After six months of waiting, a flurry of bidding activity on a sunday evening a few weekends ago, followed by more waiting, our house has finally been sold! The ink is dry on all the paperwork, and the new owners have the keys.

I no longer have to pay for electricity, gas, water, lawn service, insurance, homeowner's association dues, alarm permit, two mortgage payments, and whatever other home ownership related expenses might crop up.

It would have been nice to be able walk away from this with a wad of cash too, but the real estate market has not been terribly kind to us. But we're still in good shape. We can now start over in New Zealand with a fresh slate and make the best of it there.

Remember, the Insight is still for sale. If you know anybody who wants to drive the car with the best fuel efficiency available (about 60 mpg), let me know!

The Insight now has a newly installed cruise control system, which works great! ivo, decibel45, and bovineone came over on friday evening to start the install. We installed the throttle adapter, built a bracket for the main cruise control unit in the engine compartment, ran the wiring harness through the firewall, connected the VSS (vehicle speed sensor) signal to the engine computer under the passenger footwell, installed a disconnect switch on the clutch pedal, and finally realized that we didn't quite have enough wire connectors to do the final bit of wiring.

In between there, Amy made us all a great fajita dinner, which was just the thing we needed to get as far as we got. Thank you Amy!

ivo came by the next morning with a wire connector kit borrowed from bovineone. We finished the wiring, visually checked everything, and took it out for a spin. We got no action on the cruise control system at all.

We came back home and started on the diagnostic routine. There's a small diagnostic LED on the circuit board of the main control unit, but it wasn't lighting up at all like it was supposed to. We figured we might have an electrical power problem. I didn't have a multimeter, so we made a quick trip to Lowe's and picked one up. Almost immediately we found the problem: the ground connection for the RF receiver module was not really ground. We fixed that, and the diagnostics routine worked perfectly.

We took it out for another test run, and it worked exactly as expected. All that was left was to tidy up all the wiring. The buttons on the steering wheel are a small wireless transmitter, which is the reason for the RF receiver module above. It just clips onto the steering wheel and looks just like it was designed for the car.

The whole project probably took 7 or 8 hours total. That's about the same time that another Insight owner took to install his cruise control the first time. Like him, we could probably do it in less than half the time now that we've done it once.

Thanks to everybody who helped. This is going to make our upcoming 5000 mile road trip a lot nicer.

Since Amy and I are going to be driving on about a 5000 mile road trip in the near future (more about the details later), I ordered an aftermarket cruise control system for the Insight. It arrived today and I opened up the package and was confronted with a small avalanche of little parts neatly compartmentalized in plastic baggies. Yay, car hacking!

I'm going to try to install this thing tomorrow. Anybody who wants to drop by and help and/or stuporvise (nugget and ivo :) is welcome. I'll start around midday and will probably end up working on it well into the evening. I may even have a couple more tools to sell on gbay after this is done, too. :)

For some reason my car's battery died today. This is in the Insight, Honda's first hybrid gas-electric vehicle, which has both a small 12 V battery and a much larger 144 V system for the electric motor assist. I drove it at lunch and everything seemed fine, but when I went to go home after work it wouldn't start. I called decibel45 and a quick jump started it. My theory is that the 12 V battery has a problem and when it does, it also affects the larger assist system. I'll have to look into this further; fortunately there is an 8 year warranty on the powertrain (if it happens to be a powertrain problem).

Decibel was heading to meet snaxxx and dopplertx for dinner, so I decided to go too. I had turned off my car to fix something in the engine compartment that was not properly fastened, and then it wouldn't start again. So we ended up taking his truck instead, and came back for my car later.

After dinner we went to dopplertx's place to watch the Olympic opening ceremonies on his HDTV system. There were some glitches in the broadcast, but it sure looked good!

For me, the most heartwarming scene in the opening ceremonies was not the lighting of the torch, nor the raising of the Olympic flag, nor the performance by Bjork, but the thunderous reaction of the crowd when the Iraqi athletes entered the stadium. Each of them looked extremely happy to be able to represent their country at the games, and they clearly had the support of the spectators. I think they got the loudest applause aside from the Greek delegation.

Other interesting entrances were Korea and Taiwan. I missed seeing it because I was out of the room, but apparently both North and South Korea entered together under the name Korea, and carried their flags side by side. Taiwan entered under the name "Chinese Taipei", at the insistence of mainland China, and were not allowed to carry their national flag (they carried the flag of their Olympic committee instead). The world is making progress, but still has a long way to go.

Out of curiosity, I called the Acura dealer to find out how much they would charge for a valve clearance adjustment:

Labor:	$352
Parts:	$94
Total:	$446

The parts cost is for four rubber gaskets that they always replace as a matter of course whenever they remove the head covers. When I removed mine the rubber gaskets were in fine shape so there was no need to replace them (this is in accordance with the service manual that says you don't have to). My costs:

Tools:	$322
Parts:	$10
Total:	$332

So, even disregarding the cost of the new gaskets, I still came out ahead $20 on this job. Of course, I'm counting my time as $0 and I can use all the tools again, so I'm really comparing apples and oranges here. The only tool that isn't generic is the special Acura tool for adjusting the valve set screws, which was $75.

The satisfaction of having successfully completed the job myself is worth more than $20.

Well, I finally got the NSX all back together. The nut that gave me so much grief on friday came off within minutes of trying today. The combination of not being exhausted (it's hot in my garage!), a fresh perspective, and a good shove in the right direction was all it took.

It seems that this job didn't actually fix the whining noise that prompted this whole adventure. However, I'm happy I did it anyway because lots of valves were out of spec. Now I just need to figure out what the real noise problem is.

It took me about 10 hours total time to get this job done. The time estimate for people who know what they're doing is 4 hours. The actual work went smoothly, the part that took longer was all the silly stuff like dropping tools, having to remove the front head cover twice, getting one of the nuts on the back of the rear head cover in the right place, dealing with the other nut problem from friday, taking breaks because Texas garages are really hot in the summer, and so on.

Working on cars is fun, but it's hard work too.

Well, after another four hours of working on the NSX, I'm kind of stuck. Somehow I managed to tighten a nut with stuff attached under it slightly incorrectly, in such a way that I now can't get the socket back on the nut to loosen it. Lovely.

I ended up having to take the front cylinder head cover off again so I could see the cylinder TDC marks on the timing pulleys. The real work (adjusting the valve clearances) went pretty smoothly. Like the front, the rear cylinder bank had many misadjusted valves, mostly too tight.

Yesterday the Acura dealer finally received the special tool I ordered (see previous post). So this evening I continued the NSX valve clearance adjustment project.

I first adjusted a couple of the valves that were easy to get to, to get the hang of it. 0.006 inch clearance sure doesn't leave a lot of room for error. Loosen the locknut, adjust the clearance (turning the set screw only a few degrees is enough to send it out of adjustment), tighten the locknut taking care not to let the set screw turn at all, recheck the clearance after tightening. Remember to use a different feeler gauge for intake (0.006 in) and exhaust (0.007 in) valves. Repeat 12 times for one bank of cylinders.

I have to take a moment to note that the Honda engineers thought of some very creative places to let you drop tools. After doing the first exhaust valve, I dropped the lock nut socket. At first I could see it with a mirror, but when I reached around to get it, it dropped further into the engine compartment before I could grab it. I was hoping to hear it hit the ground but no such luck. It was stuck between a panel and a beam (it took about 10 minutes of poking around just to find it). I finally got it out and managed to not drop it down there again.

After checking and rechecking all the clearances for the front cylinder bank, I decided to put everything back together on that side to reduce the number of parts sitting around. Everything went back together without a hitch, with no leftover parts. However, I just now realized that the cylinder TDC marks are only on the front cam pulley. I don't really want to take that side apart again, so I'll just wing it for the rear bank. I can tell where the cylinder is by the position of the cam lobes. The TDC alignment doesn't have to be perfect so I should be ok.

I should be able to finish this up tomorrow. Hope it all works when I put it back together!

While driving my NSX around recently, I determined that the valve clearances need adjusting. The engine was making an unusual sound that pointed to this as a cause. So in a burst of do-it-yourself energy, I've decided to tackle this myself.

I've helped my dad work on various cars many years ago, but I've never really done any significant automotive project on my own. I already had the NSX service manual, and I found a couple of good descriptions of the job here and here. I took a trip to Sears and picked up a bunch of tools I'll need, and ordered the special tappet adjuster wrench from the Acura dealer.

Even though I don't have the special adjuster tool yet (they had to order it), I couldn't wait to get started so last night I took the front head cover off. The pictures show some detail. I measured the valve clearances and they seem out of adjustment and inconsistent, which means my guess was correct and this job really does need to be done. That's a relief after having come this far!

I'll post updates as I get further into this job.