One of those days...

[The Warden]

Well, I was going to do a valve adjustment on my car today.

A friend of mine happened to get a set of Hazet valve wrenches with his car, so for the past month or so, him, myself, and another friend of mine tried to find a time when our schedules coincided, to do a valve adjustment on all three vehicles (two 617 turbos and one Euro n/a 617).

The only problem was that, apparently, someone accidentally invited Murphy to join us.

First, the water pump went bad on the Euro 300D, so the day started out changing that out. Problem is, one of the bolts holding the fan clutch in started stripping. We wound up partially drilling out the threads, then took a BFH and a screwdriver to break the head off. Also, it turned out that the coolant was the green stuff, so he got to do a coolant flush, and that actually still hasn't been completed.

We then moved to starting the valve adjustment on that engine...actually went uneventfully, once we got the hang of it. I need new feeler gauges, though; a few of my gauges were really rusty.

Then came the second car ('84 300D, belongs to Ibe300D on here). He showed up a bit later in the day, so we made the mistake of starting to tear things apart while the engine was still warm. Of course, one of the valve cover nuts decided to jump out of my hand, and is still AWOL after a good hour of 3 people searching. If this wasn't bad enough, we wound up stripping the head of one of the bolts holding the fan clutch to his car as well. GYAAAAAAAAA!!!! It was about 9:00 by this point, so we decided to give up trying that and see about turning the crank with the power steering pulley (a no-no, I know, but better than nothing). Only problem there was that the belt kept slipping, either on the crank or the power steering pulley. After trying various things for maybe a half hour, we finally threw in the towel...

In retrospect, it's probably a good thing that we didn't even touch my car, but to say the least, this has not been a good day (in addition to all of this, one of my friends' computers took a dump and I couldn't resurrect it)...

Sorry, had to vent...have a good day