Nothin' But Trouble

We've had an interesting time with the old pickup truck. On the way home from work I was a couple of miles from the shop and the truck started smoking under the hood. I jumped out and opened the hood only to discover a small fire on the engine. After putting the fire out, we had to call AAA to tow the truck back to the shop and leave it in the parking lot until I could get everything together to fix it.

Here is a view of the damage. The fire was located towards the back of the engine and you can see the black soot from the fire and oil from the cracked power steering line went everywhere. The power steering lines were burnt, and so is the throttle cable, the cruise control cable and the windshield washer squirter tubing. Somehow, the spark plug wires are ok.

After heading to the local junkyard and finding a 1980 version of our 1979 pickup (yep, ole' Taz is 29 years old), I was able to get all of the burned parts off of it, with the exception of the power steering lines. At 100 thousand miles, the donor truck was relatively low miles (since Taz is at 265 thousand) and was not modified in any way. I decided to take the opportunity to pull the high-wear items from the donor truck to have some of those hard-to-get parts on hand if they were to fail in Taz. I got a distributor, the windshield squirter system, the wiper arm assemblies, the throttle cable, the hood release system, the headlight, windshield wiper, blower fan and turn signal switches. There were a bunch of little trim pieces and such that I got, that needed replacement in our truck.

In this picture we are installing the high pressure replacement power steering line, but we couldn't locate a low pressure return line from the parts stores anywhere. So, we installed all the stuff I picked up at the junk yard and a new manual choke for the carburetor too. After we installed everything we had on hand, it started to rain. I started up the truck and, "Darn it!" the low pressure line had a rubber hose that must have been burned too, because it was leaking all over the place. At that point, I just cut the power steering belt just so we could get Taz home.

We had to stop at a gas station for gas and after making a few laps in the rain between the store and Luann in the Magnum to get some cash to pay for the gas, we were on our way (and I was soaked!). As Katrina and I were going along in the driving rain, she asked me if I had put the bolt back in the power steering pump pulley after I had tried to take the belt off and finally decided to cut the belt. Before I had a chance to answer, we heard a 'Ting, ting, ting...' Sure enough, the pulley fell off and went rolling down the road. We had to pull off the road and I walked back to the 'drop zone' and picked up the runaway pulley, then tossed it into the bed of the truck. Oh, did I mention that it's still raining hard?

We finally got the truck home safe and sound, then I spent all day Sunday (Jan 20th), finishing up the repairs and checking everything twice to make sure the truck was ok now. Unfortunately, it was cold (by Florida standards) and I ended up coughing and hacking my way through the ordeal, then calling in sick Monday morning (Jan 21st) to recuperate.

Note: We seemed to have picked up a serious case of brochitus so I'm on meds, and Luann has been coughing pretty bad herself, so we went to the walk-in clinic and sure enough, she has the same thing and is now on a bunch of meds too. At least it's not something worse than that.

In this last picture, you can see that Katrina really gets into her work. Unfortunately, she also likes to touch her face whenever she is working on greasy, grimey things, then will scratch an itch or rub her face. This picture is after she had already cleaned her face off after I pointed out how much of a mess she made of herself, but you can see that she got even more stuff on her face after the cleanup.

Oh well, I guess it's time to go bye-bye for now...