Terrible day on Monday

Sid the Squid and his dad came to see me about swapping the EPIC pump on his dad's 2.1TD (my old estate). Diagnostics showed the pump was at fault with a problem of faulty timing due to the pump not being able to respond properly to ECU timing commands. Sid had located a replacement pump and we set about swapping it.
What a job! The EPIC lower flange nut is inaccessible by all normal standards and I hoped to gain access by removing the HP pump and alternator but although I could get the crescent spanner on the nut i could not swing it without hitting the pump cradle. I then though about removing the alternator and HP pump cradle casting but hit a snag in that the Allen bolts holding the cradle to the engine block were seized solid. I could feel one about to "go" and called a halt. I was in terrible danger of shearing one or more of these bolts and played safe. Sadly and regrettably, the job had to be abandoned
That was a very sad and devastating "first" for me; the first time I've ever had to abandon a job because I ran out of talent/facilities/tools to complete the job. Sid and Steve, I'm very sorry
Yesterday evening the lad down the end of the street called me. He'd just got hold of a very tidy 1991 Honda Civic, the sporty one with the 1.6 DOHC engine.
As he does, he was busy replacing the cam covers with highly polished examples and in doing so he dropped a nut into the depths of the cambelt. He had the sense to realise this might have fatal results if he ignored the lost nut and started up the engine. He'd tried to remove the cam covers to rescue the nut but was stumped. I went over and helped him by undoing the crank pulley (very tight) and removing all the covers. The nut was nowhere to be seen initially and then we found it resting, well hidden, in a valley in the engine mount. A flick and it fall out. Had he ignored it, it's almost certain it would, sooner or later, have got involved in the cambelt and caused considerable harm.
I've been fixing a blower speed controller module today and had another that was in very rough condition. It had been very wet. In playing with this module, I made two very interesting discoveries; the transistors can go open-circuit as well as going short-circuit as is their normal way of failure. If both go open circuit, as they had on this module, there is no blower at all. I'm now of the opinion, after doing more tests, that one transistor goes open-circuit and this causes the other to take all the blower current which overloads it and causes it to fail short-circuit and give rise to the uncontrollable blower fault.
I tried repairing this really rough module with some second-hand but good transistors I'd saved from many previous repairs. The two I chose were not a matched pair and although the module then worked it was quickly obvious that one transistor was working far harder than the other as evidenced by one being relatively cooler than the other. So, if you try repairing these modules be sure to replace both transistors with a matched pair. Match them by comparing batch numbers on them.