I intended to have today to get many of the vehicular projects done, but the weather just has not cooperated! It was maybe 55 degrees by 11am, with 20+mph winds. That’s a bit cold to clean sticky residue from paint, and wetsand the plastic headlights.

So, it became oil change day, since the 9-5 needed it, anyhow. Then, the Impalas got new filters, which is a good thing- since their air intakes looked like they were submerged in a mountain for a few millennia.

I managed to get the right one fairly well initially sanded with 400 grit before the cold got to me; It looks as cloudy as the left one because that’s the nature of abrasions on plastic. It will be sanded with progressively finer grit, then given a clearcoat. That will brighten it up, and keep it from yellowing likely for the rest of the duration of the vehicles’ use.

I may have to add a new Category classification: “Auto Related”.

Back in the day, you had to go through the entire menu system, find your carcode ID, then manually construct a link to find closeouts for parts you were interested in. It wasn’t absolutely horrid, but it was annoying if you used them for transient parts- repairs for friends and family, and the occasional flip.

RockAuto has FINALLY addressed this!

If you look up your specific vehicle, after chosing the proper motor (when applicable), click on the RSS link beside the search entry, then choose “Enjoy a Bargain” on the right side – you will be presented with direct RSS/HTML feeds to their discount/closeouts. No more manually figuring them out!

That said, they’ve never figured out what RSS is. The RSS feed just links you to the HTML rendered on their website. Still, it’s better than nothing.

Oh, they’ve also shipped me a replacement sparkplug. It should be here by Friday.

For the few of you following the trials and tribulations of my recent former-cop car purchases, the snow has dried up and I finally had a chance to work on them over the last couple days. I guess I should have opened and checked the spark plugs when they first arrived, because I was on the last box before I found this beauty.

Different colored box, Spanish (the other 15 weren’t), and obviously well used. Well, they shipped it to me as new. Now I am down one plug, can’t source it locally quickly, and am not going to mix these with the old NGKs that were in there. So, it’s now on hold because their workers were too lazy to check their items before putting them in inventory- and I made the mistake of trusting the items being shipped as being what I believed I had purchased- before actually putting them to use.

Great.

I have two more boxes of stuff to check when it arrives tomorrow, and the SAAB stuff I haven’t even looked at, yet. I’d expect this from Wal-Mart, but not RockAuto.

Just in case you weren’t aware- Wal-Mart’s auto service shops will replace leaking/broken/etc tire stems for $3.

Working on the Impalas- got the nicer grill changed over to the lower mileage unit which has no issues other than needing a wash- and a back seat.

Took the Challenger down to 7-11 to fill it up with some gas, since it has old gas in it. Everyone turned and stared.. I hate when people slow down to 20mph in a 35 zone in front of me! Yes, it’s a cop car. No, I don’t care. MOVE!

Today was beautiful- it was almost 60 degrees the whole morning!

I was able to tackle repairing my fog lamps on the 9-5, which were weighed down by the snow and ice, causign the upper aged plastic mounts to crack and fail, got the back yard cleaned up, planted zinnias in the front yard, and managed to get two of the cop cars running.

The Challenger needs a new battery. The battery it had was flat when I got the car- but it was reading a whole nil volts today when I tried to see why the car didn’t want to start- despite being on a 2A charger over the entire last two weeks of snow.

I’m trying to coax it into charging enough to be a stop-gap, because I certainly can’t afford $200 for a new battery, just to clean up and sell the car.

Of course, modern battery chargers won’t charge a battery that is below a certain threshhold, since the uninitiated might try to blast the battery with a 200A “start” charge, and suddenly find themselves covered in boiling acid. Knowing better of this, I connected the charger to the battery, then stuck a lower-voltage jump pack atop of that to bring it up to 11.2V (Harbor Freight- decent hand tools, rest- not so good), coaxing the charger into trickling into the battery..

Tomorrow, hopefully it’ll have enough juice for at least one start- if not- time to figure a way to afford a new battery, since I need to move that car to get the other two out for sale!