Today on my way to school, I stopped by Arundel Mills to fill up at the Exxon, since the diesel there is usually cheaper than most places. When I got to the station, I pulled the fuel door latch, exit the car, insert my credit card, and turn around and notice that the fuel door didn’t open. I just figured I forgot to pull the latch, so I went back around and pulled it again. The fuel door didn’t pop out like it usually does, so I thought maybe it was stuck and pulled it open with my finger.
This is what I saw:
WTF? It might be hard to see, but there is chipped paint on the left of the fuel door opening, and the thing I’m holding is the fuel door latch thingy. Aaaaand my fuel cap was loose. Someone must have pried my fuel door open and had their way with my fuel, sometime within the past two weeks. I’m not really sure if I should be mad, or wickedly laughing.
You see, I can always epoxy that latch back on, and the chip in the paint isn’t so bad. It just makes me feel good knowing that someone *may* have siphoned DIESEL fuel and put it in their GAS car. 
Eh, that’s what I’m hoping anyway. The fuel light didn’t turn on and I still drove 600 miles, so I’m not sure how much, if any, this mysterious person took.
Saturday I move to Baltimore!
I picked up the key for the new place on Sunday, but haven’t moved anything yet.
Yesterday I finally moved to Bowie! The commute to work is great; it went from 30 mins to 5 mins. 
I recently bought a myTouch 3G phone from T-Mobile (great phone!). Eventually I’ll get around to posting pics of it, and maybe my nitpicks of the software. Out of all the minor nitpicks, I felt compelled to write about one of them.
T-Mobile provides a nice application called My Account; it allows you to view how many minutes you’ve used, the data you’ve used, and how many messages you’ve sent or received. It also provides a bunch of quicktools and settable alerts. I’m irritated by the “Minute Usage Reminder” alert. It’s supposed to notify you when your minutes usage reaches 75% of your monthly minutes. From what I can tell, this feature is pretty useless. A single picture can highlight the effectiveness of this “feature”:
I’m not sure what they were thinking when they wrote this application, but it seems like a pretty easy calculation to me. How can anyone screw that up?
Today I filled up my car and calculated that I got 44 miles per gallon! That’s the most I’ve ever gotten in my car.
I’m not actually sure why I’ve been getting better mileage though. I did the timing belt change, but also changed the oil I use, plus installed the DieselGeek bypass filter, and CAT fuel filter. Whatever is causing it, I’m happy.
706.2 miles on 16.038 gallons of diesel. Goooooo diesel. Diesel being much cheaper than gas is a bonus!
I changed the oil in my VW Golf tonight. Yesterday, I received the Pela oil extractor from UPS. It was pretty beefy compared to my other smaller extractor, and it seems like a solid piece of hardware. The pump seems more durable, and the suction seems more powerful. Maybe it’s my imagination, but that was my initial opinion after using for the first time.
Before the oil change, I took a sample of oil from the oil pan using a vacuum pump sampler. I bought an oil analysis kit from Oil Analyzers that came with a prepaid shipping label. I filled it up with the pump, changed the oil, and will send it off tomorrow. After some positive feedback from using Mobil 1 Turbo Diesel Truck 5W40 oil in PD engines, I decided to give it a try instead of the normal VW spec 505.01. At tdiclub.com, there are more and more people having camshaft and lifter problems in their PD engines, even though they used the VW spec oil. Either the oil isn’t as good as VW claims, or the design of the engine isn’t as robust as their older diesel engines. Either way, I want to try to limit the damage the oil could have caused; I’m going to try using the Mobil 1 oil for a couple iterations, while taking samples between the 10K oil change interval to track the progress of the oil. It *should* do better than the VW oils, since the Mobil 1 oil is a better synthetic. We’ll see!
Soon, I’ll change the timing belt too. Everyone recommends that the valve cover be removed to inspect the camshaft and lifters, so I’ll be doing that as well. Hopefully my cam and lifters are okay. Even if they don’t look okay, I’m not entirely sure I’ll do anything about it. More than likely, I’ll just keep trying to minimize the future damage. A new cylinder head from metalmanparts.com costs about $1700, which would include everything I would need to replace (hopefully), should there be a problem. At least I know the approximate dollar amount of the fix for a hypothetical worst case problem.
I’ll post the lab results from the ~8100 mile sample from my car. I’m not entirely sure it’s an 8100 mile sample because I don’t remember the exact mileage of my last oil change. I know I always change it at roughly the 10,000 mile interval, but it may have been a couple hundred miles over or under the 90,000 mile mark. I’ll track the mileage a little better now, especially since I have to put the info on the labels for the lab to track.
This past week, I’ve spent a lot of time researching solutions to some problems we were having with Andrea’s car. After the seller tried fixing the vacuum issues affecting the turbo, he disconnected the vacuum line to the turbo wastegate actuator, created a mini vacuum on that line, and plugged it so the turbo actuator was partially closed. He checked the max boost by flooring it in several gears, and the max boost displayed as 15psi. I guess this is at the top end of what is “safe” for the turbo.
Afterwards, everytime the car shifted, it made a loud noise (clunk) and shifted hard. Some intense reading at mercedesshop.com and a few days later, I decided to fix the shifting by diagnosing the vacuum lines going to the transmission. Using a MityVac, I found that the vacuum line going from the vacuum pump to the valves for the turbo/EGT were leaking like crazy, so little or no vacuum was reaching the transmission. I solved this by plugging the line that was leaking. Since that particular line was for the turbo/EGT and the seller plugged the line to the turbo, the line was useless anyway.
With the line plugged, the shifting got much smoother. In fact, the shifting became too soft! Whenever it shifted into higher gears, it would rev a little before dropping rpms. After some more reading, I fixed this new problem by adjusting the vacuum control valve(VCV). The MityVac showed that the transmission was getting approximately 12″ of vacuum and when I revved the engine by pulling on the throttle linkage, it would drop to 5″ or so. I untighted two 10mm bolts on the VCV, turned it clockwise, and retightened. I’m not entirely sure what the twisting of the VCV does, but I’m glad it worked.
Eventually I’ll post a pictures of what I modified and adjusted and update this post.
We filled up Andrea’s car. 391.7 miles and 14.457 gallons = 27.1 mpg. I think the next fill up should give us the true mpgs of her car; this time, I filled up the car until I could see the fuel in the filler tube. Go diesel!
Last night, I changed the oil in Andrea’s car. The seller said that it had about 1000 miles left on it, but I’m glad I didn’t wait. When I checked the dipstick, I noticed the oil was super thick.
I like to use an oil extractor to change the oil on my VW Golf because it’s quick and mess free, but for Andrea’s car, it took me an hour to extract the oil. The oil was just too thick! Earlier in the day, we drove around trying to find a local store that sold an oil extractor that held more than 7L, but no luck. The extractor I currently have only holds 4L; this meant I had to stop half way to empty the extractor and continue. When I stopped half way, the tube accidentally splattered some oil on the wall. So much for mess free!
Over the next free weeks, I’m going to search for an extractor that can hold enough oil for all the cars. These are the most likely candidates:
Pela Pro 14 (14L)
Motive Power Extractor (10 Qt)
MityVac 7400 Fluid Evacuator (7.3L)
I’m leaning towards the first one, since it holds more and looks like it uses a sealed/solid container. I can’t tell from the pictures of the Motive or MityVac products if they also have a solid bottom piece.
Recently, I won an ebay auction for a wheelset that came off a Cannondale hybrid bike. I was mainly interested in the SRAM Dual Drive hub, since I’d like to use it with my Tikit. When I got home today, I finally got a chance to play with it. At first, when I tried spinning the cassette, the movement wasn’t smooth, and something didn’t seem right. After taking the hub apart, I found a metal piece on the edge of the hub’s shell.
SRAM’s website and parts list shows this as “Assy Planet Gear Carrier Dual Drive” and part number 65 0372 111 100 . I’m not sure how much this part costs, but I’m not really in a hurry to install it. Maybe tomorrow I’ll give the bike shop in College Park a call to see if they can find out how much it’ll cost.
Today I drove back from PA with four cases of water, one 27″ CRT Television, two backpacks, two boxes of bike parts, one Bike Friday Tikit, one Downtube 9, one dvd player and speaker system, and four cases of water (for my brother). Impressive isn’t it? I can’t believe how much weight the water added, but everything (including my brother) made the handling of the car much different.
