Oh My Gawd....WTF Version 19.7....

Finally Im getting somehwere. I think. Just balance and oil change and I think I might be on the road. Heres the 12 steps to drive yourself crazy in a single installment over the course of 1 week:

1. Break rim x 2
2. Order new rims
3. Recieve new rims, order new lug nuts
4. Swap tires at local shop, take home, leave out in rain
5. Cuss, invent tool to remove water from inside tires
6. Inflate tires with ether
7. Receive new lug nuts
8. Install new wheels on truck
9. Step back and gaze
10. Painfully remove stuck jackstands
11. Tighten lug nuts with wrong tool
12. Cuss a lot, go pack

Step 1

Note the nice long 2 inch crack in the middle of the four welds....

Step 5

Ingenuity = vacuum + tubes + wine bottle.
Suck for the WIN
Yeah, thats a clay pigeon thrower...

Step 6



Bobber taught me this trick down in Costa Rica, we actually used it a lot. Spray tons of ether in tire, light, enjoy! Ponder smell of burnt hair and find source on back of own hand...

Step 9

I likey!

Project Success due in part to: Eldorado Automotive, Eastside Custom Truck Parts and Fabrication, Brandsport Inc, Juan Valdez' Homebrew, Nitro and Tools, and Keith's Flaming Pallets!

Noticing....

....when you look at the pics that the goods are in, yet flat. Turns out I decided to support my local peeps to mount the tires bc the folks in town are typically incompetent as proved doubly again by this weeks affairs of lack of service. And Im not going back. From here on I need to do this myself, a classic bitter old white guy slogan.

Using fire. Yup. Fire, and something with a high vapor pressure. Done it before, gonna do it again!

Either way the black is awesome and I still have a bunch of wheels Im gonna sell cheap, so come and get em.

Scary Thought....

What if this thing fell over? According to the door sticker it weighs in at just shy of 12000 lbs. The jack I used made considerable squeaks and noises of disapproval. One of the jack stands isnt even resting on all four legs. And to think on this day I hadnt gotten coffee til afternoon...wtf?

Well I got the new rims in, and unlike what the dude said, I DO need new lug nuts. Nobody in town has em, and the ones who can order em cant get 32 like I need. One lady quoted me 13 bucks a nut, which all said and done would cost close to $450, more than the price of the wheels...shipped. So looking back online I find that I get a discount for a quantity order of more than 15, and can ship quick for $.60 a nut. $20 is way better. People in SFe are dumb. Like yesterday, nobody wants my money. I go to the tire place and theyre busy. Instead of telling me to just drop off the tires and hell get to em later, he tells me to come back some other day! The guy at the other tire place was quoting me rims and saying how much Im gonna save in shipping as I watch him add $29 per wheel in labor. Apparently the $70 I paid and the $120 he wanted for a week later delivery are the same thing. I am completely unaware.

When will this road trip ever start? I now have a plethora wheels for sale, come and get em.


Note: Zambi is so guilty at everything last night she had pasta hanging out of her mouth and looked at us like, "what?"

Neato

The Layout....

River 'Secting ....

Over all
Back in action. That was till my rim broke again. Last night. Anyways, about this last weeks job.

Beautiful skies and ginormous downpours accompanied by flash floods. Deep canyons and tamarisk. sometimes sparce, sometimes so dense and youre crawling on your knees and you cant see the sky and you start to lose your mind when you realise you have no idea where your going and the gps doesnt work in vegetaion this thick. I better pee on something. As soon as I hit a wall of russian olive Im done. I give.
One day I was out measuring a point when I heard something on a nice brisk breezy morning. I turn to my left and see a handful of pronghorn, huge antelope only 150 feet away. Down in the river I hear a lot of elk bugles. Pretty awesome birds too. And I got the Apocalypse stuck in leg deep mud and had to get chained out.

The start of a new day...storm enroute

Sometimes the caps Im looking for are a little hidden,
considerable since they were put in in 1949

And some get the base eroded right out from underneath em,
thus fall over and get buried

And then theres one that is really hard to get to, dirty SOB!!

Saturday Morning Shenanigans....

After getting some coffee, I decided that Zambi and I needed a little nature therapy. We headed up to the national forest by Cananda de los Alamos and just kept going down this trail. At a certain spot I had to get out and look to see if we could actually drive down the rocky bit, and then we did. After some chilling in the sun and a walk with the roll of paper towels, we headed back. At the rocky bit I noticed how it looks so much steeper going up than it did coming down. Either way we couldnt make it back out bc of the loose rock. Nows the point where I wish I had a beer. We might be here for a bit.
I found another trail and slowly but surely tiptoed out way up and out of the drainage. The cool part is I mapped it. But I forgot my camera.

Map soon.

Duck Season....

Hunting is here and its time to go get my license. Always practice safe shooting.

Back from the Dead....

The lappy survives another day. I never realized how awesome it truely is to be super disconnected. I got so much done the day after the HDD dropped. Amazing. But now its back, and time to pay some bills.

Not impressed.