what a weekend (long!)

Yep! What a weekend! Was just gonna fix my heater. Well............

Part 1
Got up early saturday to get some heat going in the Zuk. When I rebuilt the sammi from the junkyard I never checked to see if the heater worked until it was all back together. Every time I turned it on I blew a fuse. The radio/cig lighter fuse to be exact. I just didn't understand why. I figured I had a wire exposed or something or the heater motor was bad from sitting for 7 years in the junk yard.

So I went out and tore the heater out of the grey ghost (my parts rig) Tore it apart and found 1 1/4 inches of mud caked inside on top of the heating element. Some water and air cleaned it right up. I bet there was 5 lbs of crap inside there

I put it back together and took it to plug into the sammi to test it out. Sure enough it blew the fuse

So I tore out the entire dash, cut the tape off the harness and traced every wire used in the heating circuit. Looked just fine. So out comes the FSM. It said that I should have a light green wire in a 4 pin connector running from the heater switch to the fuse box. NO GREEN WIRE!!!

So I kept looking and looking. I found the green wire :-\ Come to find out, the radio 4 pin connector and the heater switch 4 pin connector are the same size and I had the heater plugged into the radio/cig lighter connector. That explained the fuse blowing

So I put in a new fuse (number 5) connected her up, hit the switch and COUGH! COUGH!! Dirt came flying out everywhere!!

Great news, the heater fan in the sammi was not bad so there was no need to tear out the fan from my doner. No need to tear it apart and clean it, and no need to rip out the dash!!!

All I needed to do was connect the correct wiring connectors :-\

Time for a break!!!

PART 2
Well I had to leave for a few hours to do cool family stuff. I got home at about 5 and started to put her back together. I put the dash, guage cluster, steering wheel

back in and hit the start button. CLICK! CLICK! CLICK! :-\ The solenoid was hitting hard but the starter wouldn't tuen over. I hit it again and KAPOW!!! Something bad happened

The starter busted

So I called it quits for the night and left all my tools laying all over the yard. I didn't care who took them

PART 3
Got up at 6 on sunday morning to swap the starter. I had tried to jump start it but it still did nothing. So I swap the starter and try it again. Still nothing. I try to jump start it and nothing. I finally swapped out the battery (an optima) and guess what ? IT STARTED!!! Bad news was that the newly installed started is bad :-\ It is making some horrible grinding noise

The reality is that the only thing wrong was that I ran the optima dead on Saturday while working on the hearter that wasn't broke. Ok, it starts but needs the original starter put back in. The heat is working great. My only problem now after 2 days of not needed work is that the windshield wipers won't turn off