Simply shocking couple of hours...
This afternoon, I sat down and put the driver's side door back together after replacing the window regulator yesterday. Then it was time to sit down and spend some time grading student work... And then the mail arrived with my new shock gear from Captain Z.
Fireworks. Bells ringing. Banners flying. What could I do but install it?
I opened up the hood, popped the actuator off! If you haven't been into one of these yet, let me tell you: the retaining pin that holds the gear onto the shock is small. Really small. I mean it is so small I had to go outside... Well, you get the idea. I used a small allen wrench from precision screwdriver set as a drift pin, paying careful attention to not losing that little pin. I carefully tapped the allen wrench when it got to the point that I could no longer push easily by hand.
Almost there... (Now, you all know what's coming next.)
Despite my "light" taps, when the pin came loose, it went flying. Or so it seemed. Actually, it fell down into the actuator cup and was quite easy to find once I calmed down and stopped searching the next block over. I managed to dig it out with an awl.
But then the fun really began. You never realize just how large your hands are until trying to replace something like this. It rapidly became clear to me that doing it by hand wasn't going to get it. So I switched to a pair of needle nose pliers. I carefully put the pin into the plier jaws and was carefully getting ready to attempt to insert it into the gear on the shock when I noticed how much slop there was in the jaws of the <sproing!>
This time I know, roughly, where the pin landed. Even so, man, that's a tiny pin in a large driveway. At one point I thought about trying to replace the pin with a piece of paperclip but that proved just as problematic as the pin, so I went back and found the pin.
Needle nose pliers take two... And I dropped the pin into the actuator cup. Yep, those hands *are* mighty large. And how is it that my fingers are suddenly twice as large as my hand?
This time the awl wouldn't pick the pin up. My magnet was too large to get anywhere near the pin, but once I discovered that a steel nail (and not a number of other things!) stuck to the magnet, could reach where my suddenly gargantuan fingers couldn't, it worked nicely to retrieve the pin and the bits of paperclip that had suffered the same fate.
Switched out the needle nose pliers for a set of slip-joint and... Hmm. Dropped it pretty fast that time. And watched it bounce its merry little way between the tire and the inner fender all the way to halfway under the car.
By now, I'm used to looking for the little devil, you understand, so it took mere minutes to find.
Turns out the trick seems to be to start the pin through the gear before you mount the gear on the shock. This way, the thing goes right together. Problem solved, right?
Wrong. So here, the FSM failed me. The instructions note that you shouldn't need a lot of force to reseat the actuator and that there should be an audible "click". Nothing about how to line up the gear before mounting the actuator. Well, I got nothing. Nary a click nor anything else for that matter. I did finally get the thing to seat well enough to get the retaining ring to retain the actuator, so that's something...
I get in. I start the car. Systems do their thing and come online and (drum roll, please): the DIC is dark! No warnings, nothing!
Then I went over to talk to my neighbor for a bit, and when I came back the Service Ride System lit back up. <sigh>
So I pulled the new codes and got:
14 -- Maybe I didn't get the actuator mounted properly. Hopefully, that's it as I'd rather not have to rebuild actuators yet.
23 -- probably not anything but rather from when I was turning the key off and on working on the regulator.
32 -- Actuator out of position. This is new. But 32 is the right front, which is the one on which I just replaced the gear.
So, my friends, my question to you is: how to properly align and install the actuator once the new gear is in place? All tips welcome!
Thanks,
Jerry
Edit: as I was putting up my tools, I found the pin that I installed when I replaced the gear... What, you say? I'm wondering if perhaps the pin broke in two when the gear broke or somehow wound up in two pieces? I'll look at it again tomorrow and see if I installed only part of the pin, in which case, I'll tap in the left-over piece, assuming that I can get it started. If I do that successfully, do you suppose it will stress the new gear?
