You're My Boy, Blue

[ScottyB]

went for a little drive.



our last big roadtrip of the summer to see extended family, inlaws, and my family before my youngin' goes back to school.  i know i know...i drove right through 90% of MM's back yards and didn't stop to say hi.  i hate...hate...that i had to do it like that, because i'd love to see a lot of you, but as they say in Smokey and The Bandit, we had a long way to go and a short time to get there.  


hit it with a wash and Duragloss 951 wax coating prior to the drive.  held up nice and should make post-trip cleanup easier.

can you do 1250 miles with a wife, kid, and a dog in a lowered civic?  yeah...worked out great.  set the cruise to 78, A/C to frosty, and put on the tunes.  these cars are pretty big inside so no legroom issues.  even with the "long" 6th gear it was still churning 3500 RPMs at that speed so if i ever go with an aftermarket exhaust i'm going to have to be really critical about not getting something that drones.  the koni shocks/tein springs were comfy on the interstate and only ever got harsh on the worst expansion joints.  i wouldn't want to go any stiffer for this kind of family use.  easy 32mpg average which saved us about ~$100 in gas money vs if we'd taken the xterra.

had a chance to play with my BIL's newly delivered CJ7.  302 powered, 3 speed on the floor, many freedoms, much brap, wow.  i can't emphasize enough how completely alien this is to any modern car experience.  its basically an overpowered tractor with a license plate.  cooks your feet, smells like a boat, EVERYTHING feels like it could kill you and you can't relax for a minute because its constantly wiggling around and trying to wander into a ditch or the other lane.  its incredible to think the Wranglers nowadays are $55k and trace their lineage to this mechanical bull.  top speed is probably 55 and i have absolutely no desire to find out what that feels like.  but its a hell of a motoring experience, my BIL is tickled with it, and on the right day i get why people like Wranglers so much. 



dicking with the carb to figure out a no-start issue.  turns out it was a corroded terminal connector on the battery wire.




wanna hear a story about how bad unloading a car shipment can get?  

OK, the jeep came from Tucson AZ and was driven here by a caveman.  this colossal muppet proceeds to leave the keys in the column of the jeep on "accessory" for 3 days (there's a little button under the column to let the keys out of the ignition barrel and he didn't know about it) and also lets all the air out of the front tires, and most of the back tires, to lower the jeep because he thinks he's going to hit bridges with it.  

jeep arrives on the top of the carrier and he parks it on the top of a hill, which comes in handy later.  its 90 degrees in the shade.  BIL is super amped, climbs up, cranks the key......jeep's dead, like can't jump it dead.  the 33" tires are flat and now have a contact patch about 2 feet square so the jeep doesn't want to budge.  i'm in flip flops and BIL's in boat shoes because i didn't get the memo we were going to be manhandling a truck off a trailer.  i tell the driver to drop the hydraulics so we can coast it backwards off the carrier.  we get up there to push this thing and its a looong way down.  BIL scrambles into the jeep again, almost falls off the trailer to his death, we are both probably getting malaria now from all the swarms of mosquitos that have targeted our swampy asses.  start dropping the ramp down, BIL can barely keep the jeep straight due to no power brakes and the flat tires don't want to grip the ramp treads, so the front wheels are locking up and taking away his steering.  so the only choice is to let it rip alllll the rest of the way down the ramp, hope we're lined up, and don't use the brakes because if we go too slow it'll stop rolling halfway off the ramp due to the flat tires and we can't use the brakes anyway because then we can't steer.  

so, away it goes, gets about a foot from the bottom and the passenger rear falls off the inside of the ramp and so does the front a second later, but thankfully we had cleared the end of the carrier by then so the tires just fell into empty space.  thank goodness for about 18 inches of ground clearance too, if it was a car we would have ripped the entire side off on the inside gap of the ramp.  so now we have a dead jeep sitting cockeyed in the middle of the main road of his subdivision and we can't push it because of the aforementioned 4 flat 33's.  caveman driver says sign here, imma peace out because F you and gotta be in philly by 5 etc etc.  so what now?  does the jeep even run?  on the phone with the PO, he's confused why it won't run ("i drove it on the truck myself, hey is your driver that squirrely caveman guy? oohhhh....").  we pay him and watch the truck drive off.  neighbors look through drawn blinds.

BIL runs home and gets pancake air compressor tank while i direct traffic around the big white paperweight.  comes back, and its only enough to get all the tires half full.  F it, we're doing this live, we both heave-ho and start it rolling down the hill with no driver.  i run after it in my stupid flip flops, jump in Indiana Jones style and take the wheel before it rolls through some guy's front yard.  jeep womp-womp-womp-womp's down the road on flat spotted tires and i look in the rearview at my poor forlorned BIL staring at his dead jeep coasting away.  it gets 3/4 of the way to the house and runs out of steam, thankfully by some miracle the rest of the distance is downhill including his driveway.  i insist my BIL get in the seat and take it the last 100ft home.  another heave-ho, i nearly shart my pants, and it trundles to a stop by his garage door.  woof.

epilogue - as suspected, caveman killed the battery.  got a new one, she cranked right up in glorious 5.0 soundtrack but only made one voyage and died again when we tried to start it a second time.  turns out a bad battery wire connector was only making contact with the battery post intermittently.  removed a corroded washer and she was good to go.  many test drives, then many beers.  fit in the garage with about an inch to spare above the hardtop.