Baby It's Cold Outside

I mentioned in a previous episode that the heater stopped working.  In warmer weather there was so much heat coming from the engine bay that I wasn't sure I was going to ever need the heater. Now even before the truly cold weather (10-30 Fahrenheit in my area) has hit the heater feels like a mandatory piece of equipment.

Broken Heater Panel. I forgot to take a picture of the broken wire actually being
discussed, but it would have been boring anyway.

It's the heater blower motor that quit, and it didn't take much to diagnose.  Probably before I even noticed that it was not working I saw a loose wire hanging down below the heater control panel.  This is where having a wide open dashboard is great. I first made a quick repair by stripping the wire back and mechanically fixing it back in place by clamping the wire mount down with a pair of pliers.  That lasted a week or so before the wire wiggled back out. The permanent fix was nearly as simple: 5 minutes upside down under the dash with a soldering iron.

Total cost: $0.00 (if you already own a soldering iron and have solder). I looked up the equivalent part for the Civic - it'd be $50-100 for a used part (no likely way to repair it), and would have taken probably at least 10 times longer to disassemble the dash and replace (or 20-30 times longer to drive it to a repair shop and pick it back up).  Now we're talking.  It's not all bad news with an old car.

The new heater control panel in place. A 10-year-old girl's fingers are the
right size to reach the nuts up behind the dash. Luckily I had just such a helper.

Unfortunately, a little while after this repair I accidentally knocked into the heater panel and cracked the left half off (see the first picture above). For the replacement I sprung for the more expensive option made of old school Bakelite instead of modern plastic. I'm not sure but I think the one that broke was not original, because it had an older and rare version of the usage instructions - "Push & Turn" for heater bypass on the left instead of "Push" and seemed to have an incorrect modern print font. The controls are stiff enough that I'm afraid I'll break this new one, so I need to try to get those loosed up in the future. You can't quite tell in the picture, but the little chrome rings holding the knobs in place polished up very nicely in my first stab at chrome rehabilitation.  I have a lot more of that in my future.