Had a very, very busy weekend.
The car now has new:
- Front control arms
- Water pump
- Coolant
- Drivebelt
- Oil
- Oil filter
- Air filter
- Pollen filter
- Spark plugs
- Wipers
- Parking sensor speaker
So Friday was spent servicing the car. I originally thought
"Ah it'll only take an hour or two", and ended up finishing at midnight.
Was never a great fan of working on the gravel driveway, so my brother in law offered his driveway for the weekend. The beauty of his driveway is that it's on a slight slope, which means when I jack the back of the car up, it ends up being level. Perfect for draining coolant where the nose needs to be higher too, as I just lower the car again.
Did the control arms in about half hour, they were an absolute doddle. There's a slight knocking
after I've changed the arms, so this will either be a loose bolt or a drop link. I'll have a check on the weekend, either way it won't be anything serious.
Started the water pump then. The job was easy enough, the coolant was drained, water pump changed, but the jubilee clips on the hoses were a pig as I didn't have the right pliers so I couldn't finish the job on Saturday due to this.****Also, it didn't help that it rained, so I called it a day and waited for the next day to borrow a pliers off their neighbour.
The next day had gorgeous weather in store, and as I had the right pliers I finished attaching the hoses within minutes. Filled the car with coolant, bled the system, and away we go!
Car runs fantastic. It's amazing how loud that water pump was, it's lovely and smooth now.
Also, the ebay parking sensors are still working brilliantly and look completely OEM, but they don't
sound OEM. The speaker that came with them is a rubbish piezo speaker, so I decided to change it to more of an original sounding beep.
I bought a gong from a BMW 3 series for £9. You can wire this thing to make different sounds - triple beeps, echoing beeps, etc - but I settled for a straight beep that didn't echo. It works by wiring the positive and negative to the + and - terminals, then you split the negative terminal and wire it to one of the other pins depending on the sound you want.
Once I was happy, I taped it so that it was permanent, and resulted in a positive and negative wire to directly replace the old speaker.
This is the sound after testing it on a 9V battery:
https://youtu.be/ikNpddVeYXc
I've also ran wires from the sensor box all the way to the dashboard (nicely hidden away), so the sound now comes from the dash. It's now totally OEM feeling!
I'll get a better video of it soon Not bad for £15 ebay sensors.
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