Flashboiler. Well.... The FSM has been pretty handy to have on hand. I'm still considering it.
Seems very economical to do it myself.
Did a little bit more maintenance today. Whoever owned this Samurai before me swapped the oil switch out with a oil pressure gauge. I'll have to get another switch to replace it but in the meantime the oil pressure gauge install they did was not up to par.
The tubing is broke or the this fitting is leaking. I think I may have been losing a bit of oil through here because my Samurai never left wet spots anymore so I think it was just squirting out while I was driving.
They ran the line to the gauge right through the firewall without using a grommet or anything.
I had mentioned that I had needed to replace my starter. I was hoping this wasn't the case so I first tried my own clicky starter fix. Apparently the starter is powered straight through the ignition switch unlike most other vehicles who do this through a relay. A fix is to add a relay in place of the starter wiring so that the ignition is powering the relay and the relay is relaying power straight from the battery to the starter. This didn't solve my poor starting problem but I think it was a good addition none the less.
Installing the new starter was pretty easy. Just remove the air box to get better access.
At some point in the last few weeks I cleaned out all of the dead leaves sitting in the heater vent box. I used a conduit plug to plug up the hole. My vents still blow out some leaves every now and then but I can live with it for a while. I'm told to get great results I have to remove the entire dash and clean everything out with a pressure washer.
I was doing some cleaning last weekend and wanted to get underneath the rear seat just to see what was under there. I removed the drivers side bolt with no issues but as soon as I cranked on the passenger side bolt the head broke clean off. I attempted to drill out the broken thread and tried to use some extractors to remove it but didn't have any luck. It was rusted in there extremely bad I guess.
Unfortunately I broke the nut off the body while trying to free those threads. I had to drill through a crossmember on the bottom of the Samurai so that I could add a nut from the bottom. I used a holesaw for this.
On top of that I discovered that I did have a bit of rust to deal with after all. I'll have to repair this rusted hole before winter. It's behind the rear drivers side wheel well.