Why Mechanics Hate Electric Stuff

1/12/2025

I’ve said before, winter is difficult. I know that it really doesn’t get that cold here in the PNW – and I agree. It doesn’t.

What it does get is WET. So even if i worked on Emma in every free moment, there’s not a lot of reason to take her out of the garage from… October? To… April?

In any case, to be a good steward of her health, my wife agreed to help me with a few maintenance tasks yesterday.

Start It Up

Yeah, it’s been a while – I don’t want the car to get too used to sitting there doing nothing. We removed the jack-stands that were holding up her rear-end and put ramps in on all four wheels. Makes me feel better.

Then we started her up.

She didn’t really WANT to turn over, but after some work, she started to come around. Oddly though, she had trouble staying running, so we adjusted idle a little bit.

After adjusting the idle and fiddling with the air and fuel screws, we got her running long enough to idle for a bit. It was good to hear her.

This Blows

Yeah, so, as previously stated, we’ve been having an issue with the heater motor blowing no matter what. We had hoped that by pulling the heater controls out, cleaning them, and they putting them back in, we’d get the control we’re after, but alas.

We plugged the heater controls into the heater box and no matter what we did, it blew blew blew. So I disconnectd the power for the blower. We’ll have to investigate this further.

One of a few things might be wrong:

1. The blower motor is newer, and might be grounding itself out against the firewall in a way that the previous motor did not
2. It may be wired incorrectly to the fuse box, and therefore getting constant power – this is probably most likely
3. Somewhere along the line, the cables for the power to the blower have frayed and are grounding out – unlikely at this point
4. Our switch actually is bad and we need a new one
5. The ground ain’t grounding (the black cable in the photo below piled up against the firewall
6. Obscure 1960s bullshit reason here

Next steps?

Well, we’re going to take both of the cables which go back to the fuse box, and we’re going to test them with a multimeter.

One of them should be hot, and the other one, well… not. One is the power feed from the fuse box and the other is a return path.

If they both come back hot (with voltage) then we know I borked up the wiring.

If they are fine?

Hah. Well, that’s later-Brian’s problem.

Till next time!