Is that your mechanical prowess, or are you just happy to see me?

I FIXED SOMETHING! Like for real. Not with zip ties and glue (ok, there were zip ties involved but they were very temporary.

Let me back up:

Last saturday, I took my yardsaletreasurehunt.com generated route map and hit the road. There were yard sales *everywhere* I hadn't even made it 10 miles from home because I just couldn't get to a place where there were no yard sales. Turns out this was very lucky for me because as I was turning out of one particular cul de sac*, my gear shifter went completely limp in my hand. I could move it but it wasn't engaging anything, and it def was not interested in shifting gears. I had been in 3rd when whatever had just happened happened, and in 3rd I was going to stay.

There was a quick moment of "oh shit, my transmission just fell out" because the haters keep saying that's going to happen, but I got out, looked under the car and found this not to be the case. I then realized that I could drive, it was just going to be in 3rd.

So I got back in the car, limped home and did what I always do when things break. I called Ichiro! He immediately directed me to www.chrysler.com and told me to get a new car. See above about haters. He doesn't know the bond my car and I have and how we're going to be together 4-eva. This is my first car yo and I am locked down 4 life!

We then began a co-google session, which is basically when you just say words out loud and one or both of you googles around the train of thought. I had kept saying that I felt like the shifter was working, it just wasn't catching anything under the boot. I could feel it skating by something. He said linkage, so I googled that and found this thread on a website. The part where he says "The Saturn SC2 is a deceptive monster" really caught my eye (tho I disagree, it's fucking funny. He is one unhappy bunny that one.) Also, this bit caught my eye "Lemme tell you another thing that saturn maintenance tries to screw people on, and how I beat them on it, just in case anyone has this problem. There is a plastic piece that connects the shift linkage to the shifter. When it breaks, your shifter just goes floppy in your hand." AHA!!!

He went on to describe the official Saturn solution, which is $450 worth of new linkage stuff, and his own solution, which included drilling through metal and bolting,etc etc. Ichiro astutely recognized that this was a recipe for an ER trip and possibly surgery, so we decided I should investigate more before trying this solution. He set out to do more virtual digging while I went to take the car apart. Like Megan Fox in Transformers, only without all the "Sexiest Woman in The World" business to distract me, I got up in there with a screwdriver (Because it's a Saturn and that's really all you need to take one of those apart) and pulled out the entire middle of my car: Console, ummm, other stuff (don't have the manual, don't know what it's called) , and some other pieces too for good measure. In short, a whole bunch of stuff. I stripped everything under the dash and in the middle of the car down to the actual parts, including rolling up my shift boot to get at the linkage connectors, which just made me feel like a million bucks, and also very smart.

It also made me feel a little gross, because some of the shit I found in the nooks and crannies defies imagination. It's like the car equivalent of the Land of the Lost Left Socks. Every nasty, foody thing that I had lost in the car turns out to have been installed under my middle thing. Beer caps for things I haven't drank since college (I'm sure that I as driver was not drinking them, and that they belonged to passenger road sodas), that half a bag of gardetto snack mix that just disappeared, some fries, a hot tamale and enough dog hair to build an army! Also, remnants of the vomit from the first time I tried to take Star for a car ride and she snarfed Snausages all over the place. Awwww, I remember it like it was yesterday (though now that I think about it, it was in the 90's. Woah)

Anyhoo, digging deep, this is what I noticed:

HA! wrong picture uploaded. and it stays.

Seriously though, this is what I found:

This little beauty, so eloquently described on the thread mentioned above as "cheap plastic crap" had flat busted, leaving my poor other plastic thing in there just flopping around. It was supposed to look like this(with a black cap where you see the metal ball):


but with no cheap plastic crap to hold it down, it didn't. It was a hot mess in there. I sent these pictures to Ichiro, along with descriptive text such as "metal BALLS" and "Stupid fucking plastic shitbox sonofabitch" and also a couple of "Shove your Chrysler MothaF*cka!"s for good measure.

By the time I got back in the house, I had an IM waiting that the black thing was called a Shifter Bushing, that this was a common problem, that there was an ebay dude who made them (check out his ebay name and his number of sales man), and that Saturns were ghetto.

I clicked the Buy It Now icon, and sat back to wait. 30 seconds later I got bored and read further and noticed he said I could booge the thing together for a couple of weeks with some zip ties so down to the basement I went, emerging with an armload of those. 45 minutes and 62 zip ties later I hit on the desired configuration and did indeed have a working car back. 3 days later, box showed up and in under 10 minutes my car was good as new and put back together.

In short I RULE!

* I think I found where all the Village of the Damned kids moved when they grew up. These cul de sacs were just full of the SAME people. Literally, in one cull de sac there were 6 houses, 7 golden retrievers and 6 Suburbans. They're just like little copies of each other. blech.