Remember yesterday? A magical time in the past when the world was a slightly different place, Yayoi Kusama was still alive, and the only thing wrong with my Citroën 2CV was a broken shift linkage? That I fixed? I miss those days. Now, there’s something else wrong with my 2CV, and while it’s not huge, it feels like my car was zapped with some sort of high-energy entropy ray. Do we have those in orbit? Is that a thing?
I say this because both of the minor yet annoying failures that happened – the vanishing of the little rubber doohickey on the shift linkage, and this current problem, which revolves around a bolt suddenly bisecting itself – feel like instances where the order of the universe is just degrading a bit. Entropy is having a few small victories over order.
I noticed the issue when I started the car to get my kid from school to take him to a doctor’s appointment. It started fine, and it was shifting fine, thanks to yesterday’s quick repair, but then I noticed that the voltmeter was reading 11.8 instead of the usual 14.something it reads when running. Something was up.
I stopped and looked under the hood, checking the fuses first, since I have had issues with grounding out wires popping the alternator fuse before. It wasn’t that. I kept looking, and pretty quickly saw what was up:
Oh yeah. That doesn’t look right. That’s not supposed to be at that angle!
I got in close to get a better look, and the bolt and nut appeared to still be there, which surprised me? But then I gave it a tug:
Hmm, that’s not how bolts usually work.
Ohhh that explains it all. Why did this bolt decide to halve itself now? Was it just waiting for the shift linkage to crap out, just to have a failure buddy?
What’s annoying is that to get the broken bolt out, I think I’ll have to disconnect the exhaust manifold from the heat exchanger, since the head of the bolt is hitting the heat exchanger and I can’t slide it out. Why is this bolt so long, anyway? Why can’t I put in a shorter bolt just through that front hole?
I did get the alternator in position and got the belt on, but I still need to get that new bolt, pull the heat exchanger, and all that. That bolt could be many decades old; perhaps it was time. Maybe it was replaced at the same time the shift linkage bits were replaced, and that’s why they both relinquished their grasp on functional life at essentially the same time?
Maybe. But I’d rather believe there’s an orbiting entropy ray platform that has been targeting me and my cars. It would go a long way to explaining so many things that happen without forcing me to acknowledge my own shortcomings and failings.
So, whoever owns and operates the entropy ray: please knock it off. Point that thing somewhere else, already!
All photos: author
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