Air filters!

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.

wasteful spending of the holidays 2, shark fin antenna

That's a shark fin antenna. Unlike the flashlights that actually have some use, this is purely cosmetic.

My car's stock antenna was this 1.5ft long boingy stick thing. Here's a picture of my car stock showing it.

Here's my car with a shark fin antenna... in the dark.. taken with a crappy cell phone camera.


I guess I can use my old antenna as a pointing stick... or something.

My shark fin isn't perfectly centered... or parallel.. then again, I don't think anyone else's is, and no one can tell anyways. It still bugs me though. I'll find some other day to reattach it better.

foglights!

My bulbs for them came in the mail on Tuesday. :D

Now I'm waiting for the actual lights to get here.. :(

[11/16/2009]
Everything else got here. Then I realized I got the wrong bulbs. The ones I bought are 9006, the ones I need are H11. 9006 bulbs are used on the 's' trims, but everywhere I looked didn't specify between 'i' and 's' trims. So I ordered correct bulbs. But here's a pretty picture of the bulbs I need to sell... taken with my housemate's DSLR cause I need a good picture to sell it with.

and here's all the parts I need for a fog light install. (lookie! new turn signal stalk). Crappy cell phone picture cause it's just for the blog. :P

So now I'll wait another day or two for the correct bulbs to get here, then I'll install. :D

[12/2/2009]
Late update. Installed them with the correct bulbs on 11/27. Bulbs didn't work. Threw in the stock ones and decided to deal with them when I got back home. Then after connecting some things backwards, cause polarity does matter for HID bulbs, but not for halogen bulbs, it works.

Picture courtesy of Eric. =)

followup work on car

This post contains a continuation of a project started in this post. =)

First time getting home during daytime, with the garage being empty, so I figured I might as well fix all the small sloppy things I missed last time. Plus, my replacement passenger side headlight has been sitting in my closet for a while now.

Lots and lots of work involved for a very small, almost unnoticeable change.

In order to access the headlights, I once again had to remove my front bumper. Easy stuff now. While I lied under my bumped to remove the mounting screws, I got a whole mess of engine dirt in my eyes, and the bottom of my front bumpers still just as scratched up, but this time with additional colors. How I ended up with red/green/blue paint scratches under my car I have no idea.

Then I had to heat gun open my passenger headlight to grab the clear lens. The seal wasn't too tough this time, which might explain why I had condensation in my headlights. Then I also had to heat gun open my replacement headlight.

Then, I completely removed and disassembled my headlight internals. I didn't do this last time out of laziness; but it seriously takes a whole lot of work unscrewing 3 very stiff 3" long screws. Seriously it does, and it means the headlights needs to be reaimed. I also painted certain parts of the inside the projector to reduce the "squirrel finder" glare. They never really hit the signs they're supposed to light up anyways. If I want to read signs, I'll just use my high beams instead *whistles*.

I also refocused my lens so that the cutoff actually looks like a cutoff, not distorted with a bump smack center.

Then it was sunset, so I put everything back together, sealed the headlight using my replacement--not melted--headlight cover, put the bumper back on, and cleaned up and called it a day.

!-Break to a few short side stories on other stuff

Saturday morning, yes, morning. Our water heater needed fixing (and so does everything else, but today was water heater day); the pressure release valve completely corroded shut, the main water-in control valve doesn't work, and the water and mineral deposit in the tank needed to be flushed out. Long story short, had to shut off the house water source cause the water heater water source shut off didn't work, then slowly slowly drain all 30gallons out before replacing the value. Then everything worked after that. Nasty colored water got flushed out.

Over the course of two weeks, doggy managed to break the welding holding together the locking hinge on our metal gate leading outside and separated our wooden door from the hinge leading to the hillside. As a temporary fix, mom moved our wooden rocking patio chair to block off the path to those gates. Doggy breaks everything.

Wednesday night, mom comes home and couldn't find doggy. Clever dog figured that he can crawl under the rocking patio chair to reach the other side. Then he went hillside exploring; normally that's perfectly fine, except that hillside has access to the backyard of everyone on our street, and on the street at the bottom of the hill. It also takes him a while to come back when we go out to call for him, but before he always came back, usually really really dirty. This time he didn't. So my mom spent all night looking for him. Turns out he got caught by animal control. He jumped down into someone's backyard, and couldn't jump out. They called animal control, then doggy gave animal control hell. Supposedly, it took many of them a very long time to actually catch him, then they weren't strong enough to actually drag him into the car, and probably got flung around a lot, before they finally just held him in place and got him into a cage. Then they spent the next 12 hours trying to get the tag from him. I'm guessing he tried to bite them. When they finally got the tag, they called our vet, in Walnut, who gave them at Walnut phone number that didn't work, then gave them mom's work number of where she worked 6 years ago, in West Co. Luckily she went back to work for that company so they actually got a hold of her. Course they were completely baffled at how a dog from Walnut got to Monterey Park. Then they didn't dare putting the collar back on him. When they got in contact with my mom, she said she'd come pick him up during lunch, they responded with, "NO PICK HIM UP IMMEDIATELY". When she pick him up, he flung the cage he was in around and completely trashed the place. Then charged straight out, causing much grief to everyone working there. They were all like, "nooooooo, he took so much effort to catch". Mom then called him back, put his collar on him, and he dragged her out. Then animal control just threw all paperwork into the car and he obediently stayed in the house after that.

My lawn looks like this!

It's a wonderful patch of weeds. There are a few blades of grass here and there, but the weeds make the lawn pretty green too! People driving by wouldn't be able to tell with just a glance.

--end tangent.

Saturday afternoon I decided to wash my car, I didn't get very far cause the house water was shut off. After the water heater was fixed I got around to washing it.

Well I figured, since I was going to get dirty washing the car, might as well disassemble my driver side headlight to refocus that lens and reduce glare too. So once again, removed bumper, opened up headlights, disassembled everything inside, put everything back together, and then back onto the car.

So then both headlights were correctly focused, but not properly aimed. When it was dark out, after I ate dinner with connie+friends, turns out my driver side was aimed so far up that it could light up street signs on traffic lights from the stop line, significantly higher than most people's high beams. My passenger side was aimed so low that it only went about 20ft in front of me. I probably pissed off a bunch of people when I was looking for nice dark place with a big empty wall.

They're still not perfectly aimed, they don't point perfectly straight, one of them is slightly sideways, but that's ok, as long as the height is correct. I also have them aimed slightly higher than what I had before, because the bumps of light are gone.

Stock:

Before:

After:
There's still a little bit of glare (I actually couldn't see it in person, but the camera caught it). But the cutoff is a lot sharper from farther distances now, while maintaining the same amount of blue/purple flicker.

Next thing I'll do to these is make them twice as bright! But before that, some other side projects I have in mind... foglights, LED tail lights...

Plus, I have a cool new paperweight, taken out of my extra headlight.

It'll come in handy when I want to retrofit another projector to replace the high beam reflector. Something I might do much much MUCH later.

clear lenses

Eric is a super awesome friend that helped me with most of this.

So here are my old lenses, didn't take a picture of my new ones, kinda forgot. It's pretty hard to tell the difference through a camera anyways.

So the difference is, old lenses slightly blurred light, and clear lenses did not distort light at all.

So to get to where I where the lenses are, first I had to take off my front bumper. The screws under the car and in the engine bay weren't too hard to take out, just the one behind the tire walls were... I had to turn the tires one way, go around the mud guard, and unscrew the screw that was barely visible. Wasn't too hard to take out after feeling around for it, but it was pretty painful to put back in. But it did involve starting the car, turning the wheels for more screwdriver clearance, then after taking out on side, turning the wheels the other way.

No bumper!

Oh, and notice the foglight cables, yeah I have cables for foglights that I don't have. I'll get some one day.... when I have a real job and lots of time and lots of money and did I mention money?

Then I removed the headlight assembly. The paper blobs are just holding the HID bulbs, cause they're not supposed to get dirty.



Which I dumped into my living room.

Then came the hard part, opening them up. To do that, the silicon seal needs to be melted so the housing can be pried apart. For the first one, I stuck it into the oven. Bad idea. My oven isn't big enough, and one edge got too close to the edge of the oven. So my passenger headlight now has one corner slightly melted.. and it's easily noticeable. So the second headlight we used a heat gun. Considerably slower, but it didn't melt off corners. Just goes to show guys should stick to power tools, not kitchen appliances. :P One day when I have more cash on hand, I'll replace it. But that's way way down on the list.

So the headlights look like this opened.

It takes so much effort to get it opened. With the headlight coming out of the oven, everything was hot, so it doesn't matter where you grab onto the lights, hot. With the heatgun, only the area the heat gun was spraying is hot, which takes considerably longer to heat up all the silicon everywhere. It pretty much became, heat, pull, heat, pull little by little until it came open. It doesn't help that there was nothing to grab onto to pry it open.

Silicon got everywhere too. It's like gray super sticky boogers that cools into a rubberlike material.

After it is open, its simply unscrewing the thing holding the lens in place, changing the lens, and screwing it back on.

Sealing it isn't too hard either. Both headlamps got closed using the heat gun. Heat silicon, squeeze, heat, squeeze until closed. We did a pretty messy job of closing it, cause silicon gets everywhere, and no one can see it anyways.

Then everything else got put back together in reverse order.

From preliminary observations, the light is definitely sharper. Staring stupidly at the light from many angles, it seems like there is some blue flicker added too, but it's hard to tell. Oh, and it was nice how we kept seeing spots after repeatedly looking into the lights. Don't do it, they're bright even in daytime.

Before. On my garage wall for lack of better wall. I'm not sure if the sharpness of the beam can be photographed well enough to see the difference.

After pictures will come up when it's night out. OK. Managed to get the car out. First the cutoff looked kinda like this...

Which took a while to realign.. and I don't even think I did it correctly.

That cutoff is actually not correct, but I don't really know whats wrong, and I don't have the tools to fix it, or the time. Since I have to replace the headlight I melted, I'll eventually open these up again and fix it... eventually.

But the cool side of this is, the blue flicker.



Next: LED tailights! Probably one of the easiest lightning mods. Yeah, I need a break from the tough ones.

HIDs (with some pictures now!)

My spring break project was to install HIDs on my car. They're cheap, and didn't seem that hard to install when I bought them, so I figured since I drove in pitch black pretty often, why not? More visibility is never a bad thing, plus, they look pretty.

I got the DDM 6k kit, in case anyone was curious.

My mom had the camera, so I couldn't take pictures while I installed, or of anything, but it's not like there was anything interesting to take pictures of anyways. The bulbs came in a plain box inside a bigger plain box. Exciting huh? Install just required me to removed my battery cover, my battery intake, and my fuse box cover, also nothing exciting.

Since there's no pictures, I'll keep installation details brief. When I was reading up on installing, everyone complained about the "bitch clip" that is supposed to secure the bulb in place, and the lack of space inside the engine bay to move around. Some people spent hours on the install just because of the so called "bitch clip" (I think the real name for it is "retention clip", whatever.) For that reason, many people have come up with very creative ways of reattaching that clip, ranging from the obvious way of removing the headlamp from the car (which requires removal of the front bumper) to the creative way of using various different wrenches or push in different directions and stuff.

Since I was lazy and didn't want to remove the bumper, and I didn't want to look around for wrenches since it took me like 20 minutes just to find a screwdriver, I decided to just install it onto the car with everything in the car (make sense?). That clip seriously only took about 2 minutes the first time to figure out how it worked, then another minute to unlatch it. Then another 2 minutes to reattach it with the new bulb inside. Not too sure how people could spend hours on that clip with the headlamp out of the car. Everything else was even easier, except I just mounted my ballasts whereever, people recommended mounting them under the headlamp, but that's especially hard with the bumper still on the car. So my wires are kinda messy, but they're not in the way of anything, so it doesn't matter.

Since I installed them during the daytime, I couldn't see if they were aligned correctly, or judge how bright they were. The first person that needed to go out at night was my dad, so he got to be the guinea pig, in case something went wrong. He had to go pick up my mom. So when they got back I got both their opinions.

Dad said, "Good, they're very bright. OK. Hope they'll help you see farther at night." They are bright. When they came back, I was trying to figure out if there was any glare produced, and I went a bit too far down, and now I still see a squarish circle in my left eye every time I blink.

Mom thought the high beams were on. She thought the cut off was way too high and it would glare incoming drivers. She thinks it's ridiculous how people would spent money on lights. So I took the car for a spin around darker areas and some cars to see if there would be glare or if the cut off was too high. The beam is actually leveled perfectly. It stays parallel to the ground all the way until it hits something. That cut off never gets higher than the opposite cars headlights, and since my car is pretty low, it shouldn't be too much of a problem. Though, if I go over speed bumps, or am parked tilting upwards, there's really nothing I can do. Oh, and she said I would get most definitely pulled over, seeing my luck with police, yeah probably maybe in all possibility eventually.

I think the lights are a lot bluer than I expected. I thought they would be very white with a slight tint of light purple/blue, like my LED key chain lights; they're closer to sky blue, which looks nice and all, but it really attracts attention. They make cool marks on the floor, not that it really matters. They look cool when they warm up. I have a pretty fuzzy cut off line, I'll get around to fixing that some other time, maybe during summer. While I'm at that, I'll add that blue flicker BMWs have on their lights.

I'll add pictures later tonight if I can find a dark place with walls (got one in mind).

Pictures! (I took them really quickly when I got to drive around at night, yeah, took a while)

What my car looks like with them on:


A color comparison with my high beams, my old halogens used to be that color:

rain and 5-gallon water bottles

So it rained pretty hard this weekend, and I decided, well, my car is filthy, might as well wash it while it's raining. So I backed my car straight out of the garage (which, btw, looks hilarious cause it's perpendicular to the actual driveway), grabbed a terry cloth, and started wiping it down in the rain.

It was great and all, the rain rinsed away the dirt and grime while I wiped it down... and people driving by had the most WTF expressions on their face; why did he back his car out of the garage like that, why is he washing his car in pouring rain, and woah that's one huge puddle I just went over without knowing.

Then it stopped raining for a bit, and my mom was like, well, since you're already outside, and your car's outside, go buy me water. So I went to Vons and filled up two 5-gallon bottles of water. Turns out I didn't tighten the cap tight enough on one of them.. guess what happened when I went downhill and it tipped over..

I ended up having half of one of the bottles pour into my car. Half of it ended up where the spare tire was.. the other half ended up on the rear seats and the rear foot space. So I had a wonderful little puddle in the backseat. Oh, and I have rear foot AC vents, and they got flooded with water.

So I spent the rest of the afternoon getting the water out of my car. It was easy enough getting it out of the trunk, just removed the spare and dumped out the water. Getting it out of the carpet and rear vents was another story..

I ended up geting rags and soaking them in the water, then wringing them dry. Repeat many times. After the rags stopped absorbing water, I used paper towels. Those commercials really are true, you can wring them dry and reuse them so many times. I also had tons of fun with the hairdryer... until it pooped out on me. Funny picture though, me, my laptop, and a hairdryer sitting in my car.

So now my car pretty much looks like this while it dries in the garage. I moved my mom's car into the hail to do this. haha. She's not too happy about it.

Oh, and the hood's popped open cause I disconnected my battery so the lights wouldn't stay on while I left everything open.

new car!

I actually planned on updating while I was still test driving the cars, except I never got around to it. Bought this car over the Mitsubishi lancer because it has a quieter engine, its a lot lighter, and drives better overall.

Now there's all the small things I don't like too much. For starters, when we test drove cars, we tested the '09 model. When we hunted around for a better deal, dad bought the '08 model. It's a $5000 difference, go figure. I loved everything about the '09 model, and I think my dad expected the '08 model to not be so different. Well, unlike the '09 base model, the '08 base model doesn't have..

Power mirrors. Whatever, it's a pain in the ass to adjust the first time, but since I'm the only one driving, I don't think I need to readjust them anytime soon.

Power windows. Theres a plus and minus side to this. Plus side is I can open and close my windows without the engine on. So my mom thought I was weird when I had my windows open in the garage. Downside is when I'm driving, I can only open and close my own windows, since I probably shouldn't be trying to open my other 3 windows while driving. Funny comment from mom was, look, now when you drive your car into a large body of water, you can open your windows and everyone else in the same situation as you're in with power windows will die, see? useful! But until I drive the car into a lake or something, power windows > no power windows.

Power locks. Now this is my biggest cause of irritation. Even the old Mercedes had power locks. It gets very very annoying because I like to throw stuff into the back seats, and when I take those stuff out, I have to manually unlock the door, then relock it, or unlock it, throw stuff back there, relock it, then unlock it again when I want to take it out. So, no keyless lock/unlock. No alarm. No long distance trunk opener. Maybe one of these days, we might ask them to install it.

Ironic part is, when we started shopping for cars last year, dad said he wanted me to have a car with power windows, power locks, radio, and air conditioning. (Well, obviously, he wanted the standard safety options too, air bags, anti-lock brakes, seat belts, w/e. Most cars have all that these days).

Now what I like about the car.. (with mom's comparison to her Pilot)

It's light. Like, very very light. It accelerates fast, and stops fast, and is super easy to control. Mom complains how the car is too light. Well, it's less than half the weight of the pilot. Makes sense. She also complains how since my car is so light, it has a higher chance of spinning out than her pilot. Counter-argument, Pilot has a higher chance of tilting over.

Since I got home first, I snagged the Pilot's parking spot in the garage, next to the Mercedes that we probably will never sell now. The car is so much small than the Pilot, so I can actually fully open all the car doors, the car hood, and the trunk, and Spike can still run around quite freely in the garage. With the Pilot, we couldn't even open two doors on the opposite sides far enough to let a not skinny human out without it hitting either the kitchen door, or the Mercedes. Now the landlord's description of the garage being "very big" when we toured the house for the first time seems likely.

I have a AUX jack! I can plug in my iPod (or any other similar device) to my car. :D Except I normally keep my max volume limit on my iPod around 20% of the absolute maximum (hey calculus!) cause of super loud earphone. So I need to adjust that too. But it's nice, I have music on long drives.

Now the sad part is that my mom won't let me drive it, cause she wants to drive it. Which isn't half bad, cause she's helping me break in the car anyways. So if she wants to spend the next 1000 miles driving local or in traffic, without sudden acceleration or braking, or abrupt sudden maneuvers, she can be my guest. :P New car smell makes my head hurt too, dunno why.