You Can't Make Mistakes.

Not as bad as it looks

So, the wedding was fine, and it didn’t rain at all. At least not after we arrived there.

Late.

Oh yeah, remember how I was officiating the wedding. Yeah.

We left Kalamazoo in plenty of time to arrive at our wedding destination several hours in advance. Moments after leaving the house, there was a wall of traffic—outside Kalamazoo! So, we stopped, moved 3 meters, stopped, rinse, repeat.

Then the car started to overheat.

There was steam billowing out of the hood one side. We pulled off onto the shoulder. I opened the hood and noticed that the fans weren’t running. This was a problem that I have had with the car before. The fan relays went out in the past and then the fans wouldn’t run and the coolant doesn’t get cooled. This is not a problem as long as the car is moving continuously, streaming air through the radiator.

So I pulled the fuse panel open and sure enough, there was corrosion on the contacts for the relays.

Then it started pouring rain.

So I was frantically searching for something so that I could just fuse the connections across the relay contact and let the fans run continuously, but I had no wire in the car anywhere.

Then, in a MacGyvery moment of brilliance, I spotted the top of what appeared to be a broken dry-cell battery with spring contacts. I tore it apart with a pair of pliers and fashioned jumpers, jammed them in the fuse panel, and we were off.

We still had to wait another hour and a half before we were able to leave the highway to take the back-roads the rest of the way, but at least the car wasn’t blowing piping hot coolant all over the place. It worked until later when the car wouldn’t start, but a little wiggling of fuses solved that eventually.

Now I just have to sort this all out so that the car will live until the end of the summer when we move out of the country. At that time, I am giving her to some friends who refurb cars just enough so that they can have impromptu demolition derby races on a dirt-track in Holly, MI. It is a really good time apparently.

Don’t worry, I’ll post some pictures of that.