Smilr's 94 L Sedan

[smilr]

February 2016 ->

I thought I had an exhaust leak after repairing the SHG. Turns out I was right:



Looks like while fighting the passenger side head + exhaust manifold into the car I managed to catch the new gasket with an exhaust stud and deform it pretty badly:



Seriously - for anyone trying a head gasket replacement. Just take off the damn Y pipe and save yourself a LOT of headaches.

A new Honda gasket should fix that up:



Also in february somebody on the freeway in front of me drove over a rock. Which then went ballistic and bee-lined for my windshield. It left a gnarly bullseye just above my VIN plate. Unable to find a UV resin fill-in kit locally I ordered one from Amazon. It took two weeks to arrive, in which time the bullseye decided to grow cracks:



hgeez: Oh well. Guess I'll just drill a stop cut at the upper end of the crack to keep it from spreading:




I let the bit wander a couple of times at first but this many months later the crack hasn't grown. I don't have any good pictures of the crack/holes filled with resin (it's surprisingly hard to get the camera to focus on the glass instead of the interior of the car). It ain't pretty, but I'm tall enough that the crack appears in front of the hood instead of the road from my vantage point. Within a week of fixing this I got three more tiny chips in the windshield from kicked up rocks.

I don't get it. I'm driving the same commute I drove for YEARS in the Vigor and no rock chips. Then I get several and a bullseye in the same month on my Legend. GRRR!

March was uneventful.

[smilr]

April 2016 ->

I really hated the wheels that were on the Legend when I bought it. Also the tires were dangerously bald after a couple months. Ever since the day I bought this thing I've had a bit of steering wheel wobble at freeway speeds, and at the start of April I noticed more wobble while breaking. Maybe I can fix three out of four problems with new wheels and tires?



http://www.smilr.net/legend/year1/Apr_1.jpg

That looks SO much better to me. Having grippy summer tires makes driving her a lot more fun as well. However the speed and braking wobbles are both still there.

Brake wobble got worse as April continued. I had put new rotors and ceramic pads on somewhere in the past few months (no pictures, don't remember exactly when). Perhaps I should check them again?





hgeez: My nice new rotors... horribly uneven. Didn't even wear off the factory non-directional cut pattern in the middle.

May 2016 ->

New rotors! Unlike the last ones these didn't come with any coating on the center cap, and I don't think a ring of rusty rotor would look good behind my new wheels, so time to use caliper paint!



Much better.

June, July uneventful, steering wobble still annoying.

August... brake wobble's back, maybe I was stupid to not replace pads at the same time? But she's been braking very well this whole time!

[smilr]

September 2016 ->

Perhaps she brakes TOO well?







hgeez: Stopped for a yellow->red light transition. Car behind me was following too close / too fast. I remember thinking "that's funny, I hear tires squealing but I'm not stopping THAT fast... and my car doesn't feel like she's lost tracti*CRUNCH*"

My Legend is a bonafide TANK though. NO frame damage. Trunk lid, taillights and quarter panels all without a scratch. Bumper skin and styrofoam crush damper took the brunt of it. Neither vehicle's airbags went off.

Should see the other guy:



Yeah, hood crumpled, lights smashed, radiator bent inward a couple inches. She drove away with a very slight coolant leak. I know the exceptional survival of my car is thanks directly to their car's crumply bits crumpling, so thank you modern engineering!

Finally got around to checking my newer brake rotors sometime between the accident and their insurance fixing my car:



Yup - looks like the original issue was with crappy autozone ceramic brake pads. Same bad wear pattern on these rotors. Sigh... time to fix the front brakes the right way this time, and also change rotors and pads in the rear for the first time:



Just start with the driver's front wheel and... wait, it's been dry recently, why does that suspension fork look wet?



hgeez: I've known that this axle has been letting grease slip past the inner boot for awhile now:



Now it looks as if both inner and outer boots have just ripped completely.





I've had a replacement axle for this side sitting in a closet for MONTHS. I bought a pair of front axles many months ago. I didn't take any pictures at the time, and it was far enough back that I don't remember what month that was. I replaced the passenger side axle at the time because it had a ripped inner boot when I bought the car.

I couldn't get either axle nut off back then with a socket breaker bar and cheater pipe extension. Snapped three 1/2 breaker bars trying. I resorted to cutting the nut off the passenger side in order to replace the axle. It burnt out my dremel in the process so I opted to NOT bother swapping the driver side back then and risk burning up a brand new dremel.

Guess it's time to swap the driver's side after all. For now I just did the brakes all around, maybe I can get a local mechanic to knock my axle nut loose for me?

[smilr]

October 2016:

I said I had an axle sitting around:



None of the shops near me wanted to let me drive away with a not fully-tightened axle nut (sensible of them) and wanted wayyy to much money to do the swap themselves in my opinion. Guess I'll have to cut this axle nut off myself!

I picked up some metal backed diamond cutoff wheels from Harbor freight, those things are cheap but VERY effective if you let them cut on their own. If you push too hard on them the diamond coating wears off instantly, but if you go slow they still cut faster than the 'reinforced' or standard Dremel branded cut off wheels:



Sadly I didn't avoid a little scarring on my hub:



But hey, the dremel tool didn't die this time!

Replacing the driver's axle didn't fix my steering wheel wobble at freeway speeds sadly. Seems fine otherwise.

And once again a damn rock decides that my windshield is a good place to land:





This time it's just above the midline of the glass, but thankfully in front of the passenger seat, so once again not really in my line of sight when driving.

I reused the resin repair kit from last time, and while it did a good job, I ran out of resin so the fix isn't perfect:




Sheesh, this yearly recap has been a bunch of sour notes hasn't it?

Let's talk about something happier, I had replaced the guts of the clock in my Vigor with an Arduino and an OLED display. I finally got around to transplanting those guts into my Legend:



It's nifty, and lets me do 24 Hour time. Just the way I like it.

I've got ideas for my next project as well. Recognize this guy?



I'm thinking something a bit more... functional for the future:



More to come on that one later.

I'm seriously stumped as to my steering wheel wobble though, brake rotors, wheels, tires, both axles all replaced -> no fix. Had new wheels re-balanced twice (both times they didn't find anything wrong), installed hub-centric rings to be sure these bastards are centered on the hub -> no fix. What am I missing?

The body shop and insurance company replaced my bumper with a... decent replacement. It looks good at a distance, but the paint match isn't the best. At 10 feet or closer if you are looking for it the new bumper looks more metallic, like there's less depth to the paint. If you aren't paying attention it's not noticeable. From further than 10 feet it's hard to tell the difference. I'll try to get some pictures soon, but it's been raining out here so the conditions haven't been great for photography.

If you've waded through all these updates, thank you!

[ActionJackson]

Interesting story! Keep it up. Maybe get a 3/4 breaker bar and socket next time; see if you can break them. Keep that Legend on the road.

[smilr]

I've had nicknames for my cars in the past, but I hadn't figured one out yet for my Legend.

I think I'm going to go with "Punching Bag":



My friend was in a hurry to go help his client with their computer problems and managed to back into my car pulling out of his driveway.
The irony of it all? His client is a local auto-repair shop.

[radieon]

One way to break an axle nut loose is to place a jack under the handle of the breaker bar. I'm pretty sure that will save a lot of us back trouble (and broken breaker bars) in the near and far distant future.