On The Road Again

 Sorry if you thought I was referring to getting back on a motorcycle because I'm not. In fact we just got a few inches of snow the other day. I'm talking about the Subaru Outback that blew a timing belt back in November. Let me get you up to speed. After the belt broke the car sat in the garage for a while before a couple day stretch that was warm enough for me to tear the engine down and remove the heads. Turns out all sixteen valves were bent but everything else looked ok. A local machine shop went through the heads while I bought a complete gasket set, head bolts, timing belt, idle pulleys and water pump. Last week I had in my possession all the pieces and mother nature provided a few days above freezing.
 Bolting the heads on was easier than taking them off because I unbolted the motor mounts and slid the engine to one side and installed the opposite head. It was tight getting a torque wrench in there but it was doable. Actually, the worse part was that the torque sequence had me doing one bolt from the top then the next bolt from underneath, then back on top and so on. That sucked because its a seven step process per bolt.
 I think it was a Sunday afternoon and two nights after work for a few hours to get it all buttoned back up. I was working in the dark with the front of the car pointing out of the garage and just used a pen light to light my way. After making one last lap around the engine compartment I decided it was time to fire it up. Crank, crank, crank...nothing. Not a single pop. I had a check engine light flashing at me and the "cruise" light flashing too. Last time that light flashed it cost the dealer a new $800 catalytic converter. The car was still under warranty then. Anyway, I cranked a bit more hoping to hear something that sounded like an attempt to start but still nothing. It seemed to crank normal, meaning compression sounded good and no interference between valves and pistons. I whipped out my handy dandy pen light and made one more sweep of the engine compartment. Sure enough, hidden under the intake runner on the passenger side is the ignition module and I could see it wasn't plugged in. The wire harness for it got bunched up under the manifold and kinda hid there. I plugged it in, jumped in the car and tried starting it again. Vroom! It started right up!
 I was standing just outside the garage lookin in and the garage was filling with smoke. My Ultra is a big bike yet I couldn't even see it back there through the cloud. I quickly pulled the car outside. The car ran for maybe fifteen minutes and began overheating. Remember its dark outside and from the glow of the tail lights it looked like the car was still smoking. I thought it was blowing antifreeze out the exhaust like maybe I screwed up the head gasket install or maybe I had a cracked head. All those negative thoughts clouded my rational thinking so I backed the car in the garage and gave up for the night. I spent all night going through the repair and couldn't come up with a good reason for the problem. I'm not saying I'm too good to screw up cuz I make mistakes all the time but I didn't rush this job and it should have gone right.
 A few days later I borrowed a cooling system pressure tester from Al. Thanks Al. That test told me there were no leaks in the system. I fired the car up and to my surprise it didn't blow smoke but it did overheat. I started thinking logically and realized I just had an air pocket in the system. Once I got that bled out the car stopped overheating and the heater worked fine. I'm thinking all that smoke was raw fuel in the exhaust from when I initially cranked the piss out of it. I suppose anything left in there evaporated after sitting a few days. Oh, and to my surprise, all the flashing lights and check engine light just went away. Schwiiiiing!

 So this will be my ride until we're ready to upgrade the truck. I'll need the old Dodge for towing and hauling but thats about it. The only other thing the Dodge can do better is deep snow and off roading. I don't do much off roading and the chances for deep snow yet this year are slim.

Later.