Part IV - A Month of Waiting

I didn't have to go on to Portland until the next afternoon, so Kristin and her dad and I had the morning to see about the starter.

We had deduced from the symptoms that the starter was the most likely culprit, so, with some light sailors' language on all of our parts, we got the old starter out.  We hauled it down to the auto parts store for a replacement, and were disappointed when the old starter tested good.  Normally I wouldn't be upset about a part testing good, but in this case, a functioning starter meant the next most likely culprit was the engine flywheel, which would mean pulling the engine and parting with a lot of time and money.

The situation called for some deductive reasoning.  If the starter was the problem, we could by a new one, install it that afternoon, and I could be off to Portland.  If the problem was the flywheel, it would mean an investment of labor and cash that none of us wanted to think about. Obviously, the starter was the problem.  It had to be.  We laid our money down on the counter and asked for the part, and opened the box to inspect.

That was when we noticed a small difference between the old starter and the new one. The new one, like most working starters, has a gear welded onto the end of a narrow shaft. When the shaft turns, the gear turns, and the engine flywheel turns, and the car starts. My old starter had the same sort of shaft, and the same sort of gear at the end, but the gear wasn't welded to the shaft. It spun so freely around the shaft that we assumed it was supposed to be that way.  The gear had broken clean off of the shaft.  In Boulder.  Which meant that every successful start on the whole trip (Five, in total) had been in the range of the miraculous.

With additional sailors' language we installed the new starter.  It worked perfectly, and I got on the road to Portland.  I stayed Sunday night with my friend Jesse, and arrived on time for my Monday morning interview, where I learned that someone else had already been hired.

Here's a picture of Kristin's van.  The photo is less distorted than it looks.  The tailpipe really is about two inches off the ground.

Here's a picture of Kristin's mother, looking excited to see us.  Kristin spent a few more days with her parents, while I was in Portland, and then put Vader back in the car, and we three descended on my parents.