Replacing the injectors was the easy part. The hard part was getting to
the darned things! This car is a marvel of American engineering. It
makes me wish it was a Japanese car. Most of the bolts were almost
impossible to get out without disassembling the entire car starting at
the rear bumper, but I managed to do it. Upon reassembling the car, I
lost a socket and a bolt somewhere down in the murky depths of the
engine (the outside of it). Oh, well.. The bolt was not a critical one,
so I was not too concerned. Upon re-starting the car it seemed to be
running better so I took it for a spin down the road. At the end of the
block I swung a U-turn and headed back. As soon as I turned around I
heard this awful grinding/scraping/clunking sound that seemed to be
wheel rotation related. I stopped and checked things out, but could see
nothing wrong. All the way back there was the sound. I pulled it in and
took another look around but could find nothing.
I decided to let it sit and grabbed my dad's ladder and proceeded to
climb on the roof of their house to clean out the gutters for them while
I was there. As I got to the driveway, my wife pulled the car back so I
wouldn't get the crap from the gutters on the car. As she did so, the
front wheels of the car locked up hard and the car refused to move.
Uh-oh, not good. She pulled forward and it moved, then backed up and at
the exact same spot the wheels locked up again. I told her to put it in
park and leave it till I climbed back down.
When I got down I pulled the car into the garage and felt a weird
clunking from the front end. When I backed up, the wheels locked. My
parents watched the front wheels and it was the passenger wheel that
locked. As I proceeded to begin jacking the car up I decided to call to
check on my motorcycle which was in the shop for a new front tire since
Wed. Now I really needed it back since we were down a vehicle. They had
not even looked at it yet. Needless to say I was pissed. I told them I
was coming to get the bike.
When I got back, my mom took Rain & the kids home while I proceeded to
put the front of the car on stands and remove the wheels to look for the
problem. With it on stands, I could put it in drive or reverse and the
wheels moved just fine. I thought this was odd, so put a jack under the
passenger wheel arm to put pressure on it thinking that the lack of
weight might have changed the angles and the issue was not apparent that
way. No luck there, but we noticed the half shaft was moving around an
awful lot. I suspected a bad CV joint at first, then I noticed the whole
engine moving around a bit and thought I had a bad motor mount that was
allowing the shaft to contact the frame. Nope, not that either. The
motor mounts were solid.
As I was putting the wheels back on to try again on all 4 wheels my dad
noticed a bolt in front of the garage sheared in 2 pieces. I went to
look and it was the bolt I had dropped earlier. I had earlier mentioned
that I thought maybe it was the bolt, but I dropped the bolt on the
drivers side of the engine and the passenger wheel was the one with the
problem so I had discounted that as the cause. Well, it seems that when
I made the left hand U-turn the bolt which I dropped on the left side of
the engine slid across the engine and fell on the right side into the CV
joint on the half shaft. This was the grinding I felt & heard and the
source of the wheel locking up. It seems as if when I pulled into the
garage the last time to check it out I finally sheared the darned thing
off, which is why I couldn't locate the problem with the car on the
stands. Ugh! What a nightmare to diagnose.
So, the car sits in front of my parents house waiting on us to retrieve
it tomorrow (I took the bike home). I think its time to put the gremlins
to bed. We're gonna look for something else. I'm tired of dumping money
into it. On the bright side, the car does seem to be running a bit
better though it still shakes a tiny bit, but I suspect that is the
computer compensating for the old bad injector which is no longer
installed. Hopefully it will start to run better with a few miles on it.
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