Questionok, this one is a doozy.
this car basically acts as if it is possesed (107k miles). I have had it for about 2 years and it used to have some weird hacked out alarm system in it that my mom seemed to have disabled (somehow, for some reason) before she gave it to me. (its a legal car tho, please hehe -- ) now this or some other thing seemed to have some number of consequences. There are some annoying things that have happened electrically, like the radio turning off when i roll the windows up (until i changed the radio, for instance) -- but that is besides the point and im wasting your time. please read on :D
first off there seems to be some sort of heat sink thing underneath the glove compartment that is exposed that if disconnected will shut the heating/AC off (sometimes a passenger will kick it with his/her foot)...
thing is, it seems when the weather changes, everything goes haywire. at key on, the gauges dont turn on, the compass/odometer thingy at the top doesnt turn on... the lights dont come on when you open the door, no chimes when you leave the key in -- just a dimly blinking windshield wiper fluid light, and a strange "bup bup" sound coming from near the glove compartment. One more thing, if the heat sink thing is plugged in, it will blast the heat at maximum and you cant change it. you can only disconnect it to stop it.
the car runs fine, except for since i have had the car it has consistently shuddered at 40 mph.
this has happened a few times over the past 2 years, but i havent had to take any major trips, and it usually goes away. not only am i SICK of it, but i have a 300 mile trip coming up. i want to find out just WHAT is going on here.
I have no blown fuses on the left side of the car inside, and under the hood i couldnt find any to my knowledge (although if you had a diagram of what those fuses do it would be appreciated, the cover to my fusebox seems to be missing).
AnswerHi Jason Brian,
I believe that the "heat sink thing" is the body computer which has three plugs, correct? It is supposed to be secured to the panel next to the passengers right calf.
If it you unplug one or more plugs it will cause a lot of the problems that you have experienced. I would be inclined to take some electronic circuit spray cleaner and apply it to the pins and socket of the three plugs, let it evaporate, and then indentify what is wrong. I suspect that there is something the matter with the heater/ac control system, but I need to know whether it is a conventional control unit or does it have a digital temperature display because there are different self-diagnostic tests and functional differences as well depending upon which type it is. So we need to find out exactly what is wrong with the body computer hooked up. Also turn on the windshield defrost mode on the ac/heat control panel and tell me whether or not the ac compressor is called into action so that way I would know whether the heat only is due to a lack of ac function or not. I expect that the blower will still blow full time at high but I would like to have some idea as to what to attribute the heat only to. Air temp is controlled by mixing cold and warm air and so if you don't have any cold then you will always get hot air.
The shuddering at around 35-45 mph may be due to a wheel/tire combo that is out of round. Each could be slightly out of round and if mounted one to the other so as to additively combine the out of roundness you get such vibration. The solution is to "match mount" the wheel and tire which is done at a tire store that knows how to do it. They basically have to find which wheel-tires have a radial variance of more than 1/16" and then match mount those to reduce the variance. It is basically remounting the tire on the wheel in such a position as to cancel out the out of roundnesses of each .
So see what you can do with those two ideas and let me know the answer to my question and we'll go from there.
Roland
