Finally, a successful day of working on the car

[ggehrke at gmail.com (GGehrke)]

Tomorrow I leave DC again on the trek to Kentucky (Home) and had a bit
of work to do on the car before I started.  I went out to the metro
parking lot where it's been sitting for the last week and worked on it
a bit there, and actually left with my projects all successfully
completed, for once.

First I rotated my front wheels to the back because I had a spare
(just an old wheel/tire, not a donut) on the front and because they
haven't been rotated yet though I've probably gone slightly over
mileage for it.  I wanted to do an alignment of sorts too, but that
just wasn't feasible in the parking lot, so I am going to wait until I
get home and can put together some hugely complicated and
fantastically nerdy gizmo for checking it all out.  I think while home
I'm also going to just get the car up on jackstands and make sure my
suspension is all holding together alright - check it for problems and
whatnot.  I'm sure I'll be asking questions in the next few days about
all that :)

I also installed my new CD player.  I got a Pyle 4x40 watt CD player
that is an absolute piece of junk, but it was 20 bucks and it works,
so whatever.  I had to check some of my wiring and ended up taking the
power straight from the battery (with an inline fuse) rather than
trying to branch it off of some of the other wiring behind the dash. 
I did pull the accessory power off the rear defog switch (I think)
which may not be the most proper place, but it seems to work fine and
I don't think it'll draw too much current.  When I actually rewire the
whole car, I'm going to be sure to do all that stuff right, but for
now I just want it to work and not start on fire, and actually have
something to listen to on 10 hour drives.  I can hear it over the car
idling, and I think it's going to be loud enough to hear when the car
drives (i really hope so anyways - that sucker's pretty loud right
now), so that, too, was a successful procedure :)

-Grant-