Well, I've been pleased with the Michelin X-ices this year, although I unfortunately never got to try them out on the frozen lake. Oh well, next year... The green is holding up surprisingly well for a rattle-can job too.
In other news, the Saab has gotten both rear calipers replaced because the parking brake mechanism failed and would not engage. This pic was from Sept, and the other one happened a few weeks ago.
My in-laws Chrysler Pacifica (the mid-2000s crossover, not the current minivan) got handed down to my brother-in-law and lost an engine mount that literally just rusted away, allowing the engine to move around the bay by 4 inches or so. No pics of that, but it involved partially dropping the subframe to replace it and the rear mount, and discovering that the subframe is showing some serious rust issues that will likely take it off the road in a couple of years.
Then, a worrying clunking noise started afflicting the front end of Bessie the Mazda5 - I figured it was the front ball joints since they felt a little loose, but the noise was actually the front sway bar bushings. They had become so loose, the end of the bar could move back and forth by an inch or more at each end. The plan had been to lower the front subframe a bit without removing it to unbolt the sway bar brackets, since they are wedged between the subframe and unibody. Then, I could get the bar measurements and old bushings, run out to the parts store, and put it all back together.
This worked fine on one side, and I was able to get everything off and confirm the problem.
The other side... not so much. One of the bolts came out without too much fuss (beyond the still very limited access to the bolt head), but the other one snapped off in the subframe. Well crap... that lead to removing the whole subframe to drill out and re-tap the broken bolt hole.
At that point, I was running out of time, so instead of trying to find replacement bushings, I wrapped the bars tightly in electrical tape and cut off the excess so that they fit snugly in the bushings. Then, I wrapped the electrical tape in two layers of teflon tape (for sealing pipes) so that it would slide more smoothly and not try to peel the electrical tape off. This is a temporary solution, but for the moment its been holding up well with no clunking.
Then, finally, in January the drivers' side rear sliding door of Bessie came off the rear track while we were out for dinner one night, and I needed to get it back together and working well-enough on one of the coldest nights/mornings of the year that we could limp it along til warmer weather. This has been a fairly consistent issue, since the van has an interlock switch that will block that door about 1/3 of the way in its travel when the gas door is open, to avoid crashing the sliding door into the filler nozzle or gas door. However, this interlock tends to not only stop the door, but force it off the track in the rear, and the interlock can freeze in place so it stops the door despite the gas door being closed... Eventually, this happened enough times that the rear slider rail was bent, the rear rollers were messed up and coming apart, and the door fit poorly.
Anyhow, it started feeling rough again a couple weeks ago, but we were fortunately able to find an almost identical Mazda5 (same color even!) in a junkyard about 6 miles away, so I bought the whole door, rear track and rollers off that car to replace our whole door. The rear track had been changed in that time and was beefed up right in the spot that ours had bent, so it looks like Mazda was aware of the issue and fixed it in later model years. Now, the door fits and slides much more nicely, but I still have to finish stripping down the old door to remove potentially usable bits before scrapping the rest.
I think that gets us up to date with the other cars anyway...
