Gah-dangit . . . Quinn’s at it again

For several months, I have been annoying everyone I met on the highway, without even wanting to.  Quinn’s combo headlight/turn switch broke on our trip to Maryland in May, and left us with no low beam headlights whatever—it was high beams or nothing, and once the sun went down, nothing wasn’t a choice either.  I’d been putting off getting the switch fixed because of all the money I had to spend getting her clutch replaced in July; after that was done, I hadn’t any money to pay for fixing the switch.

Then about August, Quinn began to develop a new trick, burning the “check engine” light at us continuously.  I had my mechanic read the computer code, and learned it meant the intake manifold runners, whatever they are, were sticking open.  This was followed, a couple of weeks ago, by a whistling noise under the hood whose quality suggested I had a leaking intake manifold vacuum line.  Then she began running god-awfully rough at idle, using a lot more gas than she should (and for a car her size, her gas mileage is NOT all that great), and either dying or refusing to advance the timing, leaving me in an excellent way to get run over when I couldn’t start up when traffic lights turned green.  It finally got bad enough that I had to give up a day’s worth of my dwindling personal leave hours, stay home today, and give Quinn over to Ron.  (This did have an unexpected benefit; it meant I could continue to work on the Land of Færie’s ongoing computer rollout problems, of which more later, perhaps.)

When I picked Quinn up this afternoon, Ron explained to me that his guy finally had to hook up a smoke generator to the air intakes to try to figure out what was going on.  At last they found an almost-invisible, almost-inaccessible vacuum hose buried under the intakes that had split and was sucking air, screwing up the vacuum that makes the intake manifold work.  However, he didn’t find this until so late in the day that he couldn’t get a new hose in time to fix it.  All he could do was to button her back up and give her to me so I could get M from school.  She appears to be no worse than she was, but she’s no better either, and almost at once pulled her “let’s choke, sputter, and die in rush-hour traffic” trick on North Lamar in front of the EMS station.  So now I have to give her back over to him on Monday or Tuesday and let him replace the hose, which will involve partly dismantling the intakes to get at the damned thing, and run up the labor bill several hours’ worth.  It’s unavoidable, but damnably costly.

The headlight/turn switch replacement cost $300, since Ron had to disarm the air bag in the steering wheel and pull the wheel to get at the switch.  I have no idea what the hose replacement is going to cost, but experience tells me it will be bleedin’ expensive.  Which means I’ll have to pay him a couple of hundred dollars every time I can until it’s all worked off, and any hope I had of catching up my bills in arrears is gone.

Hoodley-dum the purple refrigerator bunny trifles.  Fnord.