Siphoning...

For three days I've been trying to siphon gas out of the Hyundai's tank.  I foolishly filled it up right before the registration ended.  It is I found out very, very difficult or maybe impossible to get a siphon hose down the gas filling tube in a modern car.  There is a little plastic blocker tied to the housing with springs.  The weight of the gas coming down the tube pushes the blocker down the tube just enough for the gas to fill around it.  But it doesn't really open up enough for a siphon hose to get past it.  At least I wasn't able to make it happen.

Just in case you'd somehow missed it, siphoning gas is a huge pain.  And if you're doing it in a small tight garage it is even worse.  I spent about three hours today pulling up the back seat in the Hyundai, prying off a sealed plate, pulling out the fuel pump, and siphoning gas out the top of the tank.  I did it a gallon at a time with a cheap piece of crap siphon I bought at walmart.  The siphon didn't work at first because it didn't seal where the hoses connected to the pump ball.  I had to take cut up strips of bicycle inner tube and wrap them up and zip tie them on tight to create a seal.

For reasons I don't understand the gas came out of the Hyundai at a trickle that filled the gallon jug I was using in about twenty minutes or half an hour per go.  And there was a lot of fiddling to get it to work each time in the first place.  Then I would transfer the gallon to the Mazda, and that would go fast, but take a while to set up.  And always there were unexpected gas leaks as the pump or the hoses dribbled unseen bits of gas.  So pretty much it got on everything.  What a mess.  But what can you do?  I'm not taking the Hyundai to the scrap yard full of gas.  I finally contacted them and they offered $450 for it.  No sense giving them $35 of gas along with it.

The Grind...

So.  For a long, few weeks I've been working on a tree.  It is a Chinese Elm.  It was my neighbor's tree.  I cut 2/3rds of it down, with his permission of course.  It was quite tall.  Perhaps fifty or sixty feet tall, and the 2/3rds that I cut down were overhanging where I am planning to build my shed.  I was a little worried about it dropping on it, since it seemed to drop branches quite regularly.  There were always dead ones.

I've been working on it for far too long.  Usually about four hours at a time in the afternoons.  Cutting up the big stuff was a job, but doing the little stuff is far worse.  I might be foolish, but I've hoped to build a jtube rocket mass heater and I thought binding the twigs together I might burn them in bundles.  I have no idea if that would work, but we'll see.  I'd rather that than spend a bunch of money hauling and disposing of them at the dump.  Really, it is I would imagine eight or nine truck loads of twigginess.

Also, in the background of some of these pics you can see the chainlink fence I built.  Honestly I've been meaning to put pictures up on my blog for some time, but I keep forgetting my camera each time I go out to Magna.  But then, this time I forgot to shoot the fence specifically.  Oh well.

Cars...

I'm thinking that the Hyundai has finally had it.  It's time for it to go to that good rest that awaits all vehicles, the Pick and Save.  My parents bought the Hyundai in I think 2003(ish ?) from Larry Knowles.  He was one of my dad's counselors in the bishopric, and rehabilitates cars and sells them on the side of his fencing business.  It was relatively new.  A '98 I think.  It had lived the first few years of it's life in Reno Nevada, where one unfortunate day it was rear ended by a truck with a lift kit.  It mashed the trunk lid and busted the rear lights.  Might have crunched the rear side fenders some.  

Hyundai's now are different from Hyundai's then.  They're really competing, and in some models, beating the Japanese brands in quality.  But then, even though it was a relatively new car, and the damage was cosmetic, there was just no resale value.  Especially not for a base model Accent with a salvage title.  So the insurance company wrote it of as totaled, and sold it to a scrapper.  Larry Knowles bought it from them, slapped some new body parts on it and sold it to us.

I actually quite liked it.  It was obviously a gas sipper.  And it wasn't cool by any stretch of the imagination.  But it had a little zip.  Not much, but a little.  And the gas mileage was really quite good.  I usually got between 30 and 35mpg, depending on my town to highway driving ratio.

But there were always some problems.  I don't know if it was from the accident it suffered, or just that it was really kind of a low quality auto.  There were always gremlins in the electrics.  Especially the dash lights.  The check engine light would go on and off and on and off, and after taking it to the dealership, and the mechanic, and the tester at autozone, basically, no one thought there was anything wrong with it.  Except that the check engine light was busted.

And, not long after we got it the solenoid crapped out.  We got that fixed.

Then the reverse light switch went out, so my reverse lights wouldn't go on when I was backing up.  We took it to the dealership to have it fixed.  Bad idea.  They charged about a hundred dollars to reach in, pull a wire, unscrew the old switch, screw in the new switch, and plug the wire back in.  A hundred bucks is the price of ignorance I guess.  I ended up doing it myself about six years later when that switch burned out.

While it was at the dealership they tested and found out that there was a leak somewhere in the line for the air conditioning.  I'd known that the air conditioning didn't really work well, but didn't care because I never ever used it.  It reduces gas mileage, and cars have windows.  Yeah.  I know having the windows open reduces gas mileage too, but not as much.  And a lot of times I would just sweat it with the windows closed.  I'm weird that way.  Comfort isn't worth money to me a lot of times.

Anyway, the mechanic at the dealership said that if Cache Valley ever started requiring emissions checks, it wouldn't pass because of the air conditioning leak.  So there was that.

Also, about three or four years ago that fuel gauge died.  It kind of died.  When you filled the tank it would go up to half on the gauge.  Then it would go down to nothing and stay there for about half a tank.  Eventually the gas light would come on, and it was pretty reliable.  It was the only light in the dash cluster that worked reliably.

One that didn't was the oil light.  This was problematic, because somewhere along the way about a year back, a seal somewhere failed.  And I started burning oil.  And the oil light failed to go on.  And I ran it pretty near dry before I figured out something was wrong.  It almost certainly burned up the rings on the piston heads, which ruined compression.  The dumb thing was that I didn't realize how bad the oil burning was, and almost ran it out again just driving home to salt lake.  Again, burning the rings.  I was careful after that to always keep an eye on the oil level.  But the damage was done.

Anyway, despite the problems the car still runs.  Surprisingly.  It just doesn't want to die.  It is in terrible cosmetic condition.  There is exterior damage from two separate hit and run accidents in parking lots.  The pain was always crap, so there are scratches from the slightest brushes by bushes, your clothes, pretty much any other surface that contacts it.  The paint has peeled on the front bumper, grill and hood from insects crashing though the paint at freeway speed.  And I actually wore a hole all the way through the carpet where my heel rested in front of the gas pedal within the first couple years of owning it.  But it still runs.  And I'll drive it to the scrapper.

Yes, I am a man I must assure you, before I admit that in my head, and never spoken aloud... I gave the car a name.  It think it fair to disclose it now as it goes to its demise.  I named the car Scooter.

Like motorcyclists pull up to a light next to a scooter rider and smile patronisingly in their helmets, so might other motorists who pull up next to the Hyundai smirk.  But like it's namesake, though shamefully under-powered and somewhat shameful to be seen with, in town it is cheap, manuverable and even, at times, fun.

There's an adage something to the effect that it is more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow.  And such has been the case with the Hyundai.

Surprisingly, (or not?), over the ten years I've been driving it, despite several trips to California, and other such distant locals, I only put about forty thousand miles on it.  It's going to it's grave having only run just over eighty thousand miles.

Can that be right?  I'd go out to the garage and double check it but I don't care that much.

Anyway, goodbye to Scooter.  I'm now looking for a small truck to use through the construction process.  Hopefully I'll find something cheap.