June has been an interesting month. The first big thing was that my girlfriend and I celebrated our second year anniversary, marking the beginning of our third year together. It has been two long years together and I look forward to many more with her. A lot of interesting things happened this month.
After celebrating the start of our third year, I had finally completed an engine rebuild on a 1993 Ford Festiva.
The car hadn't been driven since 2016 because it had a serious engine problem. My grandma was the last person to use the car. She had been using it in October of 2016 to go to and from the hospital and nursing home to take care of my grandpa during his final days. After he passed away, she loaded the car with his things and came home. After that, the car hadn't been driven much for the next two years because of the engine problem. What had happened was that there was a serious oil consumption issue which caused the car to let out a lot of smoke, making it both unpleasent and impractical to drive. Back in April, I had gone to my friends shop to help him out as he was putting a new engine back into an old red Ford truck. I was impressed and I thought to myself,
"I wish I could fix the engine in the 93 Festiva"
I told my friend and he said to bring the car over. I brought the car over and we ran some checks on it. The engine ran good aside from the oil burning issue. There was good compression, so that led us to believe that while the piston rings were good, the lower oil rings weren't. My friend determined that the rebuild project would be possible so we picked up the spare engine that I had stored in my room and brought it to the shop.
After that, we had to wait to continue working on the car because I had to order some parts. I ordered a new set of piston rings, connecting rod bearings, and various gaskets. Once everything came in, we began to assemble the "new" engine. Midway through the assembly, it was discovered that the 3rd piston out of the 4 that the engine had was damaged, so I had to order a new piston. At the end, the parts weren't too expensive and I started to remove the old engine and transmission out of the car. It was a bit difficult because the Festiva was designed to be a manual transmission car and this one was an automatic, which felt more like an afterthought because it was so hard to take apart mostly due to space issues. Eventually I got the engine and transmission out. The next day, my friend and I separated the transmission and the old engine. I removed the pistons from the old engine thinking I could reuse them but the were also in bad shape. No matter how much I cleaned the pistons from the old engine, the rings still felt a bit tight and my friend was concerned that I would have the oil burning problem all over again. We got the new engine put together and then we assembled it to the transmission. My friend helped me get the engine into the car and then I started putting everything back together. It took me two long days to get the car back together. At first, the car wouldn't start because of a minor electrical issue, but eventually I got it running and I was excited to see that there was no more smoke coming out of the exhaust. As soon as I finished putting the car together, I was able to get it home. The car wasn't without problems but eventually I was able to get everything resolved. Once all the issues with the car were fixed, I seemed to have a new problem.
My cat, Fluffy appeared to have stopped eating.
I noticed the food and water bowl hadn't been touched in several days so I brought her into my room. I tried to feed her canned cat food, but she wouldn't touch it. I thought she was done for and I was really worried. Eventually, she started to eat and drink water again after a long while. I was grateful she didn't have to be taken to the emergency room.
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