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glad I wasn't there
Friday, September 24 2010
The late September heat wave continued, with temperatures high enough to require the running of the fan I keep next to my workstation in the laboratory.
At some point I decided to readdress the unending problem with the Subarus's leaking fuel filler pipe, which is how gasoline gets from the side of the car into its gas tank. As you know, this pipe has been leaking pretty much all summer, punctuated by occasional brief periods when my latest fix seemed to be holding. So I jacked up the car, removed its rear passenger-side wheel (as I had done many times before) and then began unscrewing all the various nuts and bolts that attach the fill pipe to the car. I figured that I should either replace it with a brand new one or take it out, fix it slowly and carefully, and then thoroughly test it before putting it back in. After searching the web in various ways, it was looking like a cheap replacement was going to be hard to find. So it looked like I was going to have to rely on JB Weld, perhaps with an outer layer of heat-shrinkable tubing (though large-diameter heat-shrinkable tubing is also hard to find).
It's not easy removing old rusted parts from the old rusted undersides of twelve year old cars. Sometimes miracles happen and nuts can be turned off of bolts, but just as often the bolt simply snaps off under torque.
As I strained and sweated in the heat, I was careful to stay mostly out from under the car. It was high on its jack and the jack looked kind of flimsy. At some point I went up to the laboratory to pick a new podcast to listen to, and when I came back down to the car, it was a lot lower than it had been, particularly on that side where it had been jacked up. I went around the car and could see that now the wheel hub had fallen to the ground, leaving a little crater in the asphalt. The car had slipped off the jack! I looked under the car to see if there were any dead cats or other casualties (cats love to hang out under cars when they are on jacks). But the only real collateral damage seemed to be my Hitachi hammer drill. It had survived unscathed, but its NiCad battery pack had been crushed. But once I jacked the car back off it, I found it was possible to patch the battery pack back together and get it working again. As for the car itself, it seemed fine. Most of the impact of its fall off the jack had been absorbed by the suspension. Still, it was unnerving to think that this could have happened while I'd been working. Also: I should have had the parking brake on!
I've been downloading various supposedly scary movies and tonight I tried watching one, a 1961 black and white flick called The Innocents in the tradition of "governess goes to a creepy mansion and takes charge of creepy children." But my sensibilities proved too modern for its plodding exposition, and eventually I lost interest. By the end there, all I was doing was trying to note the most recent technology being depicted. It was all very 19th Century, right down to the oil-based illumination.
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