Possumblog

Where are your shoes!?

"I didn't put any on."

"But you've got your socks on!"

"I know."

And thus begins yet another Monday morning, with a small girl throwing logic to the winds and arriving at her grandma's house having successfully managed to sneak herself unshod out of the house and into the automobile.

"::sigh::"

WELL, a fun weekend of intense physical labor and sunburn, and yes, a trip to Wal-Mart!

The first part of it was spent Friday night, when I excitedly got home expecting to be able to tear into the dashboard of the Volvo, but then had to turn around and go back and get the kids. Reba got stuck at work, so, well, you know. Went and got them, brought them home, started supper, started some laundry, and prayed a certain wife would hurry home so I could play.

Which she did. I gathered my instruction sheet and set to work--it really is incredibly simple to take the thing apart, which is either a testament to Swedish ingenuity or things just used to be simpler 20 years ago. Pull two knobs, pop a piece of plastic off, undo two screws, pop two more pieces of plastic off, undo two screws, pull, unplug four cables, TA-DAAAA.

Then the hard part, having to take this deal apart on the kitchen table surrounded by children who don't quite understand what's going on and a wife who's trying to get supper on the table.

Undo six screws, pull back panel, undo four screws, pull speedometer out, undo two screws on the side and ooOOOOoooo--look! Sure enough, the tiny little gear inside was missing teeth in three different spots. Now--to put it back together, but more importantly, how to get the numbers to add up right.

See, the odometer broke at 173,660 or so, and the car actually has 213,305 miles on it. How do I know? Because the previous owner was something of an obsessive-compulsive sort, and when the odometer broke, rather than having it fixed (or fixing it himself), he spent the next 39,645 miles carefully logging his daily mileage on a little calendar book. I assume he must have already clocked all the distances to various places (OCD can be SO handy!) and so, that's how he kept up with oil changes and fuel mileage and timing belt replacements and every other thing.

ANYway, I bought the car knowing the mileage wasn't right, and the title is marked as such. What's actually supposed to happen is that you either reset the odometer to zero, or you leave it where it is, and mark it down on a label fixed to the car. But I wanted it to read the right(ish) number of miles, mainly because it's just easier to keep up with maintenance that way, and I also have some sort of oddly misplaced and perverted sense of pride in driving very high mileage vehicles. So, I needed to add 39,645 miles to the odometer.

But I didn't know how.

So, I stuck my finger inside where the gears are and saw that by spinning the first one, I could eventually get the mile counters to turn over. I managed through an incredibly laborious half-hour of twiddling to add over 100 miles to the counter, which would mean that to get it completely up to count would only have taken 198 hours. Need something faster, obviously.

I kept trying to figure out another way, because obviously if it was this hard to set odometers BACK, there'd be no profit in it for chopshops. I hit upon the idea of using some of that compressed air stuff like you clean keyboards with to spin the tiny paddlewheel-shaped wheel that makes the works go, but obviously, I don't keep that stuff around, SO, a trip to the store!

Since I was out, I was also tasked with picking up various other stuff, then finally found my air, got home, and YAY! It WORKED! Sorta. It was really good for the first few hundred spins of the dial, but as the escaping gas made the can go cold, the force of the air coming out grew weaker and weaker. Good thing I had TWO cans! Which only made the slightest difference, seeing as how the second can was still bound by the same laws of gas pressure. Did manage to get more than a thousand miles on there in thirty minutes, which meant I could have finished up the task in maybe 20 hours or so. Still not fast enough.

Maybe I needed more consistency--not having to start and stop and all. SO, next best thing? The portable air compressor, with the ball inflation needle inserted in the end! A tiny high pressure blast of air, which sorta worked okay, but had to be positioned exactly right. Which I was unable to do for very long. And the compressor was making my head hurt with its high-pitched WhhhIPIPIPIPIPIPIPPIPIPIPIP sound.

Hmm. Sumpin's gotta give, here.

I took the gauge back inside and sat back down at the table and tried to figure out how to make this thing go faster. I FINALLY figured out the secret, though, which I will not post here for fear of encouraging misbehavior, but it does involve moving a small axle ever so slightly out of the way. After that was done, I was able to set the mileage exactly where I wanted it, and then button the whole thing back up. It also gave me quite the case of the willies, because I finally figured out how easy it is to commit odometer fraud if you're really trying to get away with something, and especially with older type geared odometers.

I had always read that it was possible to tell about tampering if the numbers didn't quite line up. Which is true. What they never mention is that if you do it right, the numbers line up nicely. I had a couple that were off half a line to begin with, but a second or two of care and they were all marching across there with no misalignment. The caveat then is to never simply trust the reading on the odometer--always ask for service records or other proof that the mileage is accurate, and there's more to it than just trusting the Carfax report. My car was clean enough inside to pass for a car with only 100,000 miles, and since it only had one owner, any tampering wouldn't have shown up on any report. Buyer beware, folks, especially with anything more than a few years old.

Anyway, after getting things fixed back to normal, and rescrewing everything together in the cluster, and fixing a couple of burnt-out panel lights, and making a careful notation in Sharpie on the back of the cluster of the work I had done, it was time to plug it back into the dashboard. I will give you an indication of how simple the process was by letting you know that my confidence was so high that I put the panel back together in the dark on the driveway. AND IT WORKED. Drove it around the block three times to make sure it was clicking around as it should, and it did.

Home, finish putting on the various trim bits, put up the two screwdrivers I had used, and that was it for the night.

SATURDAY, now--now THAT'S a whole 'nother day. About which, more in a while.

Staff meeting, you know.

Posted by Terry Oglesby at June 6, 2005 08:52 AM