the land cruiser’s back in action, ready to roll.
no thanks to me.
well, thanks to me and hmc and koji, but it was partly my fault in the first place so i cancel myself out.
somehow hmc was driving it around all last week with no problem, until she had to run out to the berkeley apartment to try to show it to a subletter. and then it wouldn’t start.
well, so we’ve been having this thing where the red connector keeps popping off the battery, so you just have to pop the trunk and put it back on. annoying, but not fatal. but that didn’t seem to be the problem this time, as it was on solid, but no juice. not even pulp.
i even tried to jump the sucker with my little miata monday, to no avail, so we figured something must be really wrong with the car. maybe alternator, maybe some cable somewhere?
so we had it towed to that very nice man koji at joy auto on 12th street, who looked at it and said that the battery was seriously dead. not only dead, but a bad battery.
only thing was, i had just bought that battery two months ago.
he says this sort of thing happens all the time, and we should just take it back, and meanwhile, he charged it up but warned us that it wouldn’t hold.
so i try and take it back to kragen today, and they test the battery, and they say it’s fine. because it’s charged. doh.
thankfully, hmc brings up the fact that it seems to be the wrong size battery. which it does seem to be. much smaller, that is. he checks the computer, and finds that the battery does have enough cranking power, but the other larger one is actually recommended. he asks us why we ended up with the dinky one instead?
i reply, “well, that’s what the girl here told me to get.”
uh, which, well, isn’t technically true at all. it’s the one that the kragen website told me to get, and the website didn’t give me any other options. in fact, when i bought the battery, the other girl asked me if i was sure that this was the right battery, in effect dissuading me from doing what i did.
anyway, he ended up taking back the bum battery and let us pay the difference to buy the new properly sized battery.
hooray! battery fits, land cruiser starts, everything is happy.
in retrospect, i see how silly and wrong everything was: trying to fit that dinky battery in the large compartment, forcing me to remove the coolant fill tube to tighten the connecting leads, and that whole thing about the lead popping off all the time. when you actually use the right part, things really do work better!
the moral of the story: the internet is smarter than you are. no, maybe it’s: people are smarter than the internet. or maybe: you can’t trust the internet for everything. some people are smarter. on some specific things.
then again, you’re reading this parable on the internet, aren’t you?
Posted at August 18, 2004 3:44 PMi think the real moral of the story is: “you only think you’re smarter than the internet until you get sucked inside it and have to battle the evil CPU with the help of a floating pixel named Bit.”
i mean, duh.
Posted by: xz at August 19, 2004 12:09 PMAh, I think the moral of the story is that boys don’t like to ask questions, they would rather go on the internet and pretend that they know what they are doing than ask for help.
The second moral is Ed should not work on his own car without supervision, no I take that back, you can change the windshield wipers.
I didn’t really think about it the other day when you told me, but did you really try to jump the Land Cruiser with the Miada? Hee.
The third moral is that Ed rocks! He fixed the Land Cruiser and is taking me to Black Rock City. What music are we going to listen to?
Posted by: Cheryl at August 21, 2004 6:04 AMhey, come on now, i did once successfully jump the land cruiser with the miata.
apparently you can do it if you just need a little boost, but you can’t do it if the battery on the cruiser is dead dead dead. not enough cranking power in the little miata battery, which is the size of a 12 volt.
Posted by: e at August 21, 2004 9:29 AMComments are now closed for this entry. Thank you for playing.