Day: May 1, 2011

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Destriping Preview, This Time For Real :-)

Seems like my great joke was thoroughly unappreciated. And I thought my readers had a sense of humour! 😀

This afternoon, I made some real in roads in destriping Miranda. I’ve discovered that a hair dryer and a scraper are the only things I need to do an efficient job. The hair dryer softens the vinyl and adhesive and the scraper allows me to bring up an edge that gives me a good grip for removing large chunks. I just need to find the right scraper. Plastic isn’t sharp enough but metal is too damaging. The perfect thing is a finger nail, which is less than ideal!

I’m now working at doing whole sections and not worrying about ghosting at this time. I’ll get all the striping off then see how uneven the finish is after doing a thorough buffing.

Here’s the passenger side before:

Today, I got rid of the writing at the back, the big burgundy swipe next to that, and the wide burgundy stripe under it.

that white patch once held writing and a big burgundy swoosh; you can also compare the compartment door to the wall to see that I removed the wide burgundy stripe below the green and pink

that white patch once held writing and a big burgundy swoosh; you can also compare the compartment door to the wall to see that I removed the wide burgundy stripe below the green and pink

you can see the ghosting of 'Royal Classic'

you can see the ghosting of ‘Royal Classic’

You can see the ghost of the big burgundy stripe above the green

You can see the ghost of the big burgundy stripe above the green

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Found the Short!

Thanks to Will’s comment that the fuse I thought was still good might actually be the bad one, I started to make progress on my electrical problem. For one thing, each time I tried to replace the fuse, the new one would blow.

Amazingly enough, I knew how to troubleshoot one step further: disconnect individual components of that circuit until I found the one that was causing a short. I also knew right away where the problem was and started there: the new 12V outlet. I disconnected it and tried one last time to replace the fuse that kept blowing. Not only did the fuse not blow this time, everything else started working just fine. Yay, I have a fridge again!

I’m going to give up on that 12V outlet and start from scratch with a new one.

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Con-FUSED

Oy.

I awoke to a chilly morn, so I plugged in my electric blanket and it didn’t work. When I got up, I checked my breakers and all were good. As the morning progressed, I quickly discovered that I have no power to my fridge and everything else on the passenger side in the front.

Since the breakers were all good, I checked the fuses with my multimeter. I got NO reading on all but one of the six. I wondered what would be the chance of blowing five fuses at once, but decided this would be the easiest and cheapest route to explore first. So I headed out to Canadian Tire and got a pack of 15A fuses, came in, and changed a couple. Still no reading.

At this point, all I can imagine is that I might have an inline fuse somewhere??? I think that I need to trace those five fuses to a a common point, but I might be in a little over my head at this point. I transferred all the perishables to one of Jody’s freezers in the garage while I figure this out. Bringing in outside help at this point is not even remotely feasible.