Car manual says I should change my filters every 20k-30k miles or so. Supposedly, the dealership charges $100+ for labor for changing air filters... I thought, how hard could it be? You slide out the old ones, and put in the new ones.
Intake filter took 5 minutes. Remove battery intake, unclip intake cover. Slide out old filter, slide in filter. Done.
The cabin air filter though was a major pain in the ass. For starters, here is where the panel to access the filter is.
So, its basically on the left side of the passenger foot well. It's there cause my car was made in Japan, and they're right hand drive, so the filter stayed on the side of the driver, where it's supposed to be.
To access the filter form the passenger side, I had to remove the trim that covers the glove box fasteners, remove the glove box, remove all the trim covering the fuse board, detach fuse board connections, remove the fuse board, remove the fuse board bracket, unscrew the filter panel, take out the filter and replace.
It was all fine and dandy until I reached the nuts holding down the fuse board bracket. My socket wrenches were not deep enough to reach the nut... so I had to find a normal wrench. Turns out my dad probably lost his 12mm wrench... and probably 4 of them cause I found 4 different 13mm and 17mm wrenches.
So I reattached the fuse board and battery and went to Home Depot to buy wrenches! My interior looked super ghetto with all the trim and glove box missing. Oh well.
When I got the wrench, I found out the nuts were on really really tight. No seriously, not only is there not enough room to really use the wrench, it would not turn the nut at all. Eventually it came loose when I used a hammer to bang on the end of the wrench repeatedly very very hard, or as hard as I could considering the space I was in.
Of course when I put the nuts back on, I didn't even bother tightening them with the wrench. It's job is to hold up a one pound fuse board, it doesn't need all that torque.
Old filters looked like this:
No picture of new intake filter cause it's purple/black. Really, the filters were still pretty clean. It probably could have lasted another 2 years of abuse.
Since my I already got the fuse board out, I also rewired some things so I could turn on my fog lights with my parking lights instead of only being able to turn them on with my low beams. That wasn't too bad, except for removing the electrical tape on top of the shrink wrap which was over even more electrical tape. They really don't want you messing with those wires. I'll update with pictures later...
Oh, and the best part is I spent all afternoon in 103F weather in the garage doing this. So I had nosebleeds afterwards. Fun fact: sneezing while nosebleeding = paintings of fireworks!
Spike realized that I was busy all afternoon and took the time to bite off a big chunk of his flesh to almost get a hidden splinter out. Nasty as hell. It looked like someone got a knife and kept poking a piece of flesh until it made a thumb sized volcano spewing out puss and blood and fat, surrounded by hair and saliva... and I had to dig through that to find the splinter, pull it out, and poke around some more to make sure all of it came out. Then disinfect with tons of rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide, which I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to use on open flesh wounds, but better than nothing. Bandaged him up and put his head cone back on. Spike seems pretty relaxed right now so I'm assuming I did an OK job. He's probably still angry at me cause I put the cone back on his head.
I always wanted an Android phone. Then the parental unit gave the OK and I got one. It looks like the Droid version of the iPhone4. Just without a camwhore camera, and better normal camera.
Oh, and it has a really really shiny screen (or my screen protector is really shiny...). It's almost like a mirror.
