Rolling Again
When we last saw Our Hero, he had unfortunately been forced to crash his brown Subaru and was in the process of transferring useful parts to a very similar white Subaru.... And now, the saga continues.
Well, I spent several oily weekends swapping engine and suspension parts, and reminding myself that I did this sort of thing for fun. The result... the white VDC Legacy Lancaster was running with various parts from the brown one, but it had issues. Many warning lights were on (ABS, VDC, airbags, steering, brakes...), and it tended to overheat if driven hard (up any kind of hill, for example). At this point, I became irked, and listed both cars for sale on Trademe. There was interest in the brown one as it was listed for $1, but no-one bought the white one.
A week later, I thought I'd have one last try. After swapping the steering angle sensor, and unplugging the airbag module then plugging it back in, all the warning lights went out. There was hope. A new radiator was a lot cheaper than I thought, and fixed the overheating. A working car again! I also had to swap out the heater core as that was clogged up and so the heater didn't work. That meant pulling the whole dash out, but now I have heat (such decadence!).
I drove it up country on a road trip last weekend, and it went really well, which gave me the confidence to buy new tires and go for a WOF check. That failed on the brake pads and some blown bulbs, but those were fixed today, so next week it will be legal.
So yes, I could technically afford a better one that didn't need fixing, and yes, it was a colossal waste of my time, but I do genuinely enjoy messing about with old cars. I call it a hobby. I get great satisfaction from driving about in something that was rescued from the verge of being crushed. I actually like old cars (and old machinery in general) - they have "character", where a new car is very sterile and impersonal (I know, a lot of people would regard that as a good thing!). Old cars have history and stories. Of course, they still have to be mechanically sound - I look for ones that are a bit rough-looking but actually drive well.
Having said all that, I do think that other hobbies and projects would probably be a better use of my time. I think I'll pull back from car repairs for a bit now. I'd like to do more writing, and I'm hoping to try some game design with Unity. Plus, if I am going to work on cars, I'd like to fiddle with my Leaf instead, because that's the future. I want to hack into the CAN bus and figure out how to log and upload performance data, with a view to developing some kind of energy use model that would allow better range prediction. The future is IoT and data, man.