Car problems
mitch @ 4:33 pm on July 10, 2005
I was on my way to school last thursday, and I stoped at a Chevron to fill up. After, I turned the key on my car to start it and nothing… It didn’t turn over… I still had the radio tho… which I thought was interesting however, this didn’t come completly by supprise. Oh no… I should know better I know… when theres problems get them fixed don’t delay. I delayed… I knew it probably was the alternator, but the battery probably needs to be changed too. Anyway, I called Elissa to come jump me so I could get it home atleast. After turning in my two papers for school, we jumped my car and I drove it straight to AutoZone. They put a tester on it and said the alternator wasn’t putting out anything. Figures, the year or so I ran my sub on it probably did it in. My lights would dim occasionally, so I knew it was comming just never got around to changing it.
Anyway, I picked up the alternator and went over to my parents to get it changed out. Looking at it it didn’t look like it was going to be all that bad to change (which was the reason I considered it in the first place). However, the bottom bolt on the alternator did not want to be loosened… the nut wouldn’t budge… I worked on it for probably atleast two hours… Untill I had rounded it off. Then I was done for the night. I started again friday night at 9:00PM because it was over 100 degrees that day, and I hate working in the heat. I brought my air compressor and used a cutting wheel to cut off the nut. Suprisingly enough the bolt slid right out after I completly removed the nut… Not sure why the nut wouldn’t come off because it wasn’t rusted and I tried turning it both ways (which seemed illogical… it should have spun off to the left like everything else does…) *shrug* don’t know if it might had gotten some kinda charge from the alternator and fused to the bolt or what… either way it didn’t matter at this point. Once I got the bolt out, pulling the alternator out proved to be a little more difficult than I would have liked. I ended up having to remove the power steering line from the pump. This translated into loosing the whole overflow… Pulling it out and putting in the new one was fairly simple after that.
I finished up around 1am saturday morning and started up my car to admire my handy work. Only to have it screetching at me… It was my power steering pump… it didn’t like how low it was on oil. So I ended up leaving it again for the rest of the night, and comming back later that morning with honda power steering fluid.
After adding it, it worked like a champ… It was even idling alot better than it has for a while. Never knew its idling poorly would have been caused by a bad alternator…. live and learn I guess 
