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- Story book 1
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- Story Book 2
These images are this morning after the fridged cold yesterday and last night. The sky is clear, the wind is blowing hard and it is officially -27 C (around -17 F) when I took these images. Now the strange thing; It will get up to -2 this afternoon, talk about a temperature swing!
The second image is where Vova attempted to push his LADA Niva through the snow around the village. He did not make it. His thermostat stuck closed and he over heated. The Niva became buried right next to our fence in a drift of snow 5 feet deep. Vova was almost crying as he thought he had killed the Niva. We dug him out, I realized what had happened to make it overheat and searched for the thermostat. I finally found it and it was in a separate free standing unit to underside of the engine. It was in a perfect spot to smack with a hammer. I told Vova to start the engine and when the temperature gauge started to move up quickly, Vova panicked and I smacked the thermostat with a hammer. Vova was looking at me like I was crazy, for beating on his Niva, but all of a sudden, the Niva smoothed out her idle and I heard a slight pop from the thermostat. It was frozen shut. Vova was not doing a good job of keeping the antifreeze strong enough and the -30 had exceeded its abilities…
Spare tire under hood
{Vova realized yesterday that I was very good with cars. Vova is better at some things than I am and I am better at other things than him. That is what makes us work together so well. The same with Sveta and I. People need to complement each other to have a relationship; Vova and I have that type of relationship…}
I had a jug of -45 antifreeze and we spiked his up to a better usage level. I also saw that he had straight water in his windshield washer bottle and we pulled that to defrost. I have a third of a bottle of blue fluid good to -41 and gave that to him. Then after all of this we had to get the Niva back home. Vova floored the gas pedal and I pushed. Two feet at a time we went the 200 meters uphill to his home. Once we got it safely in his yard, we took it apart again to put it back together properly. Now we have to get hold of a thermostat and the Big Village might as well be a thousand miles away in this snow. New thermostat will only take 10 minutes to install…
I had to use Sveta on the phone to help me translate some things, but I think Vova understands about the sticking Thermostat now. This is his first Niva LADA and it is a whole bunch different than the UAZ and GAZ he as owned. I was almost stumped at to the where about of the thermostat was. I have never seen a freestanding unit before. It looked just like a three way connector for the radiator hoses, I guessed that it was the culprit and after smacking it, it was… 😉
I really like the Russian made LADA Niva…
After getting the car fixed, Vova and I ate lunch. We had pelmeni soup and salo, plus black bread and hot tea. It was interesting to see Vova dancing around after he realized that his favorite girl the Niva, was okay! He was so upset, that he even had started to remove his front grill of the Niva, he could not understand why his electric fans would not run (he was singled minded,) if the Niva was overheating. I had to firmly stop him and it is not easy, when your command of the Russian language is limited. This is when Vova decided I knew what I was doing and let me fix the LADA…
You should have seen the smile on his face when his electric cooling fans started up and the heater was putting out hot air. He looked like a kid in a candy store…
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Yesterday made me realize something; -20 is rough when you have to work on outside issues and good friends are priceless. I was able to pay Vova back a little bit yesterday for all the help he has given me in replacing windows on the house and other things that I never had any idea about. Living in the Tiny Russian Village has been perfect and interesting, but I have come to the realization that mistakes in this kind of temperatures can kill very quickly…
It is all summed up with what Boza did this morning as it was -27 C and almost a 40 kilometer an hour wind blowing; Boza ran around the paths I cut for him. He peed here and there. I started to walk him out of the yard and he looked out over the deep snow. He turned and ran to the front door of the home. He stood there and waited to go back in…
Smart dog if you ask me…
WtR