Grounded
Adam Kibbe
Across the gap of adjoining parking spaces, and through the silencing barriers of two car windows, Dan was laughing in time with me. As we rolled down our windows to say Hi, we knew without saying we were both listening to NPRÃs “Wait, Wait, DonÃt Tell Me”. HeÃd just pulled up beside me in front of Daniela’s Cantina (once Daniela’s Tacorito) in Acton, where we were meeting Mike for an impromptu lunch. “Osama bin Laden may still be on the loose, but that’s one baseball that’ll never hurt anybody again,” was among the sidesplitters in the broadcast (referring to the recent, explosive destruction of a small leather-wrapped sphere whose role in a baseball playoff game had bizarrely and ridiculously reached curse status………).
Lunch was tasty, despite Dan’s instant aversion to the Americanization of a cuisine probably never actually found this side of the Rio Grande, no matter the nationality or recency of immigration of its proprietors. But an aside with our waitress got him a slightly more acceptable meal from off the menu, and I thoroughly enjoyed my stock, grilled-vegetable burrito (defiling cheese and all). Mike let us eat much of his, so I’ll not interpret his opinion……. And after much discussion over beer, margaritas, and Mike’s virgin ‘rita (lemonade), on topics mostly engendered by The Passion of the Christ, and other such, Mike broached coming back to his place to have a look at Matthew’s car. He claimed he’d been putting off taking it to a shop for a known but undiagnosed electrical problem, confident that within the collective experience and wisdom of his wide-ranging sphere of friends, someone — he was pretty sure Dan — would be able to solve it for him.
With the hood up in the almost-warm, day-before-leap-day sun, optimism stared down realism. None of us know all that much about cars. The basics, sure, and enough to broadly discuss most topics, or identify most thingies under the hood. But to hunt down an invisible, elusive, presumably electrical problem that had started 30 years ago……………? Where to even begin?
Well, pushing it out of the icy pond in which it was marooned and getting it closer to Dan’s Maxima, with its vigorous battery, was a start. But with jumper cables applied, the merest of clicks issued from the vicinity of the dash, the umbilical for some reason insufficient to even close a solenoid. Mike assured us that time was a factor, having been here before, and so we circled around the possible underlying issues while we waited for some electrical process we couldn’t identify to take place.
For one thing, we noticed a plug of some sort loose in space. Presumably it was supposed to be engaged somewhere. And soldered into the wires that fed it was a curious, lacquered cylinder, which Dan, the ex-electrical engineer, identified as a rheostat, or variable resistor. This jogged memories that Matt’s grandfather Mack, himself once an electrical engineer, had tinkered at length decades ago when symptoms of poor starting first surfaced. This must be one of his interventions. But to what end?
And along the same wheel well, he’d soldered a capacitor from a bare place exposed on a small, blue wire, over to a body mounting bracket, and thus ground. Hmmmmmmmmmm……… More puzzlement.
After many false starts, a little more gas in the tank, and one more-patient-than-usual wait, the Beemer finally turned over and ran. Spurting fuel from a cracked line, and hesitating a bit, but clearly healthy, with its basic parts in indisputable working order. So what had happened to change its earlier rigor mortis? Well, for one thing there WAS a charge in the battery now. Why that would be important, we weren’t sure. Cars with almost dead batteries are usually easily started by jumping. But this one always goes dead again. And a voltmeter quickly showed that the Beemer’s alternator wasn’t participating. At all.
So we got out the manual’s wiring diagram (yes, they have the original manual!), which, while in large part incomprehensible to me, is at least encouragingly simple. It fits legibly on one 5 x 8 (or, being German, 13cm. x 20 cm.) page. Dan identified the key component, the alternator, which Mike and Matt had already replaced months back, from a more instinctual diagnosis. We traced every wire shown in relation to it, and lo and behold………… No ground! None. And thus no circuit. As the old alternator’s ground was missing, Mike and Matt hadn’t installed one, and while we haven’t concocted a theory for why Mack might’ve thought it unnecessary and deliberately removed it, we think we’ve at least identified why the alternator’s not charging the battery.
Then we traced the wiring from alternator to regulator. Dan did an impressive job of explaining what a regulator does, and even correctly guessed which thingie IS the regulator, and then we identified that the wires leading to the regulator end in the free-floating plug thingie……….. A second smoking gun.
Ye old regulator
A few hiccups of memory bubble up from days when Dan had more grease on his hands. When regulators go bad (and they always do), they CAN be bypassed — while important, they are not critical. And slowly we piece together what might have happened…….. When the Beemer first showed starting problem symptoms, it may well be that it was the regulator. Either because he was frugal, or because it was a German exotic in the stolid Midwest of the day, or just because he could — Mack bypassed it. But not crudely, just by crossing some wires. First he inserted the rheostat to be able to tailor the alternator’s output voltage. Then he inserted the capacitor to drain off any excess voltage into the carriage. Mystery plausibly explained. And yours truly had the last inspiration.
The capacitor showed major signs of cracking. What if the solution had actually become the problem? Dan throws the probes across the capacitor, and sure enough — a short to ground. The damaged capacitor is draining the battery, and the ungrounded alternator’s not there to feed it. Facts fall all over themselves for us.
So Mike calls his auto parts store and orders up a regulator. Should have it in two days and be around $30. We sit around feeling dubiously proud, though the jury’s still out — Mike and Matt will make these fixes, and we’ll get back to you. Yes, we were once again manipulated by Machiavellian Mike into doing his work for him — the spirit of Huck Finn lives on, transported from the Midwest by Wolfman, now playing father in the Northeast.
And Matt, who is now driving anything he can, now that he is — say a prayer — a licensed individual, may one day be able to drive his own car, one that a loving family, visionary father, and host of dedicated friends has made, if not yet possible, at least thinkably likely.
