Alright, I admit it! I’m horrible at keeping blogs up to date!!! Any of you who actually read this thing must thank Steve for reminding me to update or I would have forgotten it again for another couple of days.

Anyway, first, there’s the car update. The most recent change on the beast was the conversion from the crappy Mopar automatic choke to a manual choke. This may not seem like much of a story, but sit back and relax and listen in or read on.

Now normally, I’m a pretty easy going guy. And I’m terribly forgiving. So it is unusual that I go off on a rant about how bad a business is. But today I feel the extreme desire to bitch out the boys at Baxter Auto. I can’t say for the whole chain right now because I’ve only dealt with the one right down the street from me in Tacoma. So here’s the scoop.

I go down there to get a converter kit for the choke. Not a major part. Nothing complicated. No problem. I get it, bring it back to the house (saving the receipt of course). We take the air cleaner off, find a nice spot under the dash to mount the pull switch, get it all ready, and then go to mount the switch. Then we run into a problem.

For those of you unfamiliar with a pull-switch for a manual choke, the kit looks like this:

When we went to remove the nut on the back of the switch (it has to unscrew from the rear of the switch and slide down the cable) we found a defect in the craftsmanship: namely, the cable was crimped onto the switch in such a way that the bolt couldn’t come off… Talk about defective workmanship. I wonder how many of these got sold. They couldn’t have tested them before they sold them because that’s a pretty glaring error.

So anyway, I saved the reciept, so I bring it back to Baxter’s and show the guys behind the counter. Their response: “well if it was me, I’d have just modified it. Ya know, just bend the crimps around until the nut fit over it”. Great idea guys!! So I’m supposed to screw around with a part you sold me that should have worked in the first place. Then, seeing as that crimp was very poorly done in the first place, as soon as I get it set in such a way that the nut will slide off it’s going to snap the connection with that cheap ass cable. Then I can’t use it and can’t return it and I have to go back and buy another one anyway. I’m sure that sounds good from a sales point of view: I buy twice the parts that I need, you make money and you don’t have to worry about hearing that your product is crap. But from my view, I’d rather return it, embarass you for your product in front of other customers so maybe you’ll actually sell good ones, and then get the money back to buy a different one that actually works.

So I got a different one (after checking at the store that it was actually built right, of course), got it all mounted and working inside the car (after some fiddling around of course: my dad, the friendly family car mentor, says that mopar chokes are the biggest pains in the ass out there, so if I can convert one of them alright I should be able to repear the process on other ones if I need to ^_^).

Now all I have to do is get used to using a manual choke……

Peace out, rant done, happy hacking! And better luck with parts than I got 😉