Walsted

The driver-side fan on the Miata died. Somehow, over time, the fan assembly warped to allow the blade to get stuck against the housing, and the fan blade ended up unsalvageable. The metal hub of the fan separated from the plastic fan blade, the plastic part of the blade fell off, and the motor drove the metal part to eat the plastic part of fan. I discovered this on Sunday evening - I have no idea how long it had been that way, as the car never indicated that it was running warm.

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Tags: cooling, fan

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Last year, I bought an eBay timing belt kit. Started one day, had the car running the next night. A few months later, the eBay water pump failed, and having the old pump still on hand (anticipating the eBay failure possibility), I swapped it back, (took six hours,) and the old pump started making noises last month, and started leaking a few days ago. Today, I did the third water pump change since I've owned the car. It took me about five hours to do it today, so I guess I am getting better ...

My stock radiator started turning brown. Not real brown, but the fact that it started at all indicated to me that I should start looking. After all, for all I knew, that was the original radiator, and thus could be over ten years old with over 249,000 miles on it. Not wanting to be stuck with a cracked radiator when it decided it was time to go, I decided to look for a new radiator. And as I have done with radiator replacements on previous cars, I decided to get a larger radiator without plastic ...

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I found out that the heater controls get hot enough to melt plastic. Not a lot of melting, just enough to be a bother.

My fan control was jammed against the #4 position. It would wobble back and forth, which would turn the fan on or off, but it wouldn't move to the 3, 2, 1, or 0 positions. I took it apart to find out why. It turns out that somehow the plastic became hot enough to melt a tiny part of the wiring connector to the switch and to allow the metal contact for the #4 position ...

Fifty miles into a fifty-file mile commute home, there is a section of road with a 45mph speed limit, and no shortage people in SUVs and pickups coming from the other direction who don't realize (or care) that it is a two-way road. Consequently, I drive near the edge of the road, and on one morning, I hit a pothole. Big, deep, and about a foot inboard of the edge of the road. Not so much an indentation in the asphalt as a total lacking of asphalt surrounded by asphalt terminating in vertical right ...