Keeping the Old Forester Going: DIY Belt Replacement

Earlier this year, I started doing a lot of the maintenance on my car myself--more out of a sense of, "if you want it done right, you've got to do it yourself," than necessarily to save a few dollars, though the latter is nice, too, given the typical mechanic charges more than double what I make per hour.  One of the first tasks I tackled was flushing the power steering system, which solved a multitude of problems--but eight months later the steering started acting up again, this time with an audible squeak I hoped was only the pump drive belt and not the pump itself going bad.

Drive belt cover removed to show the power steering
 & alternator belt (left) and air conditioner belt (right)

I've got nearly 90,000 miles on my 2004 Forester XT, and though I've been pretty good with the upkeep, it's nonetheless eight years old.  The steering system had really started to squeak when I first started the car, and the steering wheel had started vibrating again along with the car idling a bit rough at times like it had before I flushed the fluid (don't get me started on how Jiffy Lube had put the wrong fluid in--yeah, I know Dexron III is labeled as transmission fluid and not steering fluid, but that's what Subaru designed the car to take and that's what should be used!).  Replacing the pump would set me back around $150-$400 in parts, depending on whether I went with the OEM or an aftermarket pump, so I figured I'd first try replacing the belt and flushing the fluid again.

I don't believe drive belts are supposed to look quite like this...

The existing drive belt definitely needed to be replaced: as you can see in the photo above, it had split along the length of the belt into three sections, and was starting to fray along one of the strands as well.  I'm actually a bit surprised my battery held a charge, given the same belt drives the alternator and obviously  wasn't working very well, as it was slipping and squeaking a good bit.  The fact the belt is hidden away beneath a cover is no reason I shouldn't have caught this sooner (nor an excuse Jiffy Lube shouldn't have noticed it during one of their services).

Getting the right replacement belt was harder than the replacement itself.  My understanding from much consultation with the Internet tubes is that the generic aftermarket belts from auto parts stores don't quite fit right compared to the OEM ones, and unlike most parts debates across Subaru forums, almost everyone agrees on that point.  I drive right past a Subaru dealership on the way to work, so figured I'd stop in and that their service department would have something like that in stock, but alas, they "were at the warehouse," already closed for the day--and come Monday, the same tech greeted me with the same line he'd given me a few days before: "Oh, I've got some bad news on those belts... they're at the warehouse."  Yep, closed for the day again, too.

The delay pushed back the repair until after I got back from a trip to Vegas with my sister (that's a long story involving a skinny ginger git from Harry Potter and worthy of its own blog post).  Facing a commute to the office with a seriously-deteriorated belt, I decided to tackle the job before going into work.

Under the hood with the belt cover still in place

For the 2004 Forester XT, the accessory drive belts are located beneath a plastic safety cover (pictured above, foreground).  This comes off with the removal of two bolts--have a ratchet with metric sizes on hand, and you'll have no problems getting it off and out of the way.

Bolts which need to be loosened to remove the power steering & alternator drive belt (red circles)

Even split and as worn as my belt was, it had plenty of tension and wasn't about to slip right off.  I could have cut it--the existing belt wasn't exactly in great shape anyway--but given the new belt installation requires getting things loosened up, there's no avoiding releasing the belt tension.  There are three bolts for the power steering and alternator drive belt (which are mirrored for the air conditioner compressor drive belt); I've circled them in red in the photo above.  The two leftmost bolts are called out in the service manual and serve to tension the belts--to adjust, first loosen the bottom bolt a few turns, as it locks the entire assembly in place, then turn the top bolt to move the alternator up or down and thus increase or decrease the belt tension accordingly.

Before you get too far and wonder why the belt doesn't seem to be getting any looser, here's something my service manual neglected to include: notice the third bolt (center right, above)?  You have to loosen it as well so that the alternator can pivot as you adjust the long bolt on the left; a half turn or two is all it should take.  I had to really lower the alternator to be able to get the old belt out and the new one in, running that long bolt nearly all the way out.

While you've got the power steering and alternator belt out of the way, you should go ahead and replace the air conditioner belt, too, as belts tend to show similar wear, and you can't get to the a/c belt without first removing the power steering one.  The tensioner is similar to the one for the power steering and is located just to the left of the air conditioner compressor (the thing with the big pulley on the right of the image above).

Once the new belts are in place, just reverse the process you used to loosen the components and relieve the belt tension in the first place.  The belts should be tightened until they displace about a quarter of an inch under firm pressure, something you can measure by putting a straightedge between the pulleys and then pushing the belt down with one finger while measuring the distance it moves down with a small ruler (easier said than done).  Don't forget to tighten the bolt which allowed the alternator and compressor to pivot down.

I did the change-out in about 10 minutes before going to work one morning, so it should be easy for anyone to accomplish.  No special tools are required--just a socket wrench--and the parts aren't particularly expensive (both belts together set me back around $25 from a local Subaru dealership).  Replacing the belts eliminated my car's squeak, smoothed out the steering system, and should be good for another 90,000 miles or so.

Planting, Framing, Painting, Framing (A Different Kind), Wiring, Writing (Or: Where Has My Weekend Gone?)

It's been a busy weekend for me at Chateau Papillon (and busy for Beth, period; she's putting in 12-hour-plus days petsitting due to spring break for Fairfax County).  First, the plantings, with all this fantastic weather: two River Birches to join the one we planted in our side yard last year; add to that two Red-twig Dogwood shrubs, a juniper (non-native, unfortunately, but c'est la vie), and three bags of various bulbs.  Oh, and I replanted a tree sapling which had seeded itself along the fence line.  Still to go: the Ninebark, two Blueberry bushes, three Rhodies, two foamflowers, and two Inkberries.  And about 6 sacks of miscellaneous bulbs.  And the little saplings from the Arbor Day Foundation (10x) whenever they come in.

The framing?  I needed mats cut for two 12 x 18" prints, so I picked up a Logan 450 Mat Cutter at AC Moore with a 50% off coupon (making it cheaper than Amazon by about $40, but it can be found more cheaply online than that).  I framed the two photos (one of Fort De Soto Beach at sunset, one of a park in Vicenza, Italy), then moved on to more complicated matting and framed a creepy kitty postcard from Venice (said feline is dressed as a plague "doctor"), doing the 4 x 5.75" postcard in a huge 12 x 16" frame with a black mat.

Painting... well, not as much as I might have wanted so far, but I got out the power paint stirrer for my drill and cracked open a can of the chocolate we used in our hallway... two coats later, and the new thermostat looks like it was always meant to be there--despite all the screw holes I filled and sanded down where the new unit hangs vertically.  Add some general touch-up in the hall as well... I'll say the paint, over a year old now, is on its last legs; within 10 minutes after mixing, it had already begin to separate back out.  That leaves the library wall near the lights witch, as well as the library closet (which is still fuchsia, believe it or not).  And touch-up here and there throughout the rest of the house.  Not to mention the Neptune Suite and painting the exterior block walls, but those latter tasks will have to wait.

Framing again... I'm slowly working on framing in the new wall and doorway which will separate the laundry & storage room from the rest of the basement--once complete, guests staying in the Neptune suite need no longer see our Zombie Preparedness Racks of food bought in bulk and the like, or our grubby laundry sink and the sundry junk (X-mas decorations?) piled around that room.

Wiring... goes with that latter framing.  Two new outlets (one GFCI), a new light fixture, two light switches, and rewiring two fixtures we put in a few weeks ago to get them all on the same breaker.  Still to come: crawling in the attic again before it gets ungodly hot and draws in all the buzzy-bees and creepy-crawlies who have come to life with the coming of Spring.  I've got a ceiling fan and the Library's second fixture to install before weather compromises my ability to work in the attic.

Writing... well, I keep having inspiration to go and put some pen to paper and tackle something really creative--maybe the Torso Man story, or maybe something a little less gruesome.  Instead, I'm pooped and am writing in my blog.

I've left out photos, something quite important, as the Bird Watchers' Digest contributor submissions are due Monday, so I've got tomorrow to get my set together and posted online for BWD with the hopes of having them take (and pay me for) one of this month's.  And I've got to check into the due dates for Virginia Wildlife's contest, and Wild Bird's (which I won last year with my White Ibis--can't enter the amateur category there anymore; sigh).  Not to mention more trip photos to process, bird photos taken around the yard (no time yet for a trip to our favorite birding park, Huntley Meadows; sigh).

And cooking... oh, yes, how can I forget that?  I think I'll have to devote another blog to that alone.

It's been a busy start to the weekend, anyway.

Tiling the Basement: Part 1 (And Other Household DIY Tasks)

A couple of weeks ago at Chateau Papillon, we had a bit of a plumbing snafu.  Earlier that afternoon, I'd unclogged the master bathroom toilet, then gone into the hall lav to take a bath.  Beth, meanwhile, was doing some laundry in the basement.  A few minutes later, Beth came rushing upstairs: the downstairs shower, toilet, and the floor drain in the laundry room were all backed up, flooding incredibly nasty water into the basement.

If you recall, last time we had a drain issue in the basement, I'd been able to solve it by use of a pressure attachment for the garden hose.  Beth and I tried that again on both the laundry room floor drain and the downstairs shower to no avail; the clog was bad enough that even the high-pressure jet simply forced water out of the other fixtures.  Getting the drains fixed took a couple of visits by our plumbers, plus a subcontractor (Sparkle Drain Cleaners) who used a powered, bladed auger snaked into the main vent stack from the roof to clean out the entire line to the county sewer system.  You'd be amazed what they found in the main line: coins, nails and screws (none from our work--some were likely as old as the house itself), and even a socket wrench head, which was simply too large to have fallen through any of the drains (maybe via a toilet?).  But that whole experience is a bit tangential to the story at hand, if necessary set-up nonetheless.

Despite quick work with the carpet cleaner, we knew the basement carpet simply had to go.  Within a day, the entire basement began to smell like urine, and despite running the dehumidifier unseasonably and at a brisk pace, the laundry room in particular stayed damp--an increasing risk of mold, to be sure.  We'd planned to redo the basement, anyway--as you may recall, both Beth and I hate carpet (and who ever heard of carpeting a laundry room?)--but the flooding moved our schedule up a bit.

Taking out the carpet was a cinch; unlike the main downstairs carpet (in the "jungle room," no relation to Elvis and Graceland), not that much glue had been used to install it, and the water took care of what adhesive there was.  Quick work with a utility knife and some twine to bind up the rolled strips of pee-reeking carpet and we were done.

Sort of.

The water had gotten underneath some of the 1980s-era vinyl tiles in the basement, too, and where they'd come loose, I lifted those tiles up and away, expecting adhesive-stained concrete beneath.  Unfortunately, I found more tile underneath the vinyl, and not just any tile.  9"x9" black asphalt tile, probably original to the house from the 1960s.  There's one real problem with that sort of tile: it's laden with asbestos, up to 85% or more by weight.  (Some vinyl tiles up until the late 70s/early 80s also contained some asbestos, but what we've got post-dates that, luckily.)

The problem with asbestos arises--pun intended--when it gets airborne, and when microscopic fibers of it travel deep into one's lungs.  A few decades later, and your grieving relatives might be calling one of those ambulance-chasing law firms advertising on television, looking to cash in on your mesothelioma.  So long as it's undisturbed and sealed up, though, asbestos is fine--and likely lurking in the floors, walls, and possibly attics of tens of millions of homes across the United States.  What this meant, though, is that we had to entomb up that exposed asbestos tile ASAP.

The past week, we've been troweling in floor patch and sealant compound, building up to level where any vinyl tiles came up, and sealing all the way to the edges over the asbestos tiles.  It's still not quite level enough to do a good tile installation, so next up is a "self-leveling" compound, which we'll pour onto the floor and let settle to even out the edges and rough spots.  (Yes, I do plan to remove the baseboard, and re-seal the block walls along the bottoms where there's some inevitable water seepage, which you can see in the photo above if you look really carefully.)

A lot of the work has involved wearing my double-cartridge respirator, which I originally got for attic work (and which has now seen service in sanding down wall compound, cutting holes in the ceilings, attic work, and  basement asbestos remediation).  Obviously, we've avoided any scraping or removal of the asbestos tiles--just leave those suckers be, and seal them up; that's the way it's done.  And the one good thing about all that plumbing backup: wet tiles are much less likely to be "friable" and to flake off airborne asbestos particles.

While waiting for the last coats of floor patch to dry, I went ahead and installed a couple of lights in what will eventually be a basement hallway.  We'll be walling off the laundry and storage room area (which Beth calls the "water closet" now), so the hallway thus created leading from the "jungle room" (the main basement living space) to the wine bistro, downstairs bath, and around to the guest bedroom needs light.

Beth picked out some inexpensive sconces which ended up being very easy to install--as I mounted them on the wall around our furnace and utility closet, which was only finished on the outside, and the drop ceiling in the back half of the basement made for easy routing of the wiring.  I intend to move the lights over to another circuit once I relocate the larger fixture which currently sits over the laundry area; I discovered last week that the same circuit serves my office, the laundry room lights, and one set of living room lights upstairs.  When we pulled out the electric range, that freed up room for several small (15A) circuits in the main breaker box, and it will be a simple matter to tie into one of the unused 15 amp breakers and split these lights off of the other circuits.

Much more to do; I hope we can lay most of the tile itself tomorrow.  We won't have time to finish the hallway walls before going to Europe for a short vacation in a few days, but we'll at least be well on the way to having the "water closet" redone.

Winter's Toll, Part 1: Car Damage

As we continue to dig out from and clean up after the record-setting snowfall in northern Virginia, we're starting to uncover the damage done by the storm.  It's too early to say how our plants will come out; one of the blueberry bushes is still completely buried, as are several of our holly bushes, though at least two are toast, completely demolished by the weight of the snow.  More on that later, and with pictures (I promise!).

But first, I'm a bit annoyed at the amount of damage done to my car by this weather.  I'm not talking just about the corrosion from road salt; that's an issue, to be sure, but a minor one compared to a few other problems wrought by the snow.

First, I've got some sort of exhaust leak; my guess is incredibly bumpy roads--rutted sheets of solid ice, mostly--knocked something loose somewhere between the exhaust manifold and the catalytic converter.  (Because the upstream and downstream oxygen sensors read normally, I don't think the leak is after the converter.)  Also, those jarring, potholed, ice-sheet-rutted roads have done a number on my shocks and suspension, too; my car used to ride very smoothly, but now you feel every single bump in the road.  I'm not going to contemplate what's been done to my alignment; I'm afraid I'd go on an undeserved rant about VDOT and mail them a bill.

Next, because of some idiot the other day who refused to pull even remotely to the side of the road--and forced me to plow into a snowbank to avoid a head-on collision--there's a big panel that runs inside one wheel well which is completely wrecked.  Best I can figure, going up on that snow mound snapped the plastic panel along its front edge--luckily, the body panels around it seem fine.  But that plastic panel has been rubbing against something and getting hot enough to melt in places (that's how I discovered the damage to begin with: the day after said idiot ran me off the road, I smelled burning plastic after a drive).

At least the sound I thought was a possible wheel bearing issue has gone away in wake of the weather.  Some Forester experts suggested it was actually the backing plate for the disc brake causing the sound, due to uneven rust.  I guess all this bouncing around knocked the rust free.

Next up: a look at our poor plants.  We put backbreaking effort into our landscaping last year, and I'm afraid of what I'll see as the still-more-than-18-inches of snow melts away.

Getting an Audit of the Good Kind: Greening Up with a Home Energy Audit

This past Friday, Beth and I had an audit--but not one of the unpleasant IRS kind.  No, we'd taken advantage of the Virginia energy-efficiency rebate program to replace our furnace and a/c unit earlier in the year, and thanks to the weird way Virginia thought out (or failed to do so, I guess) the program, which included $250 toward an "energy audit," we had to complete everything before filing for the furnace--as once we've claimed part of the Virginia rebates, that's it: no claiming the furnace first, then the audit, and lastly any improvements made thanks to the audit.

As expected, the auditor came by with a blower door and nifty forward-looking infrared camera.  Basically, the blower door--a big fan in a frame which installs in the front door--establishes negative pressure inside the house, and spots of air leakage and other thermal issues thus become easily visible on the FLIR photos.

Heck, with the blower door in place, several of the air leaks were self-evident; simply placing my hand in front of them, I could feel the flow of air through cracks in the caulking around my office window or the light fixtures in the living room.

While we're still waiting for the full report from the energy auditor (at which time I'll finally be able to file for our Virginia rebates), I've already done a huge amount of work on remedying the basics.  Seven tubes of silicone caulk so far: I've applied caulk around the window frames--many of which were quite leaky, even though the windows themselves were not--and around several exterior air leaks, like the front door and the gap between the attic fascia boards and the brick, which let cold air straight into the attic beneath the layer of insulation.  And getting up into the attic gave me the chance to finally get around to wiring a light fixture in the library, and we've ambitions to install several more fixtures (a bedroom ceiling fan, a light fixture over the stairwell, and a couple of spotlights over the picture rail and bird art--all before we seal several air leaks along the tops of the walls and install another layer of fiberglass insulation.

Already, the house feels warmer with the reductions in drafts, and I'm sure our energy bills are going to be falling--and we'll be helping the environment as well.

It Started with the Pepper Mill: Or, Everything Goes to Hell

It started with the pepper mill.

After refilling it with a fresh load of peppercorns, the pepper mill simply quit grinding. I tried cleaning it out, refilling, tightening various bits and pieces of the mill, etc., but unfortunately, the "lifetime warranted" William Bounds pepper mill we've had since around 2004 was, to use a kitchen cliche, toast.

Then the dishwasher went out; the retaining nut holding in place the agitator snapped clean off. This one was fairly simple to fix; I only had to squint at parts diagrams on Sears' Web site for a few minutes and try to match up lines and labels on the figures to the unusual part names and descriptions. Although shipping was a whopping $20 for a $5 part (well, I could have put off using the dishwasher nearly two weeks for only $8.95 shipping and handling--I'm far too impatient for that, and we go through a load of dishes about every day and a half anyway!), once the replacement part arrived, the repair was rather simple.

Then Tabitha, my GPS, developed a severe, progressive, and incurable case of dementia. From stuttering the occasional "t-t-turn right" she went on to depressingly-long bouts of "loading maps" to finally admitting "no data" for requests for anything map related. A course of electroshock therapy (soft- and then hard-resets) failed to clear up this electronic case of Alzheimer's. Eventually, Garmin sent me a replacement under warranty, though the new Tabby is a refurb (a bit loose, if you ask me) and although a newer GPS chipset, a "downgrade" in that the prior one was a quicker-to-acquire, more sensitive version which chatted up the celestial orbiters in 1/4 the time the newer (but I'm sure cheaper) replacement does.

Our server crashed over the same weekend, apparently the victim of a fried hard drive logic board. I tried an identical drive (bought refurb for $40) to swap printed circuits and bring the middle-aged gal out of retirement long enough to recover backups without resorting to pricey data recovery joints, but in the end, we had to send the drive off to ESS Data Recovery and fork out an ungodly sum of money for my mistake in having not made off-system backups for several months.

And my car apparently has a bearing going bad--despite dropping over $2000 into service a month or two ago (a lot of that was on the maintenance schedule, but still...!) I'm debating what I can do to tackle the repairs myself, or if I want to go ahead and fork out the cash to keep the Exerda in good working order.

I just replaced my laptop's keyboard for a third time; maybe it's my typing... but fortunately, e-bay found a brand-new replacement for $15, shipping included, so it was only having to wait a week for the new one to arrive (and mashing the "E" key with extra force in the interim to avoid typing "th quick brown fox" "ovr and ovr" again).

Let's not forget, either, the leak in the backyard pond liner, which so far has received to no avail two complete sealant treatments of the likeliest points of leakage. I've got some ideas to find the leak that go short of buying a new liner sheet entirely, but it's still annoying nonetheless.

If I hadn't gotten a clean bill of health at my physical, I'd be a bit afraid to look myself in the mirror for fear of what might break down next!

Renovating an Antique, Part I: Reupholstering a Chair for the Library

Growing up, one of my vivid memories was of the furniture in my grandmother's upstairs sitting room, which had arms that looked like they ended in hands--something that creeped me out to no end; amidst the quiet clicking of the grandfather clock and the ticking floor register of the gas furnace, I imagined turning my back for just a moment and then finding the antique chair had come up to grab me from behind.

Several years ago, my aunt Mae had taken the sitting room furniture off when my aunt Marian wanted to redo the room; Aunt Mae never got around to having the chair and couch reupholstered, though, and recently, she offered them to Beth and me. As the wood itself was in great shape (particularly given the furniture is at least 100 years old), we decided to do the upholstery ourselves. Above, you can see the "before" shot, with Mr. Parker, enjoying the ratty old fabric. Aunt Mae must have tossed the cushions at some point (probably just as well, given the state of the fabric underneath).

After a lengthy, hot afternoon pulling out dozens of upholstery tacks, Beth and I finally got all the old fabric off, and the springs removed. To make things simpler, I used the table saw to cut a base platform to replace the springs; above, you can see that Didi quite approves of the chair which will soon be added to our library.

A couple of years ago, I repaired one of our antique kitchen chairs after its seat broke; in the process, I removed the old cushioning and replaced it with memory foam, making it the envy of the dining room table. Taking similar inspiration for the antique claw-armed chair, Beth and I cut a block of 3" thick standard foam, topped with an inch of memory foam padding from an old bed pillow top we'd quit using; a bit of foam glue pieced the layers together nicely.

I covered the cushion with the same velvet I used on our repaired dining room chair (we'd bought the entire bolt of the stuff when the Vienna location of Hancock Fabrics went out of business a couple of years back). Now, we need to sew the back cushion and do a bit of trim work to finish things off; more on that when we're done.

The Laptop Lemon and the Hardware Handyman

My current laptop has been something of a lemon at best--if not an outright cursed piece of hardware at worst.  Less than a month after I'd gotten it, it fell out of my laptop bag from a height of only a foot or so, but nonetheless cracked its case such that the stylus pen would no longer stay put (and I subsequently lost two $20 styluses). 

Now, I feel pretty comfortable doing repairs and work on laptops myself, including taking things well apart beyond pulling a drive or replacing the keyboard.  A prior laptop's power connector broke apart, and I replaced it with a metal-reinforced connector (out-of-warranty at the time); another had a fan failure which I later remedied.  But for the cosmetic case damage above, unfortunately, Gateway won't sell end-users the "plastics kit"--replacement plastic case parts--unlike some other manufacturers, so I've just had to live with that physical damage (Gateway wanted $300 to fix it, something I declined.)

But what else leads me to call my laptop a lemon?  At less than two years old, the keyboard began to fail, with several keys no longer responding to anything short of a right hook.  Fortunately, I'd bought the extended warranty, and Gateway shipped me a new keyboard free-of-charge.  Just after the warranty ran out, the internal network card began to fail; it dropped connections regularly (but unpredictably) and also saw weird signal degradation problems where an 11 megabit connection would slowly but unavoidably dwindle away to 1 megabit.  Fortunately, I found a replacement card--an upgrade to 54 megabits, no less--on eBay and swapped it out without much further issue.

Last year, the hard drive died; fortunately, though the death came all at once, it affected only the write heads--so I was able to plug the drive into a USB enclosure, set it to read-only access, and pull off all essential data.  I took that opportunity to upgrade the drive as well to something larger and faster.  At the same time, I maxed out the RAM by replacing one of the 512 MB DIMMs with a 1 GB module, having already done the same to the other DIMM when I replaced the keyboard.

The hinge on the laptop screen has been one of its worst-designed features; within a year, cracks began forming around the hinge's connection to the LCD panel, eventually widening to full-fledged breaks in the plastic.  This put stress on the wires and circuit boards within the screen and hinge, such that moving the screen would cause the tablet buttons to randomly fire (changing the screen orientation, etc.); fine, I disabled the button functionality.

For the past year or so, either the LCD screen backlight or the inverter powering it has been going kaplooey; at first, the screen showed an awful pink cast along the bottom, and more recently, the screen began to flicker.  A couple of days ago, the inverter began overheating to the point that the laptop screen's corners turned black (LCDs respond to heat--running the screen at a lower brightness or directly cooling it allowed the screen to recover).

This morning, the worst happened: the backlight failed altogether, and I haven't been able to resurrect it.  I'm hoping it's the inverter, but I'm following a couple of full screen modules on eBay at the moment, too, just in case the backlight itself has failed.  Worst thing is that I'm on the road for business travel and don't have access to any tools to take the screen apart... but at least I've got my work laptop, and being in Silicon Valley, I am hopeful I can find at least a replacement inverter, if not a whole screen unit, along with the tools I need to fix it (and which hopefully the TSA won't try to confiscate--they're allowed in carry-ons, but since when has the TSA followed their own rules?)

Sigh.  What a pain in the butt.  I'd buy a new laptop if (1) I weren't hoarding cash for our impending home purchase; and (2) installing and setting everything up again wasn't such a huge pain.  I may be a hardware handyman, but sometimes this job gets old.