week 3

A challenging moment from this week was when we realized that using bondo to repair larger dents and body issues could actually prove quite challenging. We figured this out when we came back after a day and see that we probably should've taken some more time when applying the bondo. This is because there ended up being a good number of larger ridges that we would now have to spend lots of time on sanding down since we didn't smooth out and layer it very well in our original application to the panel. So the challenging part about this is that now we have to sand this down to a single smooth surface to ensure it look good and that has been taking quite some time as the only powered sander we have is a single small hand held radial sander, that while a little better then just using a piece of sand paper, that is in no way perfect for the job. But since we can't remove it from the body we will now have to completely sand it smooth which will take awhile as we have already put at least two hours into it and are only almost done with about the first half.

Another slightly challenging moment was again at the beginning of the week after coming back from the weekend and having not started the truck in a day or two we found that it wouldn't start and could barely crank. This was quite worrying at first because given the age of the truck as well as the condition that the battery appeared to be in, this could be related to a number of different problems and some of which we wouldn't be able to fix with the tools at hand. This would also be a problem because without being able to start the truck it would be very difficult to get it back up onto the Rhino Ramps so that we could look under it easily and replace whatever the trouble maker could be. Luckily though our first guess at a solution of jump starting it ended up working and after running it for a few minutes we were able to turn it off and start it without problem which also told us that the alternator was functioning. However, this did tell us that there was something pulling current even when the truck was off so we went around and took out all of the interior light bulbs and haven't had trouble starting it since but will have to wait and see after it sits for a few days.

This week I was able to learn quite a bit about cleaning since last week was mostly focused on the mechanical side of things and this week ended up being a little bit more cosmetic. For starters most of this learning came around what different products can be used to first of all get stains out and second was making things smell better as many of the things that ended up working as stain removers didn't smell the best and smell is a big problem with the interior of this car especially with how hot it got this week. Although every time we go back and clean a seat or floor section again there still is quite a bit of brown dirt that comes out in the water but for the most part the stains seem to look much better and the smell at the very least has improved with help of an air freshener as well. Something that I'm still in the process of learning that can be quite challenging is trying to remove stain and smell from cigaretts and or tabacco which the previous owner had definitely smoked in the truck. Another cosmetic thing that I learned is a way to restore the look of sun damaged plastic, leather, and some metallic pieces. since most of these pieces were black, we found that taping off the area around them and then simply painting over them with a black paint proved to work quite well for restoring the look of the piece with a darker and less faded black now on it.

As for my goals from the first week I'm still continuing to make strong progress towards them. While I didn't get the chance to do as much mechanical work this week I still did make progress towards my goal of improving skills with car health, maintenance, and appearance since I worked a good amount with cleaning this week and also refurbishing the look of worn parts. As we still haven't managed to sell the van yet I got some more improvement with dealing within the second hand car market as we had a few more people look at it and I took the lead on one of them tell them about the features as well as mechanical history of the van. This week in particular though I made significantly more progress towards my goal of working together and listening to multiple opinions as we needed to come up with multiple ideas for how to get the truck to start again as well as going about next steps such as possible ways to fix the ABS brake light.