I went to change the air filter in the Mazda because the rubber seal around it was bad. Found some old droppings and urine in the bottom of the air box. Pulled it, found chicken wing bones and more urine/feces under it. Put the car out, soaked it with cleaner, soaked the AC condenser and radiator with cleaner, let it all sit, scrubbed the top of the trans and soaked it a few more times, rinsed it all till clean and no more purple/red response from the urine with the cleaner, washed the air box out the same, added better water drain holes, ran it without filter/box till the fans came on to dry some stuff up, pulled it in, gotta put it back together now. I L O V E my underhood light. I could not have seen that or done the cleaning at night without it.
Got a nice MANN filter on close out from RockAuto for like...pffft nothing. I'll go put it back together later on, not the first time I've had mouse issues but now that it's cleaned up and garaged on the regular should be the last of it. It's been sitting out the past month almost while I worked on my aunties 91 Capri turbo...but this mouse stuff was older than that, likely left overs from when I lived at the apartment and parked by the dumpster 2 years ago.
A while back I bought a single 6 Osram LED spot pod to tinker with, not so bad output but nowhere near the claimed 30W output. I finally boosted it by altering the sense resistor for the driver from 8W total current consumption to 23W total consumption with a peak temp at 70F ambient and no air flow of 140F which is acceptable and there's little visible droop in output as it heats up. It seems fairly stable. I bought a 2nd one just today to do the same boost to, I intend to swap them in place of the cosmetic yellow fogs and wire them as high beam assist/driving lights that'll come on automatic with high beams but will still have a disable switch so I can manually elect to not have them on with high beams.
Which brings me to the other recent event, the 15 year old foglight wiring I installed when I was about 16 went up in smoke, I think something shorted inside the pass side fog light as it seems to have burnt from there upward but didn't get out from in front of the radiator and luckily I was standing still idling when it happened. For whatever reason the 20A fuse just melted it's case but didn't blow, it could have been one of those recalled Chinese imposter fuses that looks like a fuse but doesn't act like one. It came with the cheap fogs a long time ago, whatever, no true harm done to the car so it's OK. I'll rewire it all when I swap in the spot pods to see if they can be useful down that low or not. Hopefully the can be, they're a very tight spot beam so fingers are crossed. If they aren't useful then I'll repair the yellow halogen fog lights if possible and reinstall those for winter and save up pennies for some Hella MicroDE projector fogs.
