Tue, 03 Nov 2009

Ross Lake '09

My drive back home from Jeff's included a two day stopover at Ross Lake for the annual confab with dad and brothers. Been doing it for ten years now.



posted at: 08:16 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Car Repairs

On Christmas eve, three years ago, I was driving cross state with family to Jeff's home in Winthrop. It was dark, snowy and icy when the road took a turn where we didn't. The car went straight off an embankment and ended up on its side at the bottom. (A humbling experience...) We were shaken, but unhurt. The car was a mess and wasn't going anywhere soon. Jeff gave us a ride the few remaining miles to dinner with family and friends.

Next morning, we returned to the scene. The car was still flopped on its side. There was a Big Rock that had rearranged the front bumper and served as our right side ramp. The other obvious damage was to the bashed in driver side door. We called a tow truck to right the car. Damage would have been considerably worse but for a well placed snow bank.

The car wouldn't start.

Rather than deal with Christmas day car repairs, we towed it to our cabin, covered it up and arranged an alternate ride home, leaving the fixup for another day.

That day finally came a couple weeks ago. I picked up a used driver side door at the local wrecking yard, and hitched a ride back to Winthrop with dad.

The car looked the same as when I parked it three years ago. It had become a home for yellow jackets, but thankfully, those had died off or become mostly dormant by this time in the year. I replaced the dead battery and found that the engine wouldn't turn. Jeff dumped some oil in the cylinders and I manually rotated the crankshaft to loosen stuck pistons. That did the trick. It then started. But I couldn't shift. Turned out that the linkage between the shift column and transmission had busted. At this point, I was still working in the dirt at the cabin where the car had sat for three years. We installed my replacement door, I crawled under the car to manually flip the shift lever (taking care not to run over myself) and then drove the few miles up to Jeff's house, where he has a real garage to work in. There, we got it jacked up and lighted up enough that I was able to jury rig the linkage back together with wire and hose clamps. Drivability restored, I drove it back home, over the mountains.

All that remained was to fix the bumper pretzel. After another trip to the wrecking yard, I swapped in a much straighter bumper and we're now back (mostly) to where we were three years ago. We've still got some driver side wrinkles as reminder that it could have been worse. And I still need to get to the dealer to pick up the proper replacement part for my linkage hack.

A happy outcome, thanks to considerable help from Jeff and Dad.

posted at: 06:38 | path: | permanent link to this entry

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