The Unsorted BBS Collection/thegreatunsorted.tar/thegreatunsorted/texts/term_papers/18.txt

Text File | 1994-10-25 | 4KB | 49 lines

                            One After Another



     My family has been having a lot of  problems with our cars lately.  As soon as we get one
car fixed, another seems to have something go wrong with it.  It seems as if the only car that
didn't have any problems was mine.  This meant that when someone's car wasn't running that they
would borrow mine.  So, of course, with all this extra use that my car was getting it was only a
matter of time before it was my turn for something to go wrong.  Surprisingly, it wasn't an engine
problem or a major electrical problem, but was my power rear windows.  They had no problem in
going down, but when I tried to roll them back up they didn't move.  If  they had rolled up but not
down it probably wouldn't have been too much of a problem and I wouldn't have fixed them, but
not being able to lock my car up was just intolerable.  So I did the best thing, fixed the problem
myself, in the cheapest way I could.
     The first things that I did were to determine exactly what the problem was and to figure
out how to fix it.  I had a friend, who works on cars, help me in pining down the problem.  After
checking the fuses and the motors, we found out that the door switches had burned out.  All I
needed to do was to replace them with new switches, which sounded easy enough.
     Next I located and purchased the replacement switches without getting swindled.  I started
by calling the Audi dealer for them, and was told that they were 50 dollars apiece.  I thought that
was way too much for them so I kept shopping around.  Next I called a local auto parts store and
found that they wanted 40 dollars apiece for them.  Well, this was still too much money for these
little things so I decided that I didn't need new switches, but used ones would be all right.  With
this in mind I called a local auto wrecking yard to see if they had any Audis there that still had
their door switches.  They did and they only wanted 15 dollars apiece for them, which I thought
was more like what I wanted to pay, so I drove over and picked them up.
     Then I removed the old switches from the doors by desoldered the wires.  I pulled the
switches out of the doors and then I desoldered the wires from them.  Luckily I had a butane
powered soldering iron so I didn't have to bother with extension cords.  Desoldering the switches
was not much of a problem, except for burning myself with the dripping solder once or twice and
trying not to burn the door.  The real problem I had was getting the solder off the wires without
dripping on my car.
     Now I installed the replacements for the switches.  All I did was solder the wires to the
new switches.  Now this doesn't sound hard, but it was a real chore.  I had written down which
color wire went where on the switch, but once I soldered the wrong one and had to do it over.
The wires were so short that it was a struggle to keep them touching the contacts while soldering
them on.  I think I had more solder drip onto my hands than I used on the wires.  A couple of
times I had one of the wires pulling out while I was trying to solder the next wire, and I had to
resolder them.  Finally, when I was finished, I checked out my soldering job.  It looked rather
messy but the wires were tight and none of the contacts were connected by solder.  Done, I
cleaned up the mess and put the switches back into the doors.
     Well, my passengers have been much happier lately, being able to use the windows, and I
haven't had any more trouble with the windows.  I'm really happy that I took the time and saved
the money by doing it myself.  Now I just have to get to work on my sunroof, which is starting to
leak water.  Oh well, there always seems to be something wrong, but we'll just have to wait and
see how long it takes me before I get up the motivation to get on to that problem.