt in between

This thread's for the first half, if you're in the second half I'm *obviously* not talking to you, I'm not fixing this car for fun y'know, you're welcome to watch but You Must Be At Least This Poor To Comment

Fucking hell at least I haven't got the cargo bike people turning up yet

In my last car thread I had some weirdo trying to get me to drive pinball machines around on a cargo bike in the middle of winter and they would NOT take "Have you ever tried to actually do that" for an answer

The real kicker was their cargo bike cost more than my car

Anyway if you have to replace a radiator in a Honda Element, the youtube vids tend to show guys grunting and sweating trying to wriggle the rad out around the bulkhead, don't do that. Just take the bulkhead off. It's five bolts, it'll be way easier

Speaking of bolts I ordered a bunch of M6 and when they show up I'll put them in and then this part of the "Make car functional for sell" project will be Finished

Each fan is two bolts and the overflow bottle is one and there was one bolt accounted for out of all those, the rest were either rounded over, missing or sheared off

only one of the sheared ones was me

oh also there's something flopping around down there that should definitely be attached to something, dunno what it is and will have to check the service manual, some fucking Car Part

I'm only doing this because of the Curse

I haven't even TOLD you lot about the Curse

See I was tryna sell this thing as a non-running tow-it-away parts car or mechanic's bargain for like $1500, I've had three guys offer me $1200 so far and accepted all of them

But the Curse intervened

and now I'm tryna fix it up and get it running myself and then I can try and get more like 4 or 5 grand for it

So the curse is, two guys have gone out and bought radiators and batteries for this car intending to buy it and fix it up.

The first guy, we got all the way to the AAA, he handed me the cash, I handed him the keys and we took a seat and waited, we got chatting, I remembered oh, when you swap that rad over, make sure to get a new temp switch in too, 'cause honestly I reckon it was a malfunction there that killed the original rad.

Now some folk will quite happily swap out an entire engine but the moment you mention any electrical issues they get sweaty and nervous, and this was one of those guys, and I asked him hey you okay, he started humming and hawwing and I said yo are you still feeling good about this, we haven't signed anything yet and it's not too late if you wanna give it another once-over, and he was all welllll, and I gave him back the cash and he gave me back the keys and we went our separate ways.

The second guy who bought a radiator was a dude who drove trucks in Alaska six months a year and took the other half of the year off, he was visiting family in Ohio and despite not seeing the car in person he was very excited to buy it. We chatted on the phone a few times and he was a delight, he went to a junkyard and grabbed a rad and battery, he said are you okay with me putting this in in front of your house, I say okay but it hasn't run since last November and what happens if you put a new rad in and it still don't go, he says well then I'm calling a tow truck, I say cool, we figured out a schedule, and then on a Friday night he called me again and it was like speaking to a different guy. He wasn't chill anymore, he was suddenly quite agitated like he was suddenly in a Very Big Hurry, he asked if we could meet at a bar and he gives me cash and I sign the paper over, I say hey I'm in Pennsylvania and it's not that simple here, you need a notary and shit, you basically can't buy a car on a weekend, let's just chill until Monday, he says okay, I'll swing by first thing Monday morning, let's say 10am.

Monday morning 10am comes round, 11am comes round, I give him a call, it goes to voicemail, I figure okay dude's ghosted me, nbd, someone else will have it. 2pm he phones me back and I get the reason he was so stressed-sounding and out-of-sorts and not exactly thinking straight when he rang Friday night - it was because he was trying to sort out four other things at the same time while being in a lot of pain, because he got bit.

🦝 You got bit?

🐻 Yeah I got bit by a spider! Had two epipens and a bunch of antibiotics, I only just woke up, I'm still feeling real shitty. Can I send a tow truck and give the driver cash to give to you?

🦝 Pennsylvania my man, you'd have to give me power of attorney for that to happen, I'd much sooner you come look at it and we shake hands in person

🐻 Aw shit Pennsylvania

🦝 It's okay dude, rest up, I got a couple other folk sniffing round but I'll tell them hold off a few days 'cause you had dibs and we'll see how you feel later in the week

The week goes by and I answer a few more messages saying hold off a couple days and some more time goes by and I show the car to a couple other folks and kinda forget about spider guy. I don't hear from him again. I text him and ask him hey how's the spiderbite,

...no response

So either the guy's Ghosting Me But Elaborately, or he's fucking died

Two weeks later I get my answer, he calls me fresh as a daisy at 9am and says

🐻 so yeah it was a brown recluse!

🦝 Whoa

🐻 I went back to the doc 'cause it wasn't getting better and I ended up in the hospital! For ELEVEN DAYS

🦝 HOLY SHIT

🐻 Yeah, I appreciate you asking after me

🐻 I still can't move my elbow though

In the meantime, I'd had enough guys look underneath and say "When you said bad rust I thought it'd be WAY worse" that I'd starting wondering about, like, if it runs and drives I could double the price and how hard can it really be to swap out a radiator

and then I remember that out of the last two guys to buy a radiator for this thing, one bottled it and one got attacked and hospitalized by arachnid

and then I figure well, maybe this is how you BREAK the curse

So now it's got a new radiator

I forgot to mention that the gas cap was full of wasps also

I found that out when I gave the car a quick once-over after Spiders-Man texted me the first time, saw a big wasp going under the gas cap flap, opened it up and a hundred wasps flew out

He was like hey is this available, I was like yeah but you'll have to give me a couple days 'cause turns out it's full of wasps and I just ordered a bee suit and it won't be here until day after tomorrow, he said lol

Drove the old Element round the block today, rotors went shrk shrk shrk the whole way but it got better over time

Feeling pretty okay about getting this car to, like, at least driveable condition

still have general Car Anxiety tho

Got some hose and a drill pump to try and backflush my heater core but I couldn't get the dang hose on the heater core barb despite it being the right size so I gave up fairly soon (this is on my driving-around car, not the fix-to-sell car)

See the problem with car work is you gotta have a car to drive around while the other one's in bits, so if I do anything where the car has to be put back together before it can be driven then the whole time I'm like "Remember gotta pick the kid up from school and also allow at least an extra hour for Unforseen Bullshit during reassembly" and I find that very very stressful

I actually enjoyed putting a radiator in the to-sell car because it's not, like, a Live Car that Has To Work at set times of day every day, if I leave all its guts strewn about overnight that's fine

Tomorrow I might try getting hoses onto the heater core again, maybe I'll dip the end of the hose in some hot water or smth

It's quite thin hose is the trouble, soft, it flexes rather than Goes On to the barb kinda thing

IDK maybe I need better hose