Just a little winter photo! As you can see, we’ve got our first snow! Quite late for Estonia, isn’t it? Last year it was like 2 months earlier.

Dear readers,

Tonight I would like to explain how you can get rid of the engine squeak that usually gets even worse in wet and humid weather. If the engine of your car is squeaking annoyingly, especially when idling and running up to 2000 RPM, then you probably have some similar issue that I had. First of all, there are generally three most common things that may cause the squeak:

• Alternator (generator) bearings
• A/C Compressor Clutch bearing
• Serpentine belt

I don’t like when my car makes unusual noises and I do get really pissed off about those things. Therefore, I had to try everything possible to get rid of the noise. First of all I had the generator looked at – one of the bearings was in really bad shape and could have caused noise when running. That was replaced by a mechanic. That didn’t get rid of the squeak and we found another noise source which was the A/C compressor clutch. Keep in mind that you can replace the bearing yourself but you need some special tools for that. In USA those tools can be ordered from most of the auto parts stores.

Since I couldn’t get those tools quick enough anywhere, I had a mechanic do this as well. When I almost thought that my squeaks were over, the humid weather came and there I was again sitting in my squealing piece of truck wondering what else to try. I didn’t suspect the belt in my case since I had that replaced like 2 years ago and this shouldn’t finish up a belt yet. They are supposed to last 5-10 years just fine. However, here comes a tip for you! When you have a squeak in the belt line and want to diagnose where it is, DO NOT spray WD-40 or any other oil onto the belt. That will kill the belt and it will never stop squeaking anymore. If you want to spray something, use a silicone spray or water. Those will also tell you what you need.

I bought a PRO 1 belt yesterday and today we replaced the belt. If you were as stupid as I was and sprayed oil onto the belt before, make sure you clean all the rollers before putting the new belt on. Otherwise the new belt could get “fried” too. You can use brake cleaner for this process but if you have any plastic rollers, do not spray brake cleaner directly onto those since it could melt the roller. Clean it with a tissue instead where you spray brake cleaner beforehand. In my case one plastic roller was present and that was the automatic belt tensioner:

DO NOT SPRAY BRAKE CLEANER DIRECTLY ONTO A PLASTIC ROLLER!

So we replaced the belt and now it seems to be OK. You should also pay attention which belt you buy – PRO 1, Gates, Dayco and some others are known as fine belts. Do not buy anything too cheap or you will get your squeaks back in no time.

So I decided to sell the Audi. The contract became effective officially on Friday. Me and my girlfriend loved the A6, so why did we sell it? Well, it was indeed a very good car. Saying good, I mean good to drive and with great performance. It wasn’t as reliable as I expected, though. I had never owned a German car before and didn’t really know what to expect. I probably spent around 1500 EUR on its repairs over the one and a half years I drove it. Even before selling it to the new owner, I fixed all the important things that had come up and he got a nicely running car without remarkable flaws. I wanted to make the deal so that I knew I was selling a working car and that I could sleep well after giving the car over to the new owner. We had a 14 day return period which ended on Friday and if I had left some issues unfixed, they certainly would have come up sooner or later.

Reliability wasn’t the main selling reason. I’ve had the Chevy Suburban for several years and altough I have tried selling it once, I finished that process before it really went to a deal. I’ve decided that this Suburban is a car I want to own for years to come since it’s a car with good history and it sure is remarkably reliable. However, when I had the Audi I was always missing the driving experience of the Chevy which I do love. It just has its own specialities which attach me to this car so strong. It doesn’t have full time 4×4, it doesn’t have all the electronics, it doesn’t have the same fuel economy FOR SURE, but it’s still awesome. It is one of those cars which has a soul and it felt like the Audi didn’t. The Audi messed with my nerves a lot of times in situations where you just didn’t want any trouble. I don’t even want to get to the details cause I’m not sure how many of you are interested in them, but well, I hadn’t had any other car behaving like this. The Chevy has had its problems which have always been fixed but none of its issues have been so urgent to fix that I couldn’t even drive the truck and most of the things have always been an easy repair. The engine was messing up last winter by not starting up properly and consuming too much fuel with Check Engine light on also. I remember I thought that it might be something serious with the electronics. However, it ended up being the water temp. sensor located on the thermostat housing. Disconnect the single cable, take the wheel wrench, screw the old sensor off, install the new one and that’s it. 13 EUR well spent. The truck ran a bit rough right after and then stabilized shortly. The check engine light later went off and haven’t seen it ever since. I think the only very serious issue with the truck was this Summer when the intake manifold started to leak coolant quite rapidly and I had to drive it to the service shop where it was fixed for 200 EUR.

Don’t get me wrong – I loved the Audi and it served us well during the period we had it. Basically, I decided that since I already owned the Suburban, the Audi didn’t really have a proper status in our fleet of cars anymore as we are now living in town again and the distances driven are not so long. Good luck for the new owner and happy new kilometres!

Things going on with my cars these days:

The Suburban is working nicely and we serviced it a couple of days ago which included oil change and replacement of air, oil and fuel filters. The usual stuff.

Today I bought new tires for the Suburban. Since the winter is coming, it was about time to find a good replacement for the current Cooper Discoverer M+S tires which don’t have much tread left. So I was able to acquire four little used BF Goodrich All Terrains! They are basically like new and I got them for like half the price of new ones. What a nice deal, really. Will be installed next week and I will then post pictures, too.

The Suburban is still lacking some fine audio equipment. Tomorrow I will be testing an Alpine subwoofer with a friend and I will probably buy it to improve the bass effect in the car. It will certainly improve it a lot, that’s for sure.

The Corvette is in its garage and the yearly inspection has expired. I won’t inspect it this year anymore, it’s put away for Winter and waiting for next Spring. Meanwhile I am planning some engine work during winter since the engine is sometimes puffing out some blue smoke and I will check other items as well. I will work on the interior and try to fix some paint issues. I will be updating you fellas here on my blog.

So, that’s it for now. Enjoy a memorable picture of the Audi taken last winter. It looked nice:

A week ago a nice event took place in Southern part of Estonia which is more than 200 kilometres away from the capital where we live. Ofcourse we wanted to go. However, the weather was not good enough to take the Corvette because I never drive it intentionally into rainy weather. And since it’s Autumn, you can NEVER know where some rain might show up and ruin your day. So, since we have only one more American car left in our “fleet”, the other option was the Suburban.

It wasn’t too easy to make it, though! The Suburban had been messing up the whole Summer and since we didn’t drive it very much and had a busy Summer by all means, we didn’t take it to repair. One of the big issues was starter and everything related – it often made terrible noise when cranking and the bendix didn’t want to retract automatically when engine started so that caused an even worse noise. I had the whole starting system fail on me several times during Summer and I fixed it by re-aligning the starter myself and retightening the bolts. I knew it was just a very temporary solution anyway.

The other thing was rear differential – I knew there was something wrong because it made gear noise when coming to a halt and especially in right turns. We first thought that a bearing could be worn, but that wasn’t it.

A week before the event I finally took the Suburban to repair. Pretty soon the problem with the starter was diagnosed – the flywheel was out of alignment and was therefore floating up and down by about 2 millimetres. That’s quite a lot. So, the transmission had to be removed and then they could figure out whether the flywheel itself was bad or perhaps the crankshaft out of center instead…

Once everything was apart, the fault was found to be in the flywheel. Since I already replaced that about one and a half years ago, it must have been simply a faulty part from the beginning and finally messed up the starter and ate its teeth so it couldn’t start properly anymore. The flywheel was sent to Finland for warranty and a new one was installed on the Suburban. That was fine, thank god. The bendix on the starter was also destroyed so a new one had to be installed as well. That pretty much concluded the starting system repairs. Everything was put back together and worked flawlessly.

Now the rear differential was much more painful. The differential case was somehow broken! Don’t ask how – the only heavier job I did with this truck was towing some slightly heavier than normal trailers but that could have only finished up an already messed up differential, not destroy a well working thing. Anyway, we had to find a new rear diff. Brand new GM parts are too expensive to order here and therefore we had to find a good used part. In fact, we found a rear end from a K1500 Tahoe which was a 4×4 and wanted to replace the whole rear end to eliminate any possibilities that my Suburban’s rear end could have been faulty somewhere. However, it just didn’t fit properly. Strange that the 4×4 rear end is just a tiny bit wider than the 2WD.  Fortunately, the differential itself was a perfect fit. The diff was found to be in good shape and therefore we replaced just that. The diff is a G80 with Auburn full locking system. Rear end was assembled back together and the oil with special LSD oil additive was poured in.

That repair really made a huge difference to this vehicle. The engine starts up like new, the drive is very smooth and there is no gear noise whatsoever. I’m very happy that it worked out like this.

So, we got the car just a day before the Southern Estonia event and were able to drive it there the next day. The event was nice but I wouldn’t consider it anything too special. Just a lot of such cars we don’t see very often in Tallinn and ofcourse a nice long cruise on the hilly roads. The weather was nice, too. We stopped at a barn where one of the Estonian Cadillac Club members keeps his cars collection. It was quite a nice set of cars, really.

So, a nice day all in all and certainly well worth the money spent :)

My Corvette was at a summer end festival near our countryplace and everybody could see this and many other older cars very close and sit inside etc. Just wanted to share some pics with you… :)