(escrito en la madrugada del 15 de agosto)
I was up late this morning.
Struggling. 😕
Mom made hootenanny pancakes, and that was tasty. Thanks, mama. 🙏
My mom let me know that Happy has been having AC issues (and heat issues), so I headed out on a test drive with her. At first, the AC was working beautifully, but after turning the heat on, which never really got hot, upon switching it back to cold, it just… wouldn’t.
It stayed what felt like ambient temperature, neither hot nor cold (well, definitely on the warmer side because it’s brutally hot over here right now).
So I got to work trying to figure out what on Earth was going on, and I spent hours in the effort.
Darn those German engineers. 😒
And once again, I fell into an AI rabbit hole, disassembling things that didn’t need to be disassembled, because AI lied about what actually needed to be done.
Did I already mention that one of the reasons why AI lies so regularly is because they basically incentivize it to do so?
I probably already mentioned it, and y’all probably already knew, but just in case you didn’t, apparently, when they train AI, they reward it (I didn’t think to ask how) for trying to answer a question even if they get the answer wrong. Not answering the question is bad. Answering the question incorrectly is good, as long as it’s provided at least some kind of answer.
😒
No wonder there’s so much misinformation returned when using AI for queries.
Anyway…
After spending a good long time trying to diagnose what on earth was wrong with my Z3, I finally settled on the issue being a busted water valve. On these old Z3s, they don’t have temperature blend doors: they use a water valve to send (or not send) hot coolant into the heater core.
Apparently, the little rubber diaphragm that seals the valve is a common failure point, the rubber disintegrating, and the hot water going through when it shouldn’t.
Hence the AC blowing cold at the beginning, but not being able to blow cold once the coolant heats up and makes its way into the heater core even with the heater not turned on.
Did I mention that in the process of trying to figure everything out, I disassembled things that didn’t need to be disassembled because of the AI lies? 😅
Which led me to find that multiple of the little plastic tabs holding the glove box in were broken.
Why on Earth did BMW design their dashboard to have little plastic tabs that hold the glove box in?
Holy. Freaking. Crap.
And that’s an app description for that engineering choice. Crap.
Old plastic gets brittle and breaks, and so now you have to replace the entire dashboard?
😶
Anyway, once I realized the water valve was bad (which I verified by disassembling the valve itself and finding the busted diaphragm inside [which means I’ve got little pieces of rubber in my cooling system 😅], I shopped around for pricing on replacement valve. BMW is super proud of theirs, wanting around $500 for the little tiny water valve. 😶
Aftermarket providers wanted about $116 for their part, which research seemed to indicate wasn’t all that reliable. Amazon had a dirt cheap one for $28 that I figured I would risk, and maybe if worse came to worst, I could just put the new diaphragm on the old valve. 🤓
But it seemed like just about everything with Z3 the effort today was frustrating. 😕
In an effort to verify there wasn’t anything else going on, I went to O’Reilly’s and bought a heater core bypass kit, spent a good little while disconnecting the heater core and connecting the bypass part, and then taking it back out for a test drive.
Gratefully, the AC worked just as it should when I took it on another test drive up into Missouri, and the air blowing out of the vents didn’t start getting warm, even after the car heated up, so that confirms that, at the very least, the drop in AC temperature was caused solely by the hot coolant getting into the heater core.
With the AC working, and having told neighbor Joe that I would let him test drive my Z3 to see if a Z3 would be something he would be looking for. Seeing the little roadster previously, he’s wanted to give it a try ever since, so I headed over to his place to let him drive it, but he wasn’t home.
Since neighbor Joe wasn’t home, I headed over to Haven Hill, spent some time hanging out with Stevie, some time hanging out with Jim, and some time hanging out with neighbor Dan.
Good stuff.
I headed back to my mom’s place for dinner, then swung over to the neighborhood market, chatted with my sister Heather for a little bit, and then veged out before calling it a night.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 