Wow, it has been nearly a year since my last posting already? How time flies. The good news is the car has been running amazingly since I finally discovered my misfiring issue last November. It was due to a bad injector. I checked the resistances one night and all were looking good until I hit number eight, it was WAYY out, so likely wide open since the plug was always wet when I was checking. So, I ordered a new set of 19 lb/hr rated injectors and the thing fired up perfectly. No more misfiring, no more rockiness, just smooth revs. It also felt like the power was back to where I was expecting it should be.
In the garage near the DD, '16 ST2. Very comfy but still has some get-up.
Fast forward to the spring where I actually started driving and breaking the engine in. While doing some touching up cosmetically and interior wise. Slow and steady finishes the race, right? Touched up the bumper and side mouldings as the paint was all but gone. I did it just with a rattle can until I get the rest of the body where I want it for a complete paint job. Inspection, no problem. I have about 1200 miles into the rebuild so far and surprisingly have been getting some pretty good mpgs out of it. When I just drive it just to/from work I am nearing 25, mostly highway. That is way better than I used to get.
During a nice cruise around the lake.
I've only had a couple hiccups so far this year. One being my throttle cable somehow popped out of the pedal lever after letting off the pedal one afternoon. The plastic clip didn't look damaged and the pedal looked fine so I popped it back in and we'll see if it stays. Then there wad this morning, the darnedest thing happened that I would never have in a million years guessed could happen. See if you can guess it before I give it away.
The only thing that gave away anything was going on was I heard a slight belt squeal drum up while on the highway. Attentive but not worried, I figured my newly replaced accessory belt was just being noisy for some reason. It stopped after 10-15 seconds. Less than a minute later my battery light lit up and I noticed the volt meter was lower than usual, around 9-10V instead of the 13+ it usually is. *
*, I am in the middle of a highway where there aren't any good places to pull over, or off. So I keep my eyes on the gauges and limp my way to my job's secondary office which is 5-10 minutes away, instead of 10-15 minutes away to my main office, all while keeping and eye and ear open for anything. As soon as I pulled off the highway I noticed the power steering was out, OKAY the belt probably snapped, oh well. Then the temperature starts to rise steadily, YEA belt is definitely dead. Luckily it was only a mile off the highway and I made it without the temp hitting much more than 1 tick above center. So I open the hood to all it's glory and BAM, there's my alternator trying to jump it's way out the bottom of my engine bay. Hanging there by the tension of the belt wrapped around the tensioner and other accessories. Two of the bracket bolts sheared and dropped my alternator. Luckily it didn't find a way down and out of the engine bay for me to run over. My friend and I are guessing the top bolt backed out, maybe I didn't torque it proper(Probably)? Then the bottom two just couldn't handle the bouncy road and sheared off. Thanks for reading! Time to get this home and fixed back up. Maybe some thread locker this time too, as that was just a crazy turn of events. I am lucky there wasn't more damage.