Garden Update

So here are the latest photos of the garden:

This is the garden as seen from the street. The tomatoes are about 2 feet tall now, and are starting to fill in the cages. I weeded them and put a nice layer of leaves down to keep the moisture in during the day (for as long as is possible in Florida lol).

This week I put corn seed and bush beans in the ground. Two weeks ago, I put in zucchini, Jackpot squash and a couple of cucumber seeds. The little white markers show the zuke and cuke and squash plantings - I weeded in here also this week, and "may" have accidentally pulled the jackpot squash, but I'll have to wait and see what grows.

The tomato that is performing the best in garden, filling the cage nicely. The one in front of it already has 3 tomatoes on it, a little larger than golf balls.

My pepper plants are finally starting to grow. Five of the six that I started with survived, the other disappeared and got weeded by accident I think. For a while they just sat there, but now they seem to have taken to the idea of growing in actual ground. You can see they are only about 6 inches at best at this point though.

Hard to see, but I have three tomato plants that I have roped between the fence and the plastic PVC pipe stakes. They were not expected to survive, but they are still alive, not as healthy looking as the others, but still not so bad considering I left them for dead. I have two others next to the A/C condenser that aren't as well off, but one of those has a blossom... go figure?

My two potted tomato plants. The one on the left is doing the best of all the plants I have, it has 4 dozen blossoms on it right now (opened, about to, or just closed) and I don't know how many that are going to be ready to open in a week or two. We will be enjoying a lot of spaghetti sauce! The other plant is doing well also, and you can see just to the right there a wet spot where my two other plants are. The two in the buckets were put into the remaining soil that I had in the garage, and I suspect that really helped a lot in their taking to the buckets. I will probably have to transplant them, or make mini-cages for them so they can grow up.

All told, I started with 12 tomato plants, and currently all 12 have survived, 7 of which are thriving right now. I started with 6 pepper plants, 5 have survived, and they are doing well. I have a lot of onions, but I don't really know when I pull them, they are still green, and the ones I have pulled have just been the shallot type. My lettuce, well, just isn't doing so well. I am going to go in there and trim it back, but I let it go for a while, and now I don't know what's a weed and what isn't (some I can see, but others not so).

Fuel Pump Swap

So I changed out my fuel pump about two weeks ago because the one that was in Strawberry had that annoying high pitched “I’m going to fail you soon” scream to it.  In fact, I had been experiencing a problem with a misfiring cylinder more and more, but didn’t expect the fuel pump to fully resolve the problem.

Anyway, I removed the fuel pump assembly from the tank (thankfully Aspires don’t require the tank to be dropped) and as I did so, I saw there was some nasty orange gunk inside the tank, and it coated the entire assembly.  In addition, the sending unit was rusted pretty well, though I didn’t change that out, but will soon.  I can only guess at what this stuff was doing to my fuel pump, lines, filter and possibly even the engine itself.

Since the swap, the car runs great – no misfiring cylinder, excellent power at all acceleration levels, however I can’t seem to go more than 160-190 miles on a tank now.  Previously I was able to go about 300, and as my fuel pump was dying, that slowly became less and less to about 240-250 miles, but now it’s just crazy.  It isn’t losing fuel, it’s just missing like two or three gallons from what was in there before.  I’m hoping the assembly just isn’t seated properly and needs to be taken out and put back in to find the right spot for it.  Otherwise, I’m at a bit of a loss.

 

 

 

The Engine Swap

When I bought Strawberry back in March 2008, it had about 102,000 miles on the original engine.  It also had a faulty Idle Air Control Valve, which of course for this little egg isn’t cheap to replace brand new.  I have since discovered the great treasures available at the U-Pull-And-Pay sites near me, so I’m not so discouraged by problems, as I’m not going to buy new unless I have to.

Anyway, the faulty Idle Air Control Valve didn’t cause a major problem; it was just annoying to have the Check Engine Light on.  This wasn’t what caused me to swap the engine, a damaged pulley did.

It sounds extreme, I know, but here’s what happened.  Sometime in April I hit something on I-4 coming home from work (I think it was a piece of tire tread).  Whatever it was banged up the passenger front wheel well, and bent the pulleys on the front of the engine.  I didn’t know the pulleys were bent until I went to work a couple days later and lost the accessory belt (I don’t have any accessories actually, just don’t know what else to call it).  This was a few weeks after I found out the alternator was bad, so I wasn’t having a banner month.  I bought a replacement belt and put it on the car, but the belt kept slipping off, I couldn’t tighten it enough to keep it on.  I showed my mechanic buddy, Kevin, and he noticed the pulleys weren’t inline with each other, and the one on the crankshaft was actually wobbling.

We took the car to his house and he dropped the engine to try to tighten the pulley down, we thought maybe it was just loose.  It wasn’t, and we also noticed the timing cover was damaged, so we pulled that off and were going to replace it as well.  Then we saw the timing belt also was not on properly, and was rubbing against the engine block.  Despite trying to put it back in place, it kept slipping back against the engine.

Dropped the engine again, removed the crankshaft pulleys and found the sprocket and key were damaged on the crankshaft (sprocket drives the timing belt), and it had a lot of play.  Replacing these were not cheap, as they were sold as a unit with another item for about $250.

Kevin suggested I swap the engine, as a replacement engine was only about $450 plus his labor cost (he charged me $250 give or take).  So for $700 I had him put a salvaged engine into Strawberry that had only 47,000 original miles on it.  So instead of hoping to fix the problem for $250, I solved it, and the timing belt cover, and the Idle Air Control Valve for $700, and got a younger engine to boot.  Not a bad deal in my mind.

Steven

 

 

About Strawberry

Since this is my first post, I wanted to give a brief history of Strawberry. Strawberry is the name my wife gave my little car after I got it home from Jacksonville. My 97 Ford Aspire was purchased in March of 2008, as gas prices were starting to go crazy, and I really felt I needed something that was going to save me some gas money in the long haul. Well, after doing some research, I discovered that Ford Aspires get some of the best gas mileage of almost any vehicle out there (36-42 mpg, manual transmission), and that’s even after 10+ years! I drove my pickup with trailer about an hour north to pickup the little car.

The car cost me $1500, the trailer rental was like $40, the tags and registration was about $110. Insurance with my current company is running about $380 every 6 months (though I will be changing that very shortly). So my initial investment into my little egg was around $2000. My wife saw it the next morning in the driveway and said it looked like a little strawberry (doesn’t help that it’s red), and that name has stuck since, despite my initial protest to the less than manly name (of course, it’s a mute point, it’s not exactly a manly car).

I really like the little car; I used to drive a pickup truck to work and back (80 miles / day round trip), and when gas was at $3.00, I was spending close to $15 / day just to go to and from work. With Strawberry, that dropped to about $7 / day, better than 50% cut.

More to come as I get time…

Steven