It is winter now and the weather is pretty cold where I live. My battery is weak and there is cold weather on the way, so I decided to test the block heater out. I was told by a friend to plug it in, and then unplug the block heater quickly. If the heat plug had any draw it would create a spark when I unplugged it. It did not create a spark so I figured that the block heater was not working for some reason. I traced the cable and found that it was just dangling at the back of the engine bay. After some research and feeling around the back of the engine, I found the block heater plug.

From the top of the engine looking to the right you can see the orange end of the block heater cable.

Because of the angle, I used a mirror to get a picture of the plug. It now works great, and I still test it regularly by checking for a spark when unplugging it.

Our drivers door on our 2007 Ford Focus broke and we were forced to open the vehicle from the trunk or use the key-less remote. After disassembling the door, this is the piece that I found was broken.

The bottom piece is the new part and you can see the little metal tab sticking out on the right that is not on the top part. It was quite the hassle to get the part into the door since there is limited room. Now the door works just as new and I am pleased with the part.

Our 2007 Ford Focus started having a power steering oil leak a few years back and we would top it off when the pump started making excessive noise. After sitting through a winter, the line burst when we started it back up. I got around to replacing it, and it took more work than I thought it would have. I took the line off of the pump and fished it down under the car.

The line fed back up under the air intake and battery housing. I had to remove those before removing it from the steering shaft.

It took a bit of work to get it all back together and fish it around all of the other cables and hoses but it worked! It did make some strange gurgling when the car was first running and I figure that is from air being in the line. After a few minutes of running, the sounds went away and it sounds fine now.

In my last post, I discovered how to fix the HVAC control knob, but that was not the root of my problem. The root of the whole thing was that the HVAC shutter doors were getting stuck. This “hack” is not the proper way of doing things, but cuts off a lot of time removing the whole dash and taking the whole HVAC apart. behind the controls and radio is the HVAC system. I cut a hole in it and found the lower shutter door that I knew was sticking. There is a rubber seal on the door that had degraded and turned into this glue like goop that stuck the shutter door to the walls. I cleaned off as much of the goop as possible with rubbing alcohol but I knew that it would eventually get sticky again, so I put aluminium foil tape over the door to eliminate any chances of it sticking again.

I hot glued in the plastic that I had cut out and made sure it had a good seal. While this is not a proper fix and isn’t really professional, I wanted to get this working with the least amount of time as possible. This seems like it will be a good permanent solution. The car just won’t look as nice if you were to take it apart one day.