I watched Amazon’s The Rings of Power. I watched it again with my kids. Here’s my round-about way of telling you what I think about it…
Our new to us Toyota Sequoia has been the gift that keeps on giving me headaches. Most recently that has been a knocking from the engine bay. That’s usually a very bad thing, but in this instance it turned out to “only” be a problem with the air conditioner compressor. It was trying to come apart and sabotage my motor.
I got in there and wiggled things around enough to find the knocking was in the clutch pulley assembly. Great! Based on this diagram I think I can fix that, and the part’s only like $150. Ordered an OEM replacement through my local Toyota dealership, NOT a communist Chinese knock-off through Amazon.
I have no clue why I always have so much optimism at this stage of a car repair project. You’d think I would have learned to expect the worst. Buying parts is always so much easier than putting them in.
And wouldn’t you know it, this a/c pulley wouldn’t disappoint, and that mainly due to two pesky snap rings. The first was broken in half, which was why the pulley was wobbling in the first place. A broken snap ring can be almost impossible to remove due to there not being any way to grab it with snap ring pliers. It took some ingenuity, and some imprecatory utterances, but I got it out. Bits of the pulley’s bearing came with it, but that’s fine. I’ve got a new genuine replacement from Toyota (not Amazon).
The next snap ring wasn’t broken, but it proved to be a magnitude of difficulty beyond its predecessor. I’ll try to describe the predicament for you: The only way to access the a/c compressor was by removing the driver-side tire, a splash shield in the wheel well, and contorting my arm in over the frame rail. It is tucked in a few inches behind the radiator so there’s no way to actually look at where you need to work. I had to reach in with a mirror I stole out of my hair cut kit to be able to see what I was working on. The biggest problem then became that I couldn’t hold up the mirror to see what I was doing while also doing what I was doing. There wasn’t enough physical space to hold a mirror, a set of snap ring pliers, a flashlight, and my arm in the same space. At most I could only have two.
Thus I had to do this job blind. It sucked. It sucked all Labor Day long. It required me going to two different neighbors to borrow several different sets of pliers when I determined that mine (cheap communist Chinese knock-offs) weren’t up to the task. I thanked God that I am not blind, because doing stuff by touch is about the most frustrating thing in the world. I tried and tried and tried again to get the tips of the pliers into the holes of the snap ring. By touch it was at best a guess each time, and even if I had it right I couldn’t see what was happening when I got to squeezing on things. Again and again and again for hours I tried and failed to get this one ring free. It was maddening. And then, God only knows how, after fighting and fidgeting against this accursed ring all day, I felt it spring free from its retaining groove.
And what does any of this have to do with Amazon’s The Rings of Power, you are probably wondering. Basically I received more enjoyment from wrestling with these snap rings than I did watching that over-priced bit of fan-fiction, written by a room full of twenty-year-old imaginations that see Tolkien’s I.P. as nothing more than a skin suit for prettying up their asinine worldview. The writing sucks. The Marxist intersectionality drippeth. The characters are morons (they basically turned Galadriel into a mix of Captain Marvel and Captain Ahab, who jumps off a boat 10,000 miles from shore because she had a change of mind… jumping the shark comes to mind, but this is something even dumber). And it is intentionally poking true fans in the eye and then claiming “racism” when they don’t like it. It’s basically a cheap Chinese knock-off. It looks the same (it’s visually beautiful), sounds the same (Howard Shore is always amazing), and uses all the familiar names and places that you love from Tolkien. But it’s a story from a completely different reality, and those of us from Middle-earth (my kids included) can’t help but smell the counterfeit. Amazon is basically Annatar, pretending to be something they are not in order to corrupt something great.
All that to say I have two new snap rings on order from my local Toyota dealership. Regarding The Rings of Power, I am seriously entertaining cancelling my Amazon Prime membership altogether. Moral of the story: stick to OEM parts, whether from Toyota or Tolkien. All you’re getting from Amazon these days is cheap knock-offs and low quality copies.
The Rings of Power Review
Love it! Was wondering how you were going to come back around from snap rings to Ring of power...but you didn't disappoint : ) Good riddance to all cheap knock-offs!