Hi. Die!

So my wife's Neon has been having aches and pains lately. Ever since some asstriscuit in a Civic rear-ended us on our way to a visit with her folks (Idiot: "You started moving and then stopped again." Us: "Not our fault you weren't watching the road and didn't leave enough room for that error." Nevermind the fact stick shift cars tend to move a bit after you let off the brake before you engage the clutch.), the coolant temp gauge has been having seizures. Her theory was the accident caused the fault. Mine was it was merely the proverbial anti-camel straw.

I looked under the hood after finding out where the sensor was located and found that the sensor wire insulation had severely deteriorated. I didn't know how far up the harness branch the effect had gone, but I knew that was the problem. After riding around for a couple of hours and having the sensor cause the car chime to warn of no temperature reading and then go into a seizure thinking the car was overheating, I had had enough. It was time to do something about it.

First thing I did was buy a new set of tools. I have several small sets, but they are of dubious quality and seem to be missing most of the stuff I actually use so I decided spending the money on a good set was better than tracking down sockets and such that may no longer be around. With that accomplished, I hit Auto Zone.

At Auto Zone, I tried to figure out how best to divide my purchases up to get maximum points on my card. I have two more now after buying a bottle of Seafoam, a can of white lithium spray grease, a set of Allen wrench style torx wrenches (for tomorrow's project of fixing the damned passenger side power window in my car), a new set of plugs for Alli's car, a plug gapper, anti-seize, plug boot dielectric and a roll of 3M molding tape for both cars, but mostly to reattach the piece of trim that came off of my car in like February and put the GTP emblem back on the driver's side after I refinish it.

The first thing I did was get down to work replacing the spark plugs. Oh dear God was that new territory. I had never seen spark plugs sitting six inches into the engine. Must be an overhead cam thing. Good thing I did have a six inch extender from an old tool kit because my new kit only had a 3" one. The second cylinder from the left was a weird one in my book. There was what looked like oil down in the pocket where the plug was. I don't know why it was there, but it was clean like straight from the bottle so I didn't figure a leak was to blame.

The old plugs were obviously done for. The two right plugs had the center electrode worn almost down to the insulator while the ground electrodes were worn back pretty far as well. The gap was probably .07" where .035" is said to be normal for that car. The two plugs that weren't so bad were still due for replacement for sure.

The new plugs are Bosch Platinums. I noticed that the plug wire for the second cylinder from the left didn't "click" into place on top of the plug. This concerns me a bit. I'm going to buy a new wireset just to be safe. The two left plugs probably weren't as worn out because they weren't getting as strong a spark to begin with.

After the plugs were replaced, I started work on digging out everything that needed to come out in order to reach the sensor. That was interesting. I had been thinking that the heater core pipes would have to come off, but that was not the case. I could reach everything well enough by removing the bolts that held the heater core pipes to the engine block and taking out the battery. I got chemical burns from that. There was a lot of electrolyte in the area of the battery. I neutralized that with baking soda water, rinsed, neutralized again and rinsed again. I will do another neutralize and rinse tomorrow before I put it all back together.

I was able to get the coolant temp sensor wire out and cutting the covering sleeve away confirmed my suspicions. The insulation had been completely eaten away. Not melted, eaten. There was no solid plastic left that I could see for most of the length of that branch of the harness. Maybe half and inch remained. The rest was shiny copper. Whatever had eaten the insulation wasn't corrosive to copper. I didn't see much of the telltale green corrosion anywhere on the wire. It's not going to be a fun wire to repair. I'll have to figure out how to reuse the same connector and jack the new wiring into the large harness trunk. Protecting the new wires is going to be difficult since heat and whatever dissolved the previous insulation needs to be avoided.