Mechanically Disinclined

He got his pilot’s license back in February, but Jose hasn’t actually owned his own headset until yesterday! After months of borrowing Becca’s headset and spares, and having to drop by her house all the time to pick them up, he treated himself to a brand new headset of his own, and it arrived yesterday. Coincidentally, mine also arrived! Mine (which is necessary for my role as Jose’s #1 passenger) is a used headset I bought off ebay for $50. It wasn’t until after I bought it that I realized apparently it’s a helicopter headset, and I now get to spend another $40 for an adapter to convert it to general aviation use. Oh well, that’s what I get for using ebay! It was still way cheaper than a new one.

Back in March, Jose and I were sitting in the massive traffic backup that was the rodeo. (We found out later that we ended up going on a day that was sold out, so there were more then 80,000 people there, apparently.) As we sat in traffic, on an unusually hot day for March, my car’s air conditioning suddenly ceased to be cold. Then I noticed that the needle for engine temperature was pegged on H. Not good. The temperature came back down each time we started moving again, but when we were stopped in traffic, the car started overheating again.
I never noticed it again until the weather warmed up, but lately it has been happening pretty much every time I’m stuck in traffic. I’ve managed to avoid pegging the engine on high, but the needle has definitely been climbing. And that’s definitely not supposed to happen.
Now, I’m an engineer, but that doesn’t mean I know anything about car engines. In fact, they really intimidate me, in much the same way that the thought of working on my bicycle intimidates me — I’m terrified that in trying to make something better, I will screw it up and ruin it entirely.
But, as Jose kept telling me, it’s just an engine. And my coworker Ray encouraged me to get the Haynes manual for my car, that goes into great detail about how to do a lot of maintenance from the easy stuff to the much more difficult. I bought that and read through the section on the engine’s cooling system and then, after much research, and much talking to Ray, Jason, Byron and my other friends that are knowledgeable about cars, I determined the following:

• I might need a new thermostat.
• I might need a new cooling fan clutch.
• I might just need more coolant.

After all my questions, reading, and Internet surfing, it appears that all I needed was more coolant. The level in the reservoir was less than minimum, and opening the radiator cap revealed a dry interior, when the Internets (and my car’s user manual) said I should see coolant up to the top. So on Sunday night Jose and I added a whole bunch of coolant to the system and voila — the temperature needle has not risen above the halfway mark all week!
I feel rather dumb to discover in the end that all I needed was more coolant. But I am also a little bit proud that I solved the problem on my own (albeit with help from my friends)! And I learned a lot more about how my engine’s cooling system works in the process, so that was pretty cool.
This may not be the end of the story, since I do plan to keep watching the system in case I have a leak somewhere (I mean, how did the system get so low on coolant in the first place?), but for now I’m feeling quite happy and maybe just a tiny bit mechanically-inclined after all.
Next up: cleaning my bike chain! All by myself!