after typed note: This was oddly theraputic to type but may seem very energized because GM pisses me off and its like the frustration of "******* STOP SUCKING SO I CAN LIKE YOU WITHOUT ANY SHAME OR LYING TO MYSELF. in no order i responded to a lot you said. If it seems disorganized its because thats my head rn but nothing bad happens but its wordy. this part about the car and CEL stuff came after the anger later LOL.
also yes the fuel level is often measured to very precise numbers % wise because heat expansion and cooling and ambients can affect not only the level but the amount of open space and an inferred temperature of the fuel returning etc are used to adjust or calculate what should be the change in all that from engine being turned off, fuel sitting for a small bit on a hot day with 2 hours before its brought to the store after only running for 3 minutes the whole way, where the percentage is made from, say 15% to 93% filled, and then the car is maybe driving at cruising speed for a short trip while speed is consistent and its warmed up fully now etc etc. like i just kinda BSed that scenario since each car does own thing but demonstrates the insane amount of **** the PCMs are inserting variables and changing the expected test results, then running the tests, giving rather decently indicative causes or problems for what they are in the codes, and also running meta-tests that are checking the rationality of its own logic or results or outputs etc.. the fact the codes dont set for literally no reason but often come back to the same small group of reasons and also generally not affecting performance except in bad purge valve situations and canisters fillign with gas. Water in gas and people who keep clicking the damn pump on the day the gas pump is being dumb or frozen itself are a couple rare but happens that would likely have codes. so in your case, interesting the code pointed at those because its usually one of those things the test for the code wont run if it thinks its ability to run the tests reliably arre compromised. that is why you can have no codes but the readiness monitors may never pass because i want to say for at least some cars the readiness monitors wont set a code because those are outside the obd2 emissions concerns because you evaporating gasoline isnt killing the cat converter, but its still an emission thing tested for so in that way it can be annoying because
we all just kinda assume issues=code but its more or less issues = "define issues mr government" = Converter lifetime monitoring = Say no more
thankfully a lot of auto makers will light that for a lot more functional issues but at the very least use a code and log it even if not the CEL coming on. My car has a CEL and a Service Vehicle Soon light separate the CEL. It doesnt actually ever light it because of a small batch of defect clusters that have bad EEPROM and small ghost issues (the IPC has its own computer, which was a new idea in 97 by far because mostly only a PCM had a microprocessor. the BCM also has one for a LOT. of STUFF. its actually insane. The cluster just uses the CEL when it cant uuse the other. vice versa if what was the scenario. Not many cars do have more than a CEL or whatever. I agree. Oh yes radios. I like it simple
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Sure, creature comforts. But they all have designated buttons you can learn the positions of and require no extended time using them esp eyes off road and no thinking about how to navigate or find your buttons on a small slow, poorly optimised screen thats also half-integratred into half the **** on the dash so you can turn the heater on and you can change where it blows but go navigate 3 screens to change where it blows and access heated seat and **** you pay me. oh and the volume knob on the radio turns on its own when you use the steering wheel. pretty ******* wizzard.
they designed buick park avenue 97-05 largely on a survey of current park avenue buyers and asked what they wanted to see on a new iteration of the car and by far the most requested QOL improvement was all instrumentations being as gm summed it up for some reason as at or above the belt line which they didnt use the word old but they pretty much also said that the instrumentation also be clear, simple, bold , and easy to use because old people couldnt read small fonts and use small buttons and etc....
All im saying is if old people want this kind of setup in a complex and big car then I will fashionably call it wisdom because somehow it also got me HUD and supercharger and cloud ride and good fuel economy and cornering lamps and a trunk fit for capitalist consumption habits. (compare to the later pic, youll see lol)
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Other than a small list of subtle details a stock square can have all the instrumentation i need or want plus it does it with about 40 some soldered bulbs that burn out just as frequent as 194 but take way more than 194s.
Also its amazing my cluster only had a couple dead spots with brand new bulbs in the sockets ngl the crumbling backing piece wasnt holding very reliably sound bulb bases on much LOL
you could almost always track the egr and related emissions to equal parts how much oil gm designed them to burn because it was an absolute joke and honestly i would have gone after them as a dictator if they pulled that **** in my democracy-by-force country. But pending that which gm stands behind "The warranty is for production defects and not design features."(this is a paraphrase of more than one official statemernt. its what their response is when not forced to do something on it)
they stand behind their owners manual indicating in the small print their oil life monitor isnt "authoritative" on when to change it, that it doesnt monitor oil level as one might think esp in new car, and that they state also in small print the expected and acceptable-to-their-selves level of oil consumption for the cars and trucks so they cant be gone after for making that. also, how well the car is kept up. when they are running just a little under the weather and with short trips, it takes no time at all for those systems to become yikes. The problem with electronic EGR is GM doesnt set codes for EGR efficiency/position not matching the commanded state far early enough. For Warranty no doubt. EGR being stuck at 4% for a **** loadof time hours etc and not at all consider it problematic but then find out your intake which is also probably leaking where this hooks up for a vacuum leak(plastic 
) they used thin wall tubing that cant be moved from vibrations let alone touched after 100k or a few years cylcling. its no thicker than a pie plate and corrugated and mounted solidly on a vibrating engine. hmm. with hot gasses and vacuum and heat cycling in the oven engine bay and those exahust and intake pulses esp on a i4 or v6 Im sure are wonderful to that pie tin ****. Oh with small passages and steel studs/bolts/nuts that are also small diameter,usually in pairs only, holding down a aluminum or steel machined part onto a gasket onto a machined surface which ends up like exhaust bolts but if they had 13 mm heads and were holding a lot of torque down onto the other surface which would be fine if not for the heat cycling and the often vertical butjust nature of the bolts life... stainless or something different like larger bolts or better something. Then the tubing I said, ohyeah, throw those puppies ontowhere they go with a small crush gasket and make sure its copper because this one 8mm screw will hold this pie tin on the opening and theentire circle loop, not just the side with the bolt without ever contracting or losinghold down force. They fixed this eventually but still used their jank ass tubing while ford used pipes with rust promoting sheaves and year.model. make. etc specific egr systems so **** themtoo.
Oh and your egr pipe to the valve will almost always be inaccessible and hard to inspect and it will be the most likely one to actually screw up your oxygen sensor because now there is an air source that exists between the engine and your Pre O2 sensor which at worst makes it slightly hunting all the time at worse its never finding an idle and your egr doesnt work right but your computer is thinking its getting inert gas at that volume it calculates and your instead leaning your mixture and not also getting that inert gas so bad enough could cause a lot of spark knock in best case of bad scenarios and you know what the worst is. most people will have other issues or not able to get that bad before catastrophic instant failure liklihoods but why exactly should your car be able to get closer/do these maybes for no reason other than greedy ********? if you dont burn oil, your egr looks damn impressive for 226 k when your car saw mostly trips with tuned up car. but those short trips make fort a lot of cycling, a lot of richer exhaust and colder exhaust(Not efficient cleaner etc...) being pushed at the valve when its closedwhich little byt little condensation here particulate there, bad day, old plugs here flooded her there bad thermostat here etc being thrown at a closed valve is just **** ready to fall in when it opens and the **** that happens when this variable opening small orficie lets rather hot and fast moving exhaust move past it... is bound to collect some **** which then sits in bore it closes in.... then the passagesi m too mad to even keep going. basically ,im grateful for my 3800 being clean despite even a plugged PCV(Which is hidden and very much not included in most service mentions till way too late in the mileage of things. which it also has a baffle under it which literally clogs up from Oil having **** suspended in it, so.. normal... that is barely referenced or found in service data and is unknown to most. oh and an o ring that is missing from what does exist LOL
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It literally vacuums the crankcase from top when the valve sticks open because wear or just too many corners cut in production or incremental amounts of buildup inhibit its normal behavior. or it pressurizes your crankcase and your burning isnt necessarily too bad because you have more psi trying to leave the cylinder than psi pushing in when using boost but you have a sure fire way to find oil on the floor or all over the exhaust manifolds or basically winterizing your subframe and aluminum transmission case because that.. never know when aluminum might start rusting out right. not like it has a natural mineral buildup on the outside thats harder than most minerals beside diamond to keep the aluminum from getting worse or anything. (also why trans like to get hot when the coatings wear off and its actually alum oxide )
NEED THE ENGINE OIL EVERYWHERE. Fortunately mine did it onlyfor a short time before discovering where and the baffle under it.
THIS ON THEE OTHER HAND:
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3.5l v6 im just not sure how much of that is meant for the oil vs the air and gas. probably works out to be on the starved but damn near workable of a 2 stroke for mix.
400 miles a quart of oil because it makes more sense to measure quarts in fuel fillings than miles travelled
. 135k when I got rid of it. That is, scaringly,
not that far from factory designated consumption.
okay so it was that mileage plus like 6 or so miles when i did
Unrelated to the oil consumption(LOL) it had no oil pressure at idle. Rip had a good run and sent a lot of additional tailpipe emissions out than its own emissiosns system was designed to handle
and **** whoever decided the oil filter would be a screw on plastic cap that is face down that threads into aluminum with a non-standard size and shape cover that, on the last oil change, broke 2 large filter sockets(its also recessed into the pan so it doesnt sit past it..... with no space other than to put a socket.... to reveal a filter that is thinner than probably a fair amount of dicks and about as long. if youre an optimist. yeah I said that. Its true. dont even try to do the back plugs. COP but you cant barely get over the opening for the coils...thus the spark plugs under them..
and because its glorious inspiration is the northstar it also, as a subtle nod, leaks oil in a near-comparable amount as fan service to the loyal head studs enthusiasts club
I go on
next about coolant and intakes and gaskets because this hit a cord with me on GM so hard lol and its funny because ultimately the cause was cheap, quick to the trigger, and also unwillingness to accept or substitute reality for a cheaper one when faced with "what to do" and hope it works. If the engines EGRs worked, didnt have excessive Oil contamination or harmful compounds goign toward the intake all the time esp when stuck from all the aforemententioned... lol... and their coolants didnt disagree with their cheapo-material changes and was stable in ******* cold climates organically and chemically and they just ******* didnt ******* design cars and engines with a severe oil consumption as a not hidden but devilishly tucked where people are going to never know this before buying, and then the whole time just trying to milk those dumb fuckers about to buy their cars for everything they can by spending as little as they can while products can be absolute junk happily.
This, ultimately, was becasuse GM said 1998 was one of the most or the most profitable years to that point and folks that is just not acceptable, they were instead signficantly disappointed with not meeting their absurdly placed goal based entirely on the GMT800 trucks coming out. more on that:
Im just gonna say I dont think the later ones are ugly but I usually can enjoy something that hasnt aged well but when new, 10 years ago, or now, I dont think I can ever say the first gmt800s looked good or appealing whatsoever... like... when you saw last years model of striking, not straight and square, but powerful lines that were very clean and without any mess and a high standard set on that initial appeal seeing one, just because 1997/8 fords had an aneurysm doesnt mean your idea was both genius and going to elevate your profits in mass... and then being disatisifed with record profits is just absurd.
OH to be nice I wont go on about coolant now because these cars are from the same time as they came out with DEXKILL and the switch to DEXOK was both stealthy, long long overdue, and Also still not compatible with a lot of their engines intake gaskets They were selling the new DEXCOOL at the same time they were selling revised gaskets that were to fix the whole "my intake gasket internally blew and its burning coolant or the coolant is in the crankcase or its leaking" that didnt even fix the issue because the issue wasnt the material that sealed in the first place.. lol..
long story dexcool cars werent tolerant of any air whatsoever in cooling system. factory fill may not been perfect or caps which routinely are junk from that era esp the plastic ones on pressurized reservoirs..may not function proper because GM for poor sealing surface on rads or the craps(Crap caps) . The intolerance you would see was microbial buidlup that began breaking down dexcool into corrosive to rubber sealing and hoses parts, allowed conductivitiy to exist where it hadnt, Loved to eat away at the sloppy leftovers in the castings for passsages. then that made the **** abrasive to both water pump and just everything, more aluminum and iron floating around to wear things, yes, but the real kicker is while those issues existed in many models more than others, not all of them at the same time, some together, it depended on the exact vehicle, the end result for those damn intake gaskets is they were just fine as gaskets after a small lived dumbassery in the mid 90s on some cars when they started changing the compression ratios of engines with a new design gasket.. lol.. this was smaller v6 iirc and inline 4s that were soon to be done then anyway. The gaskets were fine as gaskets they stood up to the things mostly well besides chemically attacked by the same hsit that ate rad hoses and made a goey syrup. the problem was their machining of surfaces was a little too eyeballed here and there and the materials holding the sealing surface was not chemically able to touch dexcool or green even, becuase it was sandwiched "not accessible" to coolant but something a small rock pebble in a windshield reminds me of this... that was in cars where the gasket was fine, coolant was fine(new or replaced with new) and the gasket was UPDATED because of failure or before hand...... and dexcool would kill the next set too because only gm can fix both issues and have the end result be that both fixes would not be compatible together for and underlying cause they weree avoiding handling to save money at all costs.
So you had GM introduce a coolant that wasnt compatible with a solid chunk of their coolant system environmental factors that knowingly and for a long time existed. They also specifically switched hard 1996 to all but a couple models over the next couple years(Non GM engine or brass parts or whatever the **** the chevy aveo was) but ignored and outright refused to acknowledge an obvious epidemic of the coolant melting ******* hoses and quickly finding the weakest spot on a gasket vs the model just a couple years ago maybe even the same design one too, and then beyond the expected/known factors part....they addressed the incorrect but cheaper part of the gasket issue when they finally would, multiple times.. they revised dexcool but did so unclearly and with the very vague assurance its the same thing but its not bad this time, same color, and your interval of change is nice and huge ---- till the warranty was done and your second fill happens, half that then on......(Why would the interval instantly be half and only the factory one is good for an arbitrarily long time? Same **** in the bottle as your tanks you claim! (warranty) oh and the original formula is incompatible with most purchaseablee dyes too and we will tell the dealers that(oopsie) only after selling one that is without ever saying that anywhere. SO since you obviously trust their judgement and word at this point in time because reasonably they refuse to elaborate how the dexcool is better and why and will continue eating gaskets for a couple more years like dinner till they fix the gaskets.... which ALSO FUNNY STORY
They got into trouble a few ways because when they released the final and good revised gaskets they had changed a lot of intake PNs to match the new designs that sat over them.. as well as intakes that were blowing up and melting where the hot exhaust through metal pipes connect to a brittle thin plastic intake(Am i ******* unfair with how obvious this **** is even if it wasnt 2020 vision like COMMON) as well as just overall cracking and inadequate designs (Ford right here with them I see their ******* 4.6 modular intakes dont you think youre better ford) in this sea of part numbers and revisions and gaskets and intakes and fluids and mostly unchanged metal parts, they got fed up with god damn dealers sending them Functional and "NO ISSUE FOUND" warranty on these parts based on a very slimy and specific definition of issue of course, but they issued parts freezing for the proper and updated parts to get better diagnostics or properly fix issues and required a lot of red tape to order the right ones. Well they superseded their part numbers in dealer parts lookups and **** instead of creating new ones where they didnt "improve a part" but instead this new part had a matching __ or could ony be used on cars produced after ______ which those books dont detail. Then they got slapped with a few low scope recalls but all of them were for gaskets and damages from said failures. Oops, and they werent sitting on many OR producing actively because those dumb dealers are too greedy. But they were selling a lot of equivalent part numbers to people who would do it themselves or bill GM after lawsuits or settlements and before some recalls got official. Even dealers dealers because they vagueyly wrote in TSBs that old parts need to be used up first and didnt at all connect that theyare the same entitty that changed and put tha _____ parts werent compatible with ____ but would distribute them as tho they were. And there was laos evidence I saw in some forum posts of incompatibl gm parts literally slapped with the updated part number and shipped and I want tosay they got in trouble for that but I dont recall exactly.
