It's your weekly "user fucks up basic maintenance" thread

I'll just leave small stuff.

What did he mean by this?

>huge snowstorm
>Get excited because my dad said that he would let ride his snowmobile around the property
>Fuel injected 900
>150hp
>Get hype
>Dad says it needs to be refueled before I go
>Explains that it's a two stroke and that it burns oil by design
>Tell him that I've rode two strokes and I understand how they work
>Buy gas and mix expensive as fuck synthetic snowmobile oil
>Put in in sled
>Ride off
>5 minutes later on corner of property
>Snowmobile starts knocking
>Try to turn around to get back to house
>Blip throttle and it BAM
>Pull starting rope and it's stuck
>Itfuckingsiezed.jpg
>Start freaking out
>End up walking back to house which took 45 mins
>Dad freaks out and tells me that snowmobiles don't take premix fuel because they have oil injection systems

Mfw when I blew up my dad's snowmobile

ooooooooh shit user.

Fortunately the worst I've ever done to one of my parents' vehicles was hit my own car with it trying to park, denting both.

Check the belt tension. A loose belt will give off a super high pitch squeak. The belt should be tighter than you think it is.

Ok I will tomorrow. What symptoms would show due to a loose belt? And is replacing the belt the fix or would the pulley need to be replaced too?

Screws and an allen wrench once.

Loose belts screech (often on startup or trying to take off aggressively from a light). If they're loose enough that they're barely on at all you'll see it on the dash board (e.g. alternator light, vehicle overheats due to lack of water pump) or your power steering isn't powerful etc. Usually pretty obvious.

All you'd need to do would be to tighten the belt. If it still squeals when tight then the belt is probably glazed from slipping for too long and you might as well pop a new belt on. That's it. If you can change plugs you can change belts. One of the easiest possible things to do unless your engine bay is a clusterfuck.

>putting nerf bars on my truck
>cab mount bolt breaks

just

I can't barely hear the squeek in my cab and I can't hear anything when the hood is open. I may be imagining it desu

The belt is moving pretty damn fast. Odds are it will still turn everything, it might just make a bunch of noise. Belts are cheap, so if it's loose, I'd just go ahead and replace it. Don't go to AutoZone and buy an el-cheapo $2 belt. Spend the couple of extra bucks and get a Gates. I just figure if you dropped a wrench in there, you may have fucked the belt.

Don't worry about the belts then. Belts are usually pretty loud and obvious. If it is the belts, they'll slowly get louder and more obvious over time. Pretty much zero potential for harm other than you might wind up having to replace a sufficiently-worn belt rather just tightening it back up.

I tossed a belt on the highway once. Best thing I could think of was tying some paracord I had in the trunk around the pulleys. I was kind of surprised it kept everything turning well enough despite all the obvious slipping to limp over to an auto parts store and get a real belt.

>Taking off cv axle on aldi
>Take off rotor and outer cv
>See boltheads with a pattern I've never seen before
>Looks like jewish star
>Fucking VAG
>Find similar socket and hammer that shit in
>Goodenough.jpg
>Shit is tight as fuck
>Take off ratchet and go for breaker bar
>Shit still not coming off
>Stand on breaker bar and it finally gives
>Breaker bar falls on ground and I almost eat shit
>Bolt head still on breaker bar
>Rest of bolt is still in CV axle
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Is there any chance I damaged the pulley(s there are two belts) itself? How hard would that be to replace?

Almost none. Pulleys are big hunks of metal and even if you managed to ding it pretty good there's no problem unless you hit it just right so that it starts chewing through belts or tossing them off. Depending on which pulley it might be easy or hard to replace, based almost entirely on how hard it is to get to. Crank pulleys can take a bit of doing to break loose, but it's not a big deal.

It's hard to imagine that you might have injured a bearing based on your description, but even then you'd just leave it be until it started making annoying squeaking pulley bearing noises.

crankshaft pulley would be a bitch. Just tug on the belt and see if it is crazy tight. If it is, this probably isn't your problem.

I'm sorry. I know what bolt you're talking about. Idk if audis were always like that but my vw replacement bolt was that kind.

Ok that makes me feel a lot better. I'll check the belts tomorrow and replace if necessary. I'm at the mileage where the manual says to check the belts for tension so they probably need to be replaced anyway. I'm not going to worry about the pulleys/bearings unless they start eating belts or making horrid noises.

>changed the transmission fluid about a month ago
>start noticing late shifts and a slip here and there
>hoping its the icy roads because they don't plow all that well by my house

It's gonna be ok, r-right guys?

could also thread lock them down with the blue stuff

If your old spark plugs were crummy enough to leave you down on power, probably you're about ready to consider yourself to be at a regular service interval where you'd want to do a whole bunch of stuff at once. e.g.

>oil and filter
>check belts
>top up coolant
>top up wiper fluid
>new wiper blades as needed
>check tire tread
>check tire pressure
>possibly rotate tires

That sort of thing. Then you can just make a bit of an afternoon of it and go about your happy life worry free with reduced chance of little annoying things that keep cropping up for your to-do list.

Nah, I just outright forgot to tighten them. They were hand tight only.

Also fuck thread lock on bolts I have to take off from time to time. Hi-temp anti-seize goes on those bitches.

to be fair, the moment you said you understand a 2 stroke, he should have told you about the oil injection. you were thinking lawn mower

the first time I attempted to change my own oil, I ended up draining out my transmission fluid instead

Me too.

You better check your fluid level before you cook your bands and clutches. Too high or too low fluid level can cause those symptoms.

I'll have to check tomorrow before I go to work tomorrow. I'm hoping its that simple, the previous owner had the transmission "rebuilt" for $800, and I'm hoping that's not coming back to bite me.

I've owned a few two stroke dirt bikes and a really old snowmobile, never had a machine with a dedicated oil injection system. I didn't even know that they existed prior to blowing up his sled

>If your old spark plugs were crummy enough to leave you down on power
My engine eats spark plugs unfortunately
>oil and filter
Done
>check belts
On it
>top up coolant
Doing a full flush next weekend, levels are good though
>top up wiper fluid
Done
>new wiper blades as needed
Doesn't rain where I am lol
>check tire tread
New to me truck came with barely used tires expensive ATs
>check tire pressure
I air up to 44 psi every fillup
>possibly rotate tires
I should definitely do that one

Wow, those are kind of nasty, but I bet you could clean them up with some emory cloth or fine grained sandpaper and put them back in.

If my car did that to plugs I'd start to wonder why.

>44psi

Really? What kind of car is it? I didn't realise there was cars with pressures that high. (I think my tyres are max 41)

Yeah they weren't pretty. Lots of carbon tracking. It's just this engine, some people replace plugs every 25k. Those are original plugs from the factory were gapped at .035 and came out of the engine at 100k mi at ~.040. Ford's updated specs are .028.
E rated truck tires. Max pressure is 88 I believe.

>recently bought an infiniti q45t from some tweakers
>keep finding things they A didnt put back
>B tools and jerry rigged shit
>3 sockets
>10+ loose screws
>double sided tape and zipties everywhere
oh and i just about fucked my shit up just now by disconnecting the AC line and having it explode in my face. everythings ok tho....

>25k
Oh, when you said "eats" plugs I was thinking way less than that. Alright, not the worst thing I guess.

I've been reading that it's the fuel injection combined with easy to gum up MAP sensors that lead to running rich. Not totally sure though.

putting premix in an injected 2 stroke won't seize the engine...

Sounds plausible. You'd think ideally the ECU would learn to adjust the fuel trims based on the O2 sensor during closed-loop operation to compensate but maybe it's not quite up to the task, or the injector/intake/combustion chaper setup is just fundamentally prone to a sooty burn or whatever.

As long as it's not so rich it eats catalytic converters then it probably doesn't matter beyond the annoyance of not being able to run super long plug change intervals.

Honestly plugs take like 30 mins and $50 to do so it's no biggie that I'd have to change em every 25k. And like I said, the ones I pulled out today we're factory originals at 100k and I didn't have that much power loss. Enough to notice a change after the plug swap but not enough that it bugged me.

>clean fuel filter
>carb floods

>massive vacuum leaks, turn distributor
>car won't start

>know about cracked tire walls
>tire explodes in parking lot

>clean battery terminals and mess with grounds
>car won't turn over

>bleed brakes
>master cylinder is busted and won't push out fluid

>rebuild carb, missing a bolt
>car starts but dies almost immediately

>parking car after a drive
>radiator springs leak and spits coolant everywhere

>hear flapping noise in engine bay, belt snapped
>tell dad timing belt snapped, he tells me my car doesn't have a timing belt (it's a fan belt)

>slam on brakes on highway
>brake gets stuck, overheats, blows tire, catches car on fire

>replace coil
>break a lead and use electrolytic grease to hold it together

>car running hot, kill it when slowing down
>won't turn over

You just know this is an american car from the description

What kind of shitbox are you driving dude

the turmoils of owning a shitbox

...

This, it'll just make obnoxious amounts of blue smoke.

F

You weren't exaggerating when you said it caught fire. Holy shit. This has to be the worst shitbox in Veeky Forums history.

I remember this... where is this from? From Veeky Forums or somewhere else?

It ran lean and cooked itself until it siezed

archived.moe/diy/thread/1065967/#1065967

Well, at least it died as its own funeral pyre.

What a helpless feeling.
My car has caught fire once, but I was in the city in the middle of the day so I got an extinguisher from a business and it only melted some vacuum lines and some wires. I drove the car home.

Honestly Anons of Veeky Forums, please buy fire extinguishers.
As much as I hate nanny legislation I really think cars should have been required to be sold with them from the factory.

I carried one for a while back when I was driving enough of a shitbox to worry.

Then again I also kept a 20oz soda bottle of rubbing alcohol under the hood for winter starts so this is the level of shitbox I'm talking about.

What? This was the 2 door Impala? That's actually sad.

...

Got a flickr or imgur album of all the pics? This story would actually make for a really interesting article on popularmechanics or something.

Eh, maybe he didn't put the correct oil to gas ratio for the sled and then starved it of oil until it spun a bearing. Lean two strokes also get hot very fast so he could have fried it, but it's probably water cooled because he mentioned efi.

once she's fully restored i'll probably do a major writeup and gallery. not until the fat lady sings though.

Wait... you're still restoring the same Impala after it caught fire?

you didn't think i'd give up after some dinky little fire did you? have you even read this? archived.moe/diy/thread/1065967/#1065967

Heaps dedication mate.

don't ever give up on something you love no matter how bad it gets. life's too short to not have stupid convictions

I wish mate. I hardly have the time to sleep at night.

You've motivated me to go out and work on my project. Keep us posted on her progress.

>fucking around with fuel system
>remove fuel pump relay and cross to prime the rail
>car starts fine
>put relay i had in the centre console into fuel pump socket, thinking that's the one I removed
>slam bonnet shut
>doesn't close properly and looks wonky
>open bonnet
>relay is fucking pins up with all pins pushed in and fucked
>underside of bonnet has four little dents in the pattern of relay

Still reading it. Your resilience is admirable.

now i dont feel stupid trying to fix my smashed up nissan instead of just buying a new one, its a heap of shit with a smashed in front end, but it was my first car

Hammer her out, use as little bondo as needed, paint her good.
She'll be good to rip for years to come mate.

>get first shitbox
>have it for couple weeks
>start hearing knocking sound from the front
>rev up
>gets louder
>clutch in
>becomes inaudible
>do this for the next 30km to work
>do this on way back from work
>ask mom what to do
>be told its old shitbox and this happens
>drive like this for a week
>decide to add washer fluid
>notice that left headlight back cover came off and was on top of the water pump belt

It had pretty deep cut in it from hitting the belt