This is along the same lines as Herb's post about his heater cables.
Oscar's passenger side cable was broken (along with the flapper inside the heater control box) when I bought him. I fixed the heater control box back when I replaced the exhaust system a while back, but didn't put in a new cable. All this time I had been running (or trying to run) the heat with only one heater box. The heater boxes were leaking around the neck where the heater control boxes hook up, but that was remedied when I replaced the heater boxes.
The other day, I decided to replace the broken cable. I had both cables hanging on my garage wall for several years now, but I decided to only replaced the broken one (why fix what ain't broke?). I thought that it was going to be a hard job to replace the cable. After unhooking the cable at the front of the bus (it was broken off at the rear), I simply pulled the cable out from the front. Well, it wasn't that simple. At the rear of the bus, at the end of the solid tube that the cable runs through, there is a plastic cap with a hole in it for the inner cable (the one that moves inside of the outer cable...confused yet?). If you are ever doing this and you wonder why the cable won't come out, make sure you have removed this cap.
Anyway, I sprayed a little graphite lubricant up into the solid tube before inserting the new cable and the cable slid on up in there like butter. The hardest part of the entire process was re-connecting the little clip that holds all the cables to the heater control mechanism up under the dash. That little bugger caused me to curse, mutter, and call up all sorts of demons before it "clipped" back on. It holds four cables in a little holder and the clip has to be put back on just right, under some pressure.
What does all this mean? Oscar now has actual heat. It used to be like trying to get warm from the flame of a match...now it is like having central heating. More than just feeling the heat, I can actually hear the air coming out of the vents. I guess having both heater boxes doing their jobs makes all the difference in the world.
