Lucky 13

I find the belief in lucky/unlucky numbers to be amusing, if not downright foolish. That said, perhaps our team number will give those folks one more supporting anecdote.

As I mentioned last time, we replaced the nasty old CV joint with a sparkly new one from Advance Auto. Once everything was back together, we were tired, and it was 9:30pm and time for dinner and beer. Perhaps we should has tested it after dinner, though.

This morning I ran the engine to warm things up, and the transmission started leaking quite a bit of fluid. I drove back to Advance Auto to get fluid to replace what got dumped last night. Ended up adding two full quarts until I was happy with the fluid level.

Alarmingly, there was a new metal-on-metal ugly sound. Better yet, on our way to I-81 from the second Advance Auto visit of the morning, I heard a piece of metal whack the bottom of the car. Assumption: The car is falling apart and will kill us any second now.

I actually found the shiny bolt that hit us, but we figured out (after disassembling and inspecting things) that the bolt must have just been in the road and I drove over it without seeing it ahead of time. In fact, the nasty metal-on-metal sound is probably the A-arm of the suspension hitting the inboard side of the CV joint, which presumably is a tiny bit larger than the old one. (Score -1 for remanufactured parts.)

Oh, and that interference also killed the strap that held the inboard CV boot in place, which means our brand-new CV joint is already being exposed to the elements. Whee!

We’ve got about 140 miles behind us now, and with the addition of some Lucas Stop Slip mooched from the team in the Chevy Celebrity, things seem to have tapered off. The engine has also stopped consuming any oil whatsoever, courtesy of the full bottle of CD2 “engine honey” we squeezed into it yesterday.

Lessons for the day:

• Sometimes the dirty fix (e.g. what Justin suggested in an earlier comment) is the best way to go, not just the cheapest way.
• All that crap at the parts store designed to fix leaks is really great stuff for nursing a crap car a little farther down the road.

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