Winter afternoon musings.

[cleatus12r]

It's cold here. It's winter and the human body isn't designed for this type of stuff but we do what we do and where we do it because we love it. We learn to dress for it and we adapt. It's been in the low negative teens the last few days and we have two more days left this weekend that are supposed to be in the negative twenties. Good times!

Work has been sporadic lately - not "work" as in physical laboring because that's always there. I'm getting at what I do and the equipment I do it to. Over the past 6 years, my place of employment has purchased a lot of newer heavy trucks and equipment and we have started leasing brand new roadworking equipment (motorgraders) and loaders. With this comes a whole bunch of covered-under-warranty stuff and I don't get to touch it. With 10 of these pieces of equipment, I don't even get to service them at their scheduled intervals as the dealer comes out and does it. I've been able to take time off of work - something that over the last 9.5 years I have not been able to do because of my workload. It is kind of nice at this point in my life so I take advantage of it......

Lots of family time. That usually includes honey-dos and picking up the kid after school. There's now a bit of spare time Iof being able to provide low-cost repair services to local ranchers who have nobody to turn to these days. I bought a tire machine and balancer a couple years ago and am looking forward to installing a 2-post hoist sometime too but I am already battling for shop space.

I'm trying to burn a little time today since it is cold and I need to work on my wife's car when she gets home from work. I absolutely hate electronic throttle bodies because for some reason, they don't like to work when it's -15....the light grease in the geartrain is not so light when it's cold so codes set for a stuck throttle plate and all of a sudden the car is limited to 15 MPH and that is dangerous. Anyway, I replaced the throttle body 2.5 years ago and it's gone halfway through this winter with no problems....until yesterday. I am not one of those people who likes warranties because I'm cheap....but in this case, I lucked out on a 36 month warranty on a nearly $300 part. That's weird...I expected a failure at three days past 36 months.

Coolio.


I had a guy call me a few days ago about replacing injector cups in a 7.3 and I turned him away. I feel kind of guilty about it now but I made a promise to myself about that a while back....family and close friends ONLY. Oh, and the engine's coming out to do them. They are soooo finicky and such a pain to get the bores clean that I just refuse to fight them anymore. Besides, there aren't many 7.3s out there anymore that don't leak from somewhere that is just easier (or the only way possible) to fix with the engine out. In addition, around here, there aren't many of these vehicles that haven't spent some amount of time in the weeds so pulling the radiator and charge air cooler to clean them out isn't a bad idea.

Sorry about going on about nothing....I'm just bored.
I still get excited about tuning and helping with those concerns although the traffic here isn't really rockin' so I interject on FTE a lot. I figure that I know just enough to be dangerous when it comes to diagnosing and walking people through the Hydra process. That technology is pretty incredible and really easy to use. FTE has a pretty decent community over there and I find it hard to believe that I have a .94 posts-per-day average after 16 years and 9 months. Maybe I should check over here...but I don't know if it's a fair comparison as this place has been down a couple times and I was kind of involved with it through the business at one point. Over there I just get to run my mouth (figuratively speaking).

I might go on a bit later but for now I get to copy and paste this since I'm surely timed-out on my login by now. Have a good weekend, guys.