Warranties and Helping Friends

Whew, close call.

The passenger side window regulator just busted in the Beetle. Thankfully, the window regulators are still warrantied until January 4th, 2009. Now I need to call up VW and arrange warranty services. Methinks I will need to set aside a day to drive the car to the authorized dealership in Fargo.

In other news, I (somewhat) helped a friend troubleshoot his car problem today. His 1999 Chevy Blazer started once and quickly died. He wasn't quite sure where to start, which surprised me since he's an authentic North Dakota farm boy. I took charge and asked him to pop the hood.

Oh. My. God. There is no space under the hood of a Blazer! There's more room under the hood of my Audi!

That said, I could access the fuse relay box and one spark plug wire, which was all I figured was necessary for diagnosis. We swapped around the fuel pump relay with a matching relay for the horn, and the relay itself checked out fine. A socket set was handy so I attempted to pull a spark plug out to test for spark. A note for anyone unfortunate enough to own one of these disasters: forget about it. You cannot remove your spark plugs unless you possess gear you simply have no way of possessing as a mere mortal home auto mechanic.

Plan B was to remove a spark plug from a different car. Three cars later (Outback, Cutlass Sierra, and a Tempo, I think...) I was finally able to (barely) remove a spark plug for testing. We got everything set up, and sure enough there was spark. That pretty well narrows the problem down.

Before jumping into all this testing the first thing I had noticed was the lack of a hum indicating the fuel pump was doing pumping of any kind. I noted this at the start, but my observation was treated with about as much respect as dirt. Now we'd officially narrowed the problem down to one of two things: the wiring to the pump or the pump itself.

I was happy. I was right.