Not exactly a super day

It seems fair to share the bad times as well as the good.

Cigarette lighter double adaptor blew a fuse – a 6amp fuse. I have a 5 amp, 10, 15, 20, 25 & 30 amp fuses.

After confirming there wasn’t anything wrong and this was the typical load of the attached devices, I thought, I don’t want to put in a 10 in case there is a problem, it won’t blow soon enough, so I put in a 5 in the hope it may have just covered it, well – it did, for about 30 minutes.

As a continuation of last night, my epically unreliable Telstra Prepaid USB broadband ran out of credit last night… after a total of 20MB downloaded since purchase. It had like $60 of credit on it!

Went to McDonalds for breakfast, used their epically slow Wi-Fi to upload our blog and download Picasa. after about 45 minutes that was done. All this time on hold with Telstra.

Turns out you cannot activate prepaid mobile broadband online, you can only activate prepaid mobile phones.
So all of my credit was consumed at the 30cents a kilobyte, not $1.60/MB…. only to be told that I had used that credit and it would not be returned. After explaining the situation to a completely unsympathetic international lady, she managed to refund me 4GB of data, assuring me that was much more than the $60 I loaded it with – somehow I doubt it. Waited on hold for 30 minutes for the complaints line which I suspect I was being deliberately stalled on.

Camera for the second time won’t connect until I take the battery out of it !? actually – make that continually unable to connect. It won’t copy a few photos, and naturally the SD card reader in the laptop is also fail. ugh.

Also noticed when parked, as part of my daily check to find oil on everything from the bell-housing, transfer, propeller shafts, diff that seems to be dripping and blowing backwards as we drive. damn. When we were stopped we noticed around 5 drops of oil on the ground. The drops are primarily beneath the bell-housing. Feels like maybe an oil seal at the back of the engine. I’ve been keeping tabs on the oil every time we get fuel and it’s not using any whatsoever.

Since Canberra we’ve noticed a slight bearing noise, so I picked one up today in the event it could ever need replacing – somewhat of a spare.  Was having a great drive today and around the 300KM mark  we swapped drivers we realised an awful sound coming from the passenger front wheel when we started off again. The bearing sounded like it had collapsed – almost like metal in a blender.
Pulled over and replaced it but seemingly the bearing noise is gone, but the crunching is still there.

I put the transfer in 4H (not locked) which is just like All-Wheel-Drive. The noise stopped. Hmm. – Diff oil perhaps? It’s always seeped from either end of the axel where the CV’s are, but just checked it, nope, it’s full. So tomorrow we were planning to see the local mechanic. However he’s not due back until the 10th…

When changing the bearing I noticed that I couldn’t find the split ring that holds the shaft in place (to stop it coming too far out, or too far in) but in the shards of metal, assumed it got eaten up. After dinner I gave this some thought – perhaps the absent split-ring was allowing the shaft to go too far in and causing the CV’s to bind up and that putting it in AWD kept tension on the splines making it less likely to fall in and out. See the picture to the right – all the bearings fell out in my hand!

In the dim light after dinner, we took the hub cap off to see if we could hold the shaft in place with some wire in place of the split ring, but found it inside the hub (it stands to reason it couldn’t have got chewed up, because it’s on the other side of the hub). Before putting it back in place, I pushed on the shaft and noticed it can go quite a way in – perhaps this could be the problem?! We’ve put the split ring back and took it for a quick drive, and seemingly no problem. We’re desperately trying to not get our hopes up, but it’s possible this may have fixed it.

If this doesn’t fix it, I’ll try removing the hub’s, one at a time, and then both to see if there is a differential problem. Worst case, this will enable us to drive to a proper repairer or home…

Wait, the up arrow on the keyboard has stopped working too… not exactly a super day.