My stuff is sick

None of the following is terribly interesting or important, I suppose, but it's occupied a great portion of the last few days of my life.

My hard drive crashed and I lost a lot of stuff. It turns out I did have a few things on CDs. I recovered all but the last year of photos and some music, but that's about all. The picture at the left shows my very sick laptop hard drive connected to a desktop computer. Yes, that's a stethoscope. I was listening to the spindle spin up and the read heads whiz about in the cyclical click-click pattern that is the hallmark of a dead drive. I've given up all hope on this one and I haven't spent much more time on it.

That's not so with my sister's car. One of the pictures I lost as a result of the hard drive crash was a nice one of her car's engine and transmission hanging from my engine hoist. A couple weeks ago I yanked the whole thing and changed the clutch and timing belt. I put it all together and the thing wouldn't start. It took me two days(!) to find and fix a faulty ground. Ran like a charm for a week. Then Monday I get a call from my sister. She's stranded with a dead car. I've spent four days now testing every single sensor, connector and harness for a fault, but everything looks fine. The thing runs, but it will intermittently develop rough idling, loss of power and the engine won't stay on.

These electrical and engine control problems can be very tough to diagnose without the right equipment. And guess what? I don't have the right equipment. I'm left with three alternatives. First, rare as it may be, I may have a bad tank of gas since the problem developed right after my sister filled up. I'm going to drain the tank just to see. Two, my folks happen to have another model car, same make, with the exact same engine. I'm going to swap out sensors, fuel injectors and throttle bodies until I find the component that failed. Three, take in to a shop. I've never, ever taken a car into a shop and I don't want to start now. I wouldn't even know where to start since I would need someone to give me a confident and reliable diagnosis without actually fixing the problem. Truth is, I think most mechanics take an educated guess at it, but don't really know what the problem is until they try a likely fix and see what happens.