Key Won't Turn, More On the Continuing Saga of My Car.

Order_242, (Wiki.) Hola Chile.

Ian Cooper

I’ve blogged about the continuing saga of my car before.

The big thing, in my humble experience, is not to panic when something goes wrong.

A good case in point was the other day. It was minus fourteen Celsius, with a wind chill of about minus twenty.

I stuck the key in the ignition and it wouldn’t turn. This happened a few days before. The car is a 2002 model. I paid about $2,100.00 three years ago. Sooner or later the thing must inevitably be towed away for scrap value. In the meantime, if something goes wrong, I try and think it through, gather as much information as possible, and desperately try not to throw money at a problem when a little knowledge might save a few bucks.

My mother was in town—she lives twenty-five kilometres away, so I got her to take me to the smoke-shack and the bank. She has CAA and she can get me a tow if necessary. I called the dealership, and the ignition lock cylinder, according to the parts department, is about $143.00.

I got them to put me through to the service department and the service writer told me that it generally takes a half an hour of labour to change the cylinder.

How that relates to keys with the transponder chip in them is a good question, because the cylinder has to match the key. I only have one key, it’s cold as hell out there. Snow lies in heaps all about my car, and working on the thing in the apartment building’s parking lot isn’t all that attractive.

As soon as I hang up the phone, I think of ten more questions I should have asked. Yet I would sure hate to be a pain in the ass to them guys.

I hate being cooped up in here. Call it maturity, call it a kind of quiet Canadian desperation, but panic wasn’t going to help me.

When all the world seems to be going to hell in a hand-basket, (whatever the frick that is) then a smart poverty-stricken basterd turns to the internet...right?

Okay. Here’s this guy saying how to turn the key when your steering lock becomes engaged. Mine wasn’t at first, but by the time I was done wiggling the steering wheel, trying over and over again, inserting and reversing the key, the steering did become locked. Here is a trouble-shooting list.

Here’s another guy talking about removing the bottom cover and lightly tapping on the rib of metal that surrounds the lock cylinder—don’t be whaling away on this relatively soft metal casting with an iron-worker’s hammer and maybe that would work.

The question is what exactly is the problem? But hitting the button on the remote lock feature quickly shows whether the battery in your two-piece keyset is working.

Arguably the lock or the key is simply worn. If I had another key, it might actually work better. This still does not address a worn cylinder, although it might put off spending money on a repair for a while.

My ignition failed in my own driveway—and yet we all need to go to the grocery store, and not everyone has CAA or a cell-phone for that matter. (I don’t.)

It all comes down to poverty, but after discussing it with the gentleman at the dealership, I decided that if the lock is screwed, tapping on the end of the key isn’t going to hurt it any further.

The question is how hard? And for how long? If you’re still smashing and pounding away a half an hour later, Buddy, it ain’t going to work.

Calling the tow truck and having her hauled to the dealer is a good default option. A hundred and forty for the part, a half hour of labour…that’ll be about eight hundred bucks, right…??? By the time we're done here...

So I tried the car again. The key would not turn.

Then, using a snow scraper, which is plastic and not all that heavy, I just tapped and whacked and banged lightly away on the end of the key in the ignition switch. I don’t particularly want to smash the key out the end of the cylinder, neither do I want to dislodge the cylinder…what I think we are trying to do is to free up some sticky pins in the lock cylinder. (Maybe.)

I used a little electronic cleaner, and shoved the key in and out. And of course the little bugger worked.

It’s interesting when the thing fires up, but all I could do was to take her for a ride. It’s a bit stupid to shut it off away from home—or I could have taken it to the dealership and arranged for repairs. This saves the price of a tow, or calling my mother and going through the hassle of finagling a free tow. 

I’m a grown man and that’s sort of coat-tailing your own mother, right?

When I got home, I took the key out. I put it back in, and it wouldn’t turn. So, I whacked on it with the scraper, and got it to go again. I started the car and switched it off.

Now, if you were truly desperate (and I’m not, not so much, anyways) you could buy a cheap aftermarket lock cylinder and do this with the transponder chip in your keyset.

I don’t claim to be a great mechanic. What I am is cheap—and resourceful.

Basically we just bought ourselves some time. We went to the liquor store and we're feeling pretty impressed with ourselves.

And that is a good feeling, ladies and gentlemen.

The smart thing to do is to take the thing in to the dealership first thing Monday morning.

END

A Dream of Racing.

Night Cruise.

Weird Anecdotes.

(We’ll leave you with that. – ed.)

The Ongoing Saga of My Car: idle air control valve



A red Neon by a Norwegian fiord. (Matti Paaviola. Wiki.)



The ongoing saga of my car has been an interesting one. Within two weeks of buying it, I had some trouble getting it into reverse.

I only paid $1,900 for it, and there was a kind of characteristic whine to the transmission, which I never noticed until the weather warmed up and I was driving with the window open. A rebuilt transmission would cost a hell of a lot of money.

She has a heck of a ka-chunk from somewhere underneath when I let the clutch out, too. It’s part of the mystique or something.

Within a month I had no reverse at all. I’d just bought the thing. I was pulling up in front of my parking spot and leaving it in neutral. With the engine running I had power steering. So I would push the car back into the spot, turning the wheel with my left hand. In the morning, and it was winter at the time, I would fire it up and just drive away. Around town, I chose my parking spots carefully. I went two month without reverse.

On the internet, I searched the problem. It might not be the transmission. I could get shift cables for $311.00 plus tax. Or I could try simple bushings. On the engine end of the shift cables,  I saw there was definitely a pin sticking up through a big empty hole. The other bushing was crushed but still in place. So I tried the bushings for about $12.00 plus shipping and handling. Voila!

All of a sudden I had reverse again. I felt pretty good about that. Just the cables, plus tax, plus shop rate for labour would have been anything up to six or seven hundred bucks. 

One day I was in Petrolia walking around in the park by the Discovery site. When I got back in the car, I started it up. There was a squealing, squawking noise and I shut her down. Looking under the hood, I saw a belt had come off the front of the engine.

Oh, great. I pulled it out and sure enough the inner part was cracked all over the place. It’s all dried out and ready to break. I got in the car expecting to drive thirty kilometres on a dying battery. I assumed it would start.

Turns out it was the belt for the power steering and the air conditioner—no lights on in the dash or anything. Driving the car without power steering for the first time was a revelation, but my arms are stronger now. When I took it to the garage, they said it would cost $989.00 to put a new plate on the front of the engine. The plate holds a ‘belt tensioner.’ They said it was jammed. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I said no. I drive without power steering or air conditioning now, and hope that other belt holds on for a while.

One day I was driving down the road, enjoying the sunshine. All of a sudden the engine goes. It was spitting and sputtering and running on something less than four cylinders. I pulled into a parking lot and checked under the hood.

Lo and behold, the number one spark plug was missing…just gone. The wire was hanging loose. I took a walk up the street and I couldn’t find that damned plug anywhere. It’s probably jammed in the undercarriage or the exhaust system somewhere. My fault, I probably didn’t torque it up enough when I did a tune-up last September. It took six months to work itself out. I drove across town with three cylinders, bought a single plug for about four bucks and put it in. She runs just fine.

The other day, I noticed that when coming up to an intersection, the revs didn’t drop like they should. It should drop to about 950 rpm, just under a thousand, and it hung up at about 1,500 revs.

The problem persisted, and one time it even stayed at 2,000. One day it dropped all the way to about 600, idling a bit rough, and that was unusual too.

So looking on the internet, I found the most likely cause of the problem. It might be the ‘idle air control valve.’ Looking for parts, I could pay anywhere between $86.00 and $137.00 from U.S. websites. The Canadian price might vary widely as to source, but of course I would call around.

I was on the internet, just trying to find out what the part looked like and where it was located. I stumbled across some guy on Youtube—just another link on a page, right? And he was showing people how to clean an ‘idle air control valve,’ and there was some other guy cleaning a ‘mass air sensor,’ and that caught my eye.

I watched the video. If I can clean it, why buy a new one? The cleaner cost $11.00 and I put it on my credit card. The job took twenty minutes. When I went for a drive, the revs were dropping to about 1,050 rpm. We’ll keep an eye on it.

Also on Youtube, there was a video where they showed how to clean the throttle body on a fuel-injection engine. It’s a big round flapper valve in a tube, a venturi. A rubber hose connects it to the air-box. At idle, the flapper is closed, and a ring of guck can build up around the rim of the valve. This interferes with proper idling. The same type of cleaner is used for this job. When I take the air-box apart to get at it, I’ll take off that other sensor and clean it again.

The internet has saved me hundreds if not thousands of dollars in car repairs. The key is patience, and then looking further, even when you might already have an answer.

One thing I want to do before winter is to put the rear tires, which have plenty of tread, on the font of the car, where the tires have scrubbed down to near-slicks from under-steer and hard driving.

With baldies on the front, secondary roads, when driving in the rain, with their washboard effect and intermittent puddling can lead to an unpleasant snatch-and-grab steering even when you should be going straight. This is due to wheel-spin, and floating around in general, even when you’re just cruising at eighty kilometres an hour.

Without anti-lock brakes, the back end will tend to come out on ice under braking, but going through snow requires grip on the front tires, especially true with front-wheel drive.

There’s still a bit of tread on there and they tend to last longer on the rear of the car.

How to clean mass air sensor. There are a bunch of tutorials on Youtube.

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