More Cont.

License plate light out. 2 bulbs. 94's? Fixed.

Repaint 1/3 of the rear bumper skin. 12 chips showed the black plastic underneath, like someone always backed into the same cinderblock wall in the morning. Lots of coats with rattle-cans, and wet sanding in-between and polishing after. Long Project. Looks nice, no drips, no swirl. Color matched. 4 color coats, 5 clear coats. Also patched a dime-sized spot of rust under Drivers Rear fender lip. Since Duplicolor doesn't make the 929L Cashmere Metallic match I had a can of a Toyota Beige from my old Camry. I checked it by spraying a little under the trunk lid. Dead on. A better match to the color of say, the doors, than the color match between the hood and the plastic nose of the original paint. Really good. Should be listed as a cross match at Duplicolor. Dupli-Color BTY1581 Almond Beige Pearl is the actual name.

Pics, yeah I know.

TYC Headlights came, and have been installed. Damn. Nice! Good parts. $118 shipped, 3 days to arrive. Ebay. Came with new rubbers and bulbs installed. Identical to stock.
Open hood, pull white lock up, pull old assembly out. Disconnect 1 plug. Reverse new ones in. Took 3 minutes to swap both headlights. Perfect. New "eyes" make a Huge difference. The car looks 5 years newer. Aw dammit. Now I need new fog/turns cause they don't match.... !!!


What follows made my week: a break-thru !

So much time and energy put into this car. I was getting fatigued. Every dammed thing was broken. Every system on the car had needed attention, fixed or replaced. Well, o.k. The windshield wasn't cracked and the regulators all worked. The money was still making sense, but the time/energy was getting a bit much. Because the car still had Deamons: buggy crap that would be require trackdown time and maybe piles of money. Time is in short supply for me in the summer. Those deamons all had to do with:

Brakes/abs, Cruise control, Odd low speed steering.

Sometimes, at low speeds, the ABS would engage on braking and buzz the pedal for a second. No service lights, just Traction Control Engaged would flash up then poof, just like I was sliding on snow. Other times above 20-30 MPH I would get the full ABS disabled/Trac control off crap and both warning lights would stay on until the Key was taken out and the door opened. Sometimes an ABS Pedal buzz backing up, sometimes flashing lights... when turning left. It all mostly went away for a week or so after cleaning the harness at the ABS pump, but soon returned. I hadn't gotten around to re-scanning for codes, but it had had stored ABS codes when I first bought it last month concerning both front hubs. Signal issue Right, No signal Left..etc. The exact p-codes are lost to time. Worrying issue. Deamon #1

The Cruise actually started "working", after all the warning lights and codes were dealt with <exception being the intermittent ABS> but it was... not right. I thought the stalk was bad, it acted like it had bad contacts. Sometimes you could set the cruise, the DIC would say Cruise Set, but it would instantly cancel itself. Then, most of the time, pushing the Stalk up to accelerate or resume would do nothing or flash that it was trying but then your speed would just slowly settle. 1/5 times it worked like I thought it should. Unusable. Irritating because I constantly drive cars with the cruise control as soon as I'm over 30 MPH. Really. Rarely use the gas pedal. So that SUCKED. Damn Deamon #2

Steering effort was too stiff at low speeds: Sometimes. And the assist curve seemed off. After replacing the ENTIRE DAMN SYSTEM I thought maybe I had gotten poorly rebuilt rack. Or it didn't like the Fluid? Hmm. I mostly blamed Poor GM engineering, maybe the newest gen of GP's had crap steering. I have read how easy it is to get a badly rebuilt rack, and the high failure rates from the factory didn't inspire confidence. Was becoming convinced that Magnasteer II just sucks. The steering "boost" wouldn't drop out and come right back like it was doing originally.. and no Lights/DIC messages.. it just.. felt crappy. I was going deal with it, but other priorities were at hand... a pain in the ass that I shouldn't be having UGH.... Deamon #3

I went after Daemon #1 2 days ago.I started with a continuity test of the front hubs while wiggling the harness. Both sides rock solid, 1157-1160 Ohms. Not a twitch. You could induce 3-5 millivolts if you spun the wheel. Check. Pulled the connector off the at pump and probed while tugging the wires around.. Same. The harnesses and hubs seemed fine. There are 2 grounds out of the harness that carry the ABS wires, both go to a bolt on the Trans. I had previously cleaned those up. They were eliminated as a problem. Hmm. I started wondering which hub sucked and my butt puckered when I saw on my phone that they were $150 each locally. Yowch. Well.... despite the previous codes concerning the fronts, I conceded that I needed to go thru the back hubs/harnesses before I threw money at the problem. I took a break before swapping the jacks/stands around, lit a cigarette and stared off into space
.
And then IT happened. Sometimes.. sometimes it happens. That little voice chirped a little something in the back of my head.
It said: "Hey, what about that thing that guy said in that post on that website?" What, that Ground Wire thing? **** off, I'm busy. Well, I can look...he said something about the ground connection from the negative battery sucks and the cable is about a foot and a half long and bolts into the upper fender right under the fuse box right about... oh hey. I bet that's it. Huh that uh.. yeah. That looks like crap. So I started taking it off. And lo and behold, it did suck. The eye connector was bolted to a painted surface, so the juice had to go out one side of the eye to the bolt head and thru the bolt threads into the rusty crap threaded crap into the body of the car, and it had rusted, and was crap. And was oxidized and looked hideous. And was ugly and fat and no one liked it anyway. It actually had white corrosion fuzz trapped between the top side of the eye and the bolt head like a corroded battery terminal. Sandpapered off the paint, and the connector, and a wirebrush to the bolt. And Dielectric grease on all of it. I called it a day. It was dinner time. I wondered if it would help the ABS issue.

I didn't wonder long. I knew as soon as I pulled it out of the drive way. The steering was light reversing out onto the alley, where there was loose gravel. The rear tires slipped slightly but didn't trigger a protest from the ABS when braking to shift R to D. Huh? It was all gone. The steering effort was, and 2 days later, is still exactly what I think it should be at all times. The ABS hasn't made a peep. And the cruise control works consistantly, Flawlessly.

I'll be a sonofa*****. All that from one crappy connection? What a relief. That post from that guy, was from a guy on here. Now I gotta go find that post and send someone a cookie. Or a beer. Something.

DEAMONS #1 #2 #3 DEAD.