What are you working on today?

[Creekside]

Spent most of Saturday night at the 24hr emergency vet clinic with my bassett who managed to get a large cut on her abdomen. 30+ stitches, a wound drain, and several $$$ later she’s recovering well. Drain will come out Tuesday or Wednesday and stitches in a couple weeks. She freely roams nearly 1000 acres between us and the neighbor so there’s no telling what she got into. It’s one of the hazards with being a farm dog.

Yesterday I pulled the shell off the bed of my Ranger as it was in desperate need of a cleanup and you can’t access the rear window with it installed. Gave it a steam clean and then a good hand wash. Then I started sanding on the bed for a repaint. I’ll be doing the bed myself but the cab will get a Maaco job. It’ll be painted to match my dump truck. Metallic silver on the bed and staying with a red cab. Then it’ll get lettered to match as well. Going to do a new set of headlights, some window seals, cab corner molding, new front valence and a new rear bumper too. I’ve had it 10 years and it’s time to dress it up a little. It was a Coca-Cola work truck before I had it so it’s far from perfect but still has a lot of life left.

 

[14Accent]

The neighbor kid's grandma asked my wife if I had any time to look at his little Kia Soul with an inop blower motor, so last week I crawled under the dash and used my old halogen "test light" to verify that it was indeed a failed blower. It was, so I ordered up an SKP from RA and dug into the replacement this morning:

If you've never had the misfortune of doing a blower motor in a Soul: try not to. Its buried up in the center of the dash, against the firewall, behind the throttle and brake pedals. Its been a while since I'd done one, but it came back to me pretty quick.

This is looking up past the throttle pedal and towards the firewall. You can just see the blower in the center of the photo.

Brake pedal comes out as an assembly after removing the pivot pin, 8 nuts and the wire for the stop lamp switch.

There she is.

OEM Bosch on the left, SKP right. Its your typical Chinese copy, but it wasn't bad for $46.

Again, OEM left SKP right. The fins on the SKP fan were tiny compared to OEM and would have definitely affected airflow volume. A quick swap and the OEM wheel was in place.

This photo is the opposite of the others, OEM right SKP left. Again, a fairly good knock-off.

Installation went fine, but I did run into a problem that seemingly endless numbers of aftermarket blower motors have: it spun backwards as installed Nothing a quick swap of the connertor's pins didn't solve, but still.

Finished it up by throwing a can of R134 in the system and calling it a day. Back to the real job tomorrow.