2002-07-09 - 16:42
I will make this entry a no-brainer and concise. I am not having the best of days.
I left on 4 July 2002 to drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit my parents and to "take care of my car". Soon after starting my drive at 10 am I realized my car was having issues. Anywhere between 2500-3500 RPM (50-65 MPH) it was overheating (redlining). I gave little attention to this and drove more slowly (~50 MPH) to keep it cool, until I hit the traffic around the I-580 / I-5 traffic zone. Then I realized that not only was the temperature high, but when I slowed down or put the clutch on, my RPM remained at 3000-3500. Again, I ignored this and continued. The I-5 southbound was relatively clear, helping me avoid issues with the car. However, at some points in the drive, although I was keeping my speed low, the engine temperature passed the redline and I had to pull into a rest-stop to let it cool down. After cooling, I removed the air-filter unit on the carbeurator and tried to see what the problem was. My idle-adjustment was set to its absolute minimum. So I added some more antifreeze to the radiator (~750 mls) and started on the road again. To no avail. I kept on this way (very slowly) for another four hours and realized that if I hit the Tejon pass on the I-5 around Bakersfield, my car would never make it over. So I cut accross to the 99 freeway and took the less steep route through Tehachepi, which added another two hours to my trip. The weather was nice for a typical 120 degree Fahrenheit desert day. Just then an idea hit me. I turned my heater on full blast and kept going. My engine temperature came down to normal!!! I was cruising after that!! I was absoltely dying from the blistering desert heat combined with my car heater going full blast, but I was making it! I hit 65 MPH (the rebel in me).
That is until around 10 miles from my parents' home. I was going around a bend on a bridge on the freeway, when I heard a clunk under the car and suddenly the car acted like it was a see-saw, as it wobbled left to right, violently. Next thing I knew, I was spinning out of control accross the lanes of the freeway toward the center median just as I passed the open part of the bridge. The whole thing took maybe five seconds to happen, but it took me another five seconds to actually realize that it had happened to me. Finally, the car came to a stop on its right two wheels, and landed flat and normally, only facing the wrong direction of the freeway. I was on the median, and not in the lanes of traffic, only having barely missed the center dividing wall. The car had died, and I was too shaken to do anything for a minute or two. What the heck had happened?! I was close enough to home to bother my father for help. I called him on my cell phone and he was there within twenty minutes. He arrived and we decided to see if the car was still drivable. Mind you, at this point, there was not a scratch on me or the car, and none of the wheels had been damaged. The car started up fine and it was moving. However, it went about six inches forward and came to a stop. Same thing on the second and third tries. It was the rear passenger wheel. It was getting stuck somehow. So we get out of the cars and check it out. There was a metal arm, just in front of the rear passenger tire, broken under the body. It was there to stop the forward-rear movement of the tire, and it no longer kept the rear wheel from touching the body of the car and stopping the wheel. Incredibly enough, when we drove slowly, the sticking did not happen. Also, it was around 7:45 pm at this point and it was getting dark. Everyone else on the planet was aware of this and they were setting up, getting ready to watch the fireworks at the local high-school, so they were nowhere near our freeway. Taking advantage of this, but still fearing hitting dusk, we drove at snail's-pace miles per hour, with frequent (emphasis on frequent) inevitable stops. Finally we were close enough to home to where it was safe to get on the city-streets to trudge our way. Here comes the scary part. After driving for a while,we had to make a left at a busy intersection across a set of railroad tracks. With the disruption in the road from the tracks, the wheel started sticking again. Ahhh!!! But the car made its way over, begrudgingly, and we were in the clear. However, the tracks had disrupted our flow somehow, and the car was making more frequent stops, and causing traffic behind us. So we found a nearby business center parking lot where we decided to leave the car until morning, transferring most of the belongings from my car to the van that my father had driven. At this point we drove home in the van and arrived just in time to watch the fireworks with the rest of the family.
In the morning, we arrived to find that overnight, the car had been broken into, with glass strewn everywhere inside and outside of the car. The vandal, having found nothing to steal from the car (the radio was a piece of cow-pie and he had realized it after breaking my poor window), had emptied three dollars and forty cents change from my change bin and in his spite (for my lack of things to steal), he had broken open and smeared a stick of deodorant (which I had left in the car accidentally the night before) on the back set of the car.
To speed the process of writing along I will shorten the rest of the weekend from this point on. We jimmied the rear wheel and got the car home. We spent the rest of the weekend either 1) cruising the local car salvage yards for the parts we needed to fix the car or 2) under the car. Essentially, we tried to get to every single problem that the car had, including the RPM problem, the overheating problem, the broken rear wheel stabilizer as well as a few problems that we discovered needed fixing along the way in our investigation. My father and I were working on the car until LITERALLY five minutes before I had to leave for San Francisco again on Sunday, the 7th of July. Everything was acting okay for the first one third of my journey back, until the RPM problem returned, this time acting as the main problem, sending my RPM's up to 4500 on idle. I just couldn't take it any more. The I-5 northbound was moving like it was a parking lot. The wather was hot, my car was revving at 4500 RPM and I could not risk a burnout. I pulled into a rest stop and hung out there for a few hours until the traffic calmed to a decently-moving speed, and I hit the road again. This time, I let the car do its thing, and if it wanted to go 4500 RPM, I stuck it in 5th gear and I let it go. Eventually, somewhere near 300 miles from my parents home, 100 miles to go to my home, and eight hours later around 11:30 pm, the problem fixed itself. I arrived at home and the idle was sitting nicely at 750 RPM, and I was exhausted. It was almost 2:00 am, and I got up at 6:00 am for work.
That was until today, Tuesday the 9th, when my car decided to start revving at around 4000 RPM again on the San Francisco city streets, and I started crying somewhere near Fulton street and Laguna avenue.
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