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tired and with hands that needed scrubbing
Sunday, June 18 2017
rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
I spent a surprisingly large amount of my otherwise-free Sunday trying to better hack the downstream oxygen sensor on the Subaru. As you'll recall, I'd attached a resistor and capacitor to its wires in hopes of evening out its fluctuations and reducing the overall voltage of its output. But then the check engine light had come on. Fortunately, the error was a different one from the P0420 I'd been getting. Now I was getting a P0137, which suggests (according to online documentation) that the voltage from the downstream oxygen sensor is too low. This is what my circuit could produce if it were overly-aggressive or one of my connections had failed. In the process of disassembling and testing the circuit today, I realized a solder had failed in one place and that an attempt I had made to reach ground had also failed. Typically when I need to tap an insulated wire, I can just wrap some bare wire around the insulated wire and then heat for awhile with molten solder, burning through the insulation and forming a solid solder to the wire concealed inside. But the insulation for the wires to an oxygen sensor is made of sterner stuff; it couldn't be melted at soldering temperatures at all. The insulation that should've been burned through didn't even seem dented or discolored. It took me a surprising amount of time to redo and test all this stuff, mostly because I couldn't really do work on the oxygen sensor cable when it was plugged into the car, and I couldn't test it when it was unplugged. Furthermore, I kept seeing weird and inconsistent readings on my multimeter. It ended up being a surprising long, unsatisfying hackfest, the kind that left me demoralized, tired, and with hands that needed scrubbing before I could do anything else.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170618 feedback
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