so, this morning i picked up the sentra and took it to the recommended electrician: chino’s. the shop is barely wide enough for a door; it’s sandwiched between a restaurant and a tire repair shop. the first thing chino did was to use one of my fuses to verify that what i told him (that the fuse for the meters kept blowing out) — not off to the best start. he then proceeded to take off a bunch of stuff and remove random wires, then check the fuse again. how did he check the fuse? well, first he got some coated multi-strand copper wire. he stripped off the coating, then removed individual copper wires. he would then wrap a strand of the wire around the metal tabs of a blown fuse, and use that ‘repaired fuse’ to test out if he had found the short. if he hadn’t, the copper strand would break (like a fuse).
he continued to unplug random connections, test the fuse, rebuild the fuse, etc. for about 30min. i was a bit shocked (…i would think a car electronics guy would be able to do more than just guess and check), a bit dissapointed (…this guy had better tools at his disposal, like a multimeter), a bit impressed (…using copper wire to rebuild the fuse was a kinda clever idea) and finally shocked again, when he did actually find the problem. turns out that the switch for my brake pedal was shorting the system….so he unplugged that….and everything works fine.
well, almost. two small problems. 1) my brake lights don’t work now. 2) you know how in an automatic car, you need to push on the brake pedal to get the car out of park?….well, without that switch, i couldn’t get out of park. luckily one of my earlier failed attempts at a kill-switch is able to bypass that safety feature (i no longer need to press on the brake pedal to get out of park).
in other news, once we were back at sea-level, i stopped smelling fumes and the transmission started working better again! we drove from huaraz to lima, stopping at a little town (baranco) along the way for lunch. so far, most of lima is overcast, congested and not too nice. we’re staying in miraflores, which is a really nice area in lima. it has nice restaurants, shops and houses. the restaurant we ate at tonight was kinda funny. it was on calle pizza (a street with tons of pizza/italian places). however, food was coming and going from the restaurant all night. for instance, the pizza’s were prepared inside, then brought next door to be cooked, then brought back in to be served. the apple pies also came from another place next door (the waitress literally walked in through the front door with the pies already on ceramic plates).
sorry, no pics for today.