Vehicular Madness

A while back my car started malfunctioning in an odd way. If it wasn't run every day, the battery would go dead. Didn't seem like such a big deal a brand new battery met the same fate.

It's been sitting, and I've been driving other things, but I finally got it into the mechanic and got him to poke around and discover the problem. Which was actually fairly easy to discover, considering.

See, I had figured there had to be a short somewhere draining the battery. I just had no idea how to go about finding it. Thus my need for a mechanic. Who, first thing hooked the battery up to a trickle charger for a few hours, then flipped it over to boost to try and start the car.

Of course being concerned about an electrical malfunction and a possible battery malfunction he checked the battery for heat as the boost kicked in, so he was under the hood and not inside the car when smoke began rolling from my dash.

It seems that my eight year old (give or take) stereo had decided to give up the ghost, by shorting out and drawing charge off the battery. Today, it decided to commit suicide by catching on fire.

Frankly with the amount of dust and dirt that must have made it's way into that thing I'm amazed it hadn't blown up earlier.

Luckily the mechanic was quick thinking and jerked the cables, and then dismantled the dash to see what exactly had caught on fire.

Hopefully re-installing the factory stereo (which doesn't have a CD player, but I'll survive without that for a while) will solve the short, which appeared to come from inside the stereo itself. Mechanic will be going over everything once the new battery is installed (I got it at El Marto Del Wal, it's got three year free replacement, they can give me a damn new battery) just to make sure there's not another incident, but he figures the culprit was the stereo.

So, possibly as soon as tomorrow afternoon I'll have my car back, yay!

And hopefully nothing else catches on fire.