Whew, that's better.
Yesterday on my way into work, the damned air conditioner was at the forefront of my attention. I had already determined that the OEM part was pretty hard to come by and would be expensive as all hell if I found it, and had reasoned out that if the home warranty DID come through for this, it'd be a while before they dispatched anyone (I imagine there are THOUSANDS of broken air conditioners across the city, the way the summer's been hitting us these past few days.)

So after making a token attempt to lodge a claim on my warranty, I went into work, then took 5 minutes to walk across the street to Ideal Appliance Parts. Good thing I did. I didn't have the old fan motor on me, but had written down all the specs off its casing. The clerk knew exactly what I was talking about, and handed over a box from a large pile of boxes against the back wall. Hmmm... seems like this is a pretty common form factor for these things! He told me this was a high quality motor with ball bearings instead of crappy bushings like the old motor had.

I felt a little trepidation, noticing that this motor had a LOT more wires sticking out than the old one, but the clerk reassured me that four of those wires were hooked together just to switch the rotation of the shaft, and he showed me how the starter cap hooked up. Downside was, there were no returns on electrical parts, so if anything went wrong, I was out $100.

After double checking the lug spacing on the old setup, I went ahead and took the plunge. Soon after I got the thing back to my office, the authorized service center for my warranty called and said they might be able to make a visit. *$@#*!

But oh well, I had taken the plunge already, and after talking with them, I found that they wouldn't really have been able to come out till Thursday. So I departed work a little bit early and, with extreme care, did the installation myself, ending just as it began to rain (and 10 minutes after C.O.G. was supposed to start our rehearsal.) Success!

It always feels good to accomplish something myself (even though I realize that I'd have saved $50 or so had I allowed the warranty cover it.) Another consolation was the fact that there's no WAY any field tech would have put the extreme care into the installation that I did. I soldered and individually heat shrunk each connection instead of just wire-nutting everything like those who had been there before me. Hopefully this holds for a long time... it's gonna be a long hot summer.

Rehearsal afterwards was OK. We had a guest in the lab, one of Rachnid's friends from work, who actually had a funk/soul hit record back in the 70's. He still had some guitar moves as well... I told him to bring his guitar next time he visited!

Right now I'm waiting to hear back from a Baton Rouge area con next month... another possible gig.