Post:Fjords and Fords

From Fozzee.net

How many people can say, on an ordinary Sunday that they actually / actively prevented a car from catching fire? I got a call yesterday afternoon from my dad that my sister's car was dead by the side of the road. Some sort of electrical problems, randomly dying, etc, and that the alternator had tested bad (at a national chain shop). Further, "it might be smoking". So I grabbed a volt meter and fire extinguisher and headed out. I found it on the shoulder near 680 on Maple. I started checking around under the hood, looking for a loose connection or something and heard some intermittent arcing when I wiggled the negative terminal.

Shortly, I noticed that the insulation on the main negative lead was entirely melted off, and shorting to the positive terminal. I thought "holy crap" and dropped everything to get that terminal off the battery... There wasn't a loose connection at all, just an intermittent 8ga dead short across the battery posts, which would look like an open, because battery potential would drop to almost nothing.

Needless to say, we temporarily insulated the wire (with splitloom tubing) and drove it home to replace the alternator (and the wire, obviously). If a VW requires unnaturally strong toddlers to work on the belting system, a Ford requires a magician. The alternator physically can't come out of the car with everything in place. In the end, we ended up relocating the coolant overflow, the power steering reservoir, the fuel pressure regulator (I think) and a bunch of harnesses. We also had to shift the engine forward, after loosening the passenger side engine mount.

In the end, though, it got done... About 5 hours after the initial phonecall, the car was back on the road.

In other news, we did get to IKEA this weekend, and successfully retrieved Becky's chair, among other things (nothing else really notable, some storage boxes and a little shelf...).