(written on April 1st from notes)
I was late getting going this morning, but it was a beautiful day, so I figured it would be a good opportunity to make the Peg Leg Falls hike again to try to capture the color magic of my first trip to the falls three years ago. 😁
After a quick photo op by the lake…
And then a brief road-construction delay on a country road, I was on my way, once again making the drive through Arthur’s Pass. 😊
Clearly I must have been distracted, but I was still surprised when I realized I had driven right by the little dirt turnout that you need to park at for the river walk to Peg Leg Falls. 🙃
So I doubled back, pulled into the little dirt parking area, aaaaaaaand then proceeded to spend hours battling my heating components… and my frustration. 😅
I hadn’t taken pictures of the positions of the actuator and connecting rod the other day, so I was flying blind trying to figure out how to put it back together.
And there were at least four different variables:
- The actuator needed to be functioning properly, with one direction culminating in full heat and the other direction culminating in full cold. That seemed to be good to go, but
- The actuator rod needed to be in a certain position when reattaching the rod, and
- The rod needed to attach to the lower door connection with that connection in the correct position, and
- And the rod needed to be the proper shape, and it had been bent, but I didn’t know what shape it needed to be in.
At least, those were all the variables I was trying to work through, and that’s a heck of a lot of possible combinations to have to try.
With very little information available online for my particular make, model, and generation, I was relying on AI to get me the data that I needed for how the system worked.
The information the AI gave me made logical sense, but no matter what I did, no matter how I placed the components, I could never get the system to function as described by the AI.
After many attempts and much frustration, I finally video called my brother Richard to get another pair of eyes and perhaps a better brain on the problem. Since the onset of brain fog in my late twenties, I often struggle with abstract thinking, so it’s nice to have a brilliant brother to bounce ideas and circumstances off of.
It took a good long time to be able to get him the views necessary to understand how the system functioned and why I was having such a big struggle with it. In the end, the best explanation for why I was unable to get it put back together properly seemed to be that I was most likely dealing with bad information from the AI. The functional description of the system was logically sound, but it just wasn’t working out that way in practice.
So I tried using a different AI. I have been using Google’s Gemini, and I switched over to Grok. Information that Gemini had given me, but then when I pressed the AI further, explaining the situation, it changed its mind and gave me different information. 😆
I think it was Grok’s third attempt, basically saying that the functionality that I was coming up with was actually the correct functionality, so I put everything back together that way and called it good.
Good golly goodness. 😶
Having spent so much time working on my van’s heating system, trying to get an official diagnosis, so I knew how to fix it or what to tell whoever bought it from me (Winter being right around the corner 😅), I ended up getting a super late start hiking up the river to the falls, which meant that the sun was already behind the mountain, which most likely was going to put the waterfall in the shade.
😕
I should have just gone right up when I first got there, but I wanted to get this stupid heater situation figured out.
[sigh]
Oh well.
The water level was a heck of a lot lower than it was a couple of months ago when I was here before, which made the water hike a lot easier.
I also measured the distance of the hike and how long it took me. As best I can tell, it’s somewhere around a quarter of a mile, and it didn’t even take me 15 minutes of rock hopping.
Easy peasy. 😊
As feared, the section of the canyon with the waterfall was shaded, but it was still beautiful.
After getting back to the little dirt parking area, a gentleman down by the river who had parked near me called over and asked if I wanted anything to eat.
While I had been working on issue, a 20-something Middle Eastern looking gentleman had walked over and asked me if I happened to have a propane fitting connection. Had he and the gentleman with him were trying to have a barbecue in the mountains, but they had forgotten the fitting they needed to use their propane tank with the stove, and they lived all the way in Christchurch, so it wasn’t a simple thing just to drive back.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have what he needed.
But after getting back, they asked if I was hungry, and I wandered down to at least chat with them, not actually expecting to eat anything.
But they made me food, and we chatted for a little while. Turns out they were from Afghanistan, four of them in their… I would say late twenties to early thirties maybe.
Once again, the conversation turned to politics quite quickly, and they thought that maybe I had been in the military, probably because I was wearing my regular camo hat.
For some reason, I felt a little uneasy. They were super nice on the outside, but it just felt… uncomfortable.
It didn’t help much when they said that life was better in Afghanistan with the Taliban in control. 😅
Now, to be fair, what on Earth do I know? I only know the “facts” that I get from the information sources I’ve sought out and come into contact with over the years.
Does that mean I actually know what’s happened and what’s going on?
Nope.
My experience tells me that the information I receive is generally biased, No matter where I get it from.
So, though I feel like I have a relatively accurate perspective, I’m open to being incorrect.
And I’m a firm believer that expectations and assumptions have an extremely powerful effect on perception of experience (e.g. the 1980 Dartmouth invisible scars study).
After bidding farewell to the Afghani gentleman, I decided to swing down to Arthur’s Village and avail myself of the huge recycling bins next to the train station.
Many thanks to the people who put those there. 🙏
Well I was there, I popped on over to use the bathroom and what did I notice?
A hose!!!
Sure, it was labeled as a fire hose 🙃, but it was just a garden hose with a cut off end, so you wouldn’t even be able to screw anything onto it.
After all of the diagnostic work that I had done to try and figure out the heating issue with my van, the symptoms seemed to best fit an issue with a clogged radiator core, and unless I wanted to pay a shop to flush out my radiator core, which I didn’t want to do, I needed to find somebody with a hose, so I could back flush any and all gunk out of the heater core.
And here was a hose. 🙃
I debated for a little while whether or not to use the hose for my flushing purposes.
Would anybody care?
Eventually, I unwound the hose to see if it would even reach my van where it was at, and it wouldn’t.
It was also still daytime, which meant there were people regularly entering and leaving the parking lot, which wasn’t optimal.
So I moved my van to the other end of the bathrooms, where there happened to be another fire hose on the lady’s side, but I didn’t use it.
I did decide to go ahead and try flushing my heater core, but I started doing it with lung power. 🙃
I used some of my empty soda bottles to drain the radiator, which took a heck of a long time since I could only do it from the teeny tiny spout instead of being able to use the big spout (I needed to be able to recapture all of my coolant to be able to put it back after I was done, since I didn’t have any with me, nor did I know where to dispose of used coolant).
Once drained sufficiently, I disconnected the heater hoses and went to work (clear tubing and tapered brass hose connecting fittings), so I didn’t have the resources to direct the flushed out coolant and water into a bucket.
So what I did instead was take one of my empty soda bottles, and cut a plus sign in it, such that I could put the end of the heater hoses in the soda bottle to capture what was blown out. That would allow me to 1) not spill any on the ground, 2) not spill any on electrical parts, and 3) check for gunk after each flush, so that I knew when my flushes no longer yielded gunk.
The first blow through the hose, with all my lung might, yielded an absolutely nasty mix of cloudy coolant and an enormous amount of gunk. 😶
I thought to myself: I think I found the problem!
The next flush required me to pour water through one of the heater hoses until it started pouring out into my flush bottle. Then I shoved my head back in the engine compartment, put my mouth around the heater hose, and once again, blew as hard as I could.
More gunk. Lots of it!
I kept going with the process over and over and over. Most flushes were reversed flushes, and then every once in awhile, I would go back the other way to give the best possible chance of getting everything out.
I kept going with the process over and over and over again, probably for a good hour with just my lungs as the pressure force.
To my surprise, using just my lungs was actually quite effective. 😁
After probably the first 30 minutes of my flushing efforts, I did start walking over to the fire hose to fill up my little soda bottles as needed, so I could keep flushing. 🙃
As the sun started going down, I decided to push my van from the women’s bathroom side of the station to the men’s bathroom side, so that I could situate it right in front in a place where the hose would be able to reach my engine bay.
It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t too terribly hard to get it pushed over, gratefully, and once over, I went to town 😎
Forward flush. Reverse flush. Forward flush. Reverse flush. Forward flush. Reverse flush.
Gosh, I don’t know how many times I did that. It was probably another hour of just that. 😆
And periodically I would mix in a lung-powered effort.
Surprisingly, my lungs seemed to do a better job of flushing the gunk out than the hose did. 🤔
What can I say, I blow. 😅
Since I was already going to all the effort that I’d gone through thus far, I decided to try and flush the radiator as well, so I emptied a bit more coolant out via the lower radiator hose until the radiator was completely empty, and no coolant was coming out of the engine block.
I then proceeded to flush and reverse flush the radiator, but pretty much nothing came out.
That’s actually a good sign, I think. The little tubes inside the heater core are much smaller on the inside than the ones inside the radiator, so heater cores are much more likely to get clogged up than radiators.
Looks like my radiator isn’t clogged. 🎉
It was well after dark before I finally decided I’d flushed it enough and got everything buttoned up and put back together.
I put my coolant back in, and then I used a sock filter out the crap from the portion of coolant that got blown out of the heater core that was full of absolute nasty.
I didn’t want to use water because I didn’t want to mess with the mixture.
Still, I did lose some coolant, so my system is a tiny bit low, but not enough to cause any overheating issues. I’ll need to grab some coolant to top the system off at some point.
But guess what?
I. Have. Heat! 🔥
I no longer need to point the passenger’s middle vent toward me because neither my middle vent nor my side vent can produce heat sufficient to keep me warm in cold weather. Nope! I’ve got heat out of all of ’em, baby!
🥳
That’ll up the resale value. 😎
It was after 10:30 by the time I got back to Lake Brunner. I could have continued on down Arthur’s pass, but I wanted another day in the pass to play around.
Sure, it’s going to be a decent amount of money in fuel just to do the drive all over again tomorrow, but who knows what tomorrow will bring?
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 