I Think I Got All The Life Out Of These Pads

Last week I did a brake job on The Old Lady's car. Here is pictures of the rotors and pads. What's funny is I thought I'd hear something when the pads were worn to the point of needing replacement. There was a little metal tab that would make contact with the rotor when the pad was worn to a certain point, but we never heard any noise from them. Instead they got worn down with the pads. I replaced the pads and rotors and now it should be good for a few more years. The original ones lasted 5 years. I think the rotors were worn to the point where turning them wouldn't have been an option. They were close to the minimum thickness and were grooved pretty much.

The week before I rotated the tires and in the process discovered that the lugnuts were fucked up. There was a metal shell on the lugnuts and after having the tires replaced several times using impact wrenches the lugnuts were to the point where on several of them I had to drive the socket on the lugnut with a hammer in order to remove it.

This is what the lugnuts looked like when I got them off. They were pretty fucked up.

This is what I did with them. I took the outer shell off the lugnuts. It took some time to remove the outer shell from all of them (the shell had come off a few of them already), but now I have solid nuts to work with. I need a smaller socket to turn the nuts, but at least now I can put the socket on by hand and not have to use a hammer to drive it on. The lug wrench in the trunk is for the lugnuts with the shell on them, so I will need to put something in the trunk to remove the smaller size nuts.  They are now 18mm and they were 19mm.

I have a bunch of lugnuts off other vehicles, maybe I'll look and see if I have ones I can use to replace these.

Ford definitely didn't have a better idea with these lugnuts!!

I Might Need This Next Year

This will be the last year the county will be plowing driveways in the winter. Next year I might need something like this or maybe become a snowbird. I have been thinking about changing the snowplow from the Jeep to the Dodge pickup, but this looks like more fun. (I think I'll start removing the plow setup from the Jeep today so I can maybe get it installed on the Dodge before calendar Winter hits.)

Snowmobiles will let you travel over the snow drifts, but this rig would allow you to do it in heated comfort.

A/C

There was one day this summer when the temp was pushing 90 and the humidites were too. I dug out the portable A/C and hooked it up. It managed to lower the temp in the house a couple degrees and made it more comfortable by making it a little drier. Figured out that the trick with the A/C would be to start it early in the day before the house heats up.

We never did remove the firewood from the house. There were some mornings where we debated whether or not to light a fire in the stove.

Anywho, after that one day, never used it again. Left it in place until yesterday and it worked to keep things comfortable. If I had put it away earlier I know I would have had to set it up again as we would have had another hot day.

Cheap Flights

If It Ain't One Thing, It's Several

Got our water situation fixed with a new well, but that wasn't the end of our problems. Discovered The Old Lady's car needs a brake job. It's only got almost 82k miles, why would it need new brake pads and rotors?? I'll deal with that next week.

Recently we had a short power outage. The power was only off for a short period of time. By the time I called friend on the cellphone and found out he didn't have power either, the power came back on a few minutes later. Later that evening I decided we would have some ice cream on some pie for desert (or evening snack) and discovered the ice cream was very soft. I put the ice cream in the big freezer and started checking the temp in the refrigerator. The temp in the refrigerator was pushing 50° and in the freezer it was 15°. If the freezer isn't down close to zero, ice cream will get soft. Thought at first the refrigerator needed to be reset because sometimes after a power failure the compressor won't start again until it is reset. The way to reset this one is to turn off the power and turn the power back on. (Learned that a couple years ago when we returned home from spending some time visiting The Kid and the refrigerator wasn't working. We bought a new one and later when I went to figure out why it died, it worked when I plugged it in.) The Old Lady put stuff like milk in a cooler with some ice.

The next day it was not keeping the temp cold enough in either the freezer part or the refrigerator. It was cycling between 20° and 40° in the freezer. I pulled it out and started looking at it to determine why it wasn't working right. The compressor and some lines were warm and some lines were cold. I decided to look in the back of the freezer compartment. Had a hunch the fan wasn't working. Pulled the back of the freezer compartment off and the coils had frost on them. The fan wasn't running and after I pulled the fan out I discovered why.

The power surge must have fried the solder joint of the wire and it came loose. When I pulled the fan the wire wasn't out like in the picture, it just didn't look quite right. 

I swapped refrigerators, put the old one back, the one I thought had died a couple years back. One of these days I'll see about fixing the fan. First I'll see if I can solder the wire back on, but I'll need to cut away some of the housing to find where connection is for the wire. It was all sealed up. If that don't work I can always order a new one.

Someone Did Half A Tuneup

The other week I decided to tuneup the "The Guppy". When I changed the plugs I discovered that someone previously had done what would amount to half of a tuneup. Of the 8 sparkplugs 3 were original equipment plugs. It's a wonder it wasn't running worse than it was considering there are almost 70k miles on it.

As the picture shows, three of these plugs are not like the others. The plugs that had been changed (Autolite) were the ones that were easy to get at when you removed the engine cover in the cab. The two front ones on the right side of the engine and the one in front on the left were the Motorcraft original equipment plugs. Those plugs are difficult to get at to change. I had to remove the air cleaner box and some of the ducting to get at the front plug on the right. The second plug back I had to go thru the wheelwell with several long extensions  and universal joint on the plug socket, also to change the front plug on the left. While I was at it I changed the distributor cap and rotor. 

The new plugs I put in were ones I had bought for my pickup. It turned out the motorhome engine takes the same plugs as the pickup even tho the motorhome engine is a 460 and the pickup is a 302. The new plugs are platinum tipped ones, so I don't think I'll ever have to do this again.

We got a bunch of maintenance records with the motorhome. So far I haven't found anything about it having had a tuneup. The original owners kept a record of every oil change starting at less than 2000 miles for the first oil change, and repairs that were done, but didn't see anything about a tuneup.

Now I need to take it to my propane dealer to have the regulator on the propane tank replaced and the propane system checked out.

Cabinets

A while back The Old Lady ordered a couple of cabinets for the kitchen. Thursday they were delivered and I started to work on installing them.

This is how they looked when they came off the truck. One cabinet is trying to fall off the side of the pallet. When I pulled the cardboard off the cabinets I discovered both were damaged. The smaller one was basically destroyed.

The smaller cabinet had damage on all four corners. The front was bent out of shape and almost ripped off, Now we have to drive over 100 miles to return it to a Home Depot while they send us a replacement.

This is the before picture. There was a base cabinet that came from someone that replaced their kitchen cabinets and a small table. We wanted to do a more built-in set of cabinets.

I made this picture bigger so the damage would be easier to see.

The larger cabinet only had some minor damage on one side. I was able to glue and clamp it to repair it before installing it.

This is the larger cabinet installed with a piece of plywood for a temporary countertop. When I get the other cabinet installed next to the refrigerator, I will do a better countertop. Still working out the details on what materials to use and how to install it.

We have a division of labor here, The Old Lady picked out the cabinets and ordered them, The Kid will pay for them and I get to install them.

The Rand Paul-EO Diet

The Colbert Repor

How about a shout-out to cousin RuPaul!!

Almost Enough To Make Me Want To Get A Twitter Account

I guess someone at US Airways tweeted this picture to someone that had sent in a complaint.

Of course you need someone to guide the airplane when it backs out.