Liner

Steph’s got a new ride, a 2001, 8 cylinder, 4wd Toyota Tundra. It’s a sweet truck but it’s picked up a noise that I suspect is from the drivers side wheel compartment. It starts as a vibration at 45mph and is pretty loud at 65. It feels like air vibrating something so I have concluded it must my the lining inside the wheel well, which is loose.

The problem is, I have no idea how to fix it. There are some pretty funky rivets attaching it to the body and then there’s also the question whether or not to even keep it. Fortunately, I happen to know the best auto-body tech on the West Coast (who also happens to be my son) so I’ve put together this post just for him.

Sending it off, now…

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Best Of Both

As Winter approaches I usually pull the camping stuff out of my truck and put the six sand bags down on the bed. Combined with my Hankook snow tires she handles the snow great. This year I may do some Winter traveling so I’m going with the best of both: bags and bed. I’m only loosing 3.5 inches of space inside the canopy this way.

Meanwhile, Piper’s bed-bathing…

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Water Taxi

Back in the Seattle days my employer HopeLink had the Water Taxi contract and I had the privilege of supervising the DART connector buses that shuttled riders across West Seattle to Alki Beach. It made for some great photo ops…

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nuCamp

I was standing by in Driggs today for a Family Dollar pickup when this Montana truck pulled up towing this sweet little trailer. I passed a compliment to the nice couple that owned it and they just smiled and said that they loved it. It drew a lot of attention while it sat there.

I looked the outfit up and it’s a nuCamp 400. This is the brand new 2018 model with an MSRP in excess of $31k, depending on options.

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Limitless

I visited a cool car stereo store down in Idaho Falls today called Limitless. I needed to upgrade the original radio in my old truck and they did a great job. When he first looked my setup over, the tech guy said “You know you won’t be able to play cassettes anymore?” Ah yea, that’s ok…

They had one of those mix and match things going on but I knew what I was looking for, so I just pointed and we proceeded. I went with the Alpine UTE-62BT. This receiver is mechless (no CD drive or disc mechanism) and supports FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), similar to MP3 but better quality. I’m going to burn all of my CD’s down to FLAC and store them on a single $20 low profile 64G flash drive which plugs right into the front of the unit. Goodbye CD’s!

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Muffler Madness

My mechanic recommended Art’s Muffler in Idaho Falls to install a nice little Flow-Master onto my sweet sounding exhaust system so I called them yesterday and made an appointment for 0800 this morning. When I got there the asshole at the counter told me that nobody wrote my appointment down, they were booked solid and he told me to come back another day. Really, after a 1.5 hour drive?

There were several techs standing in front of the place, I could tell they worked there because they just had this muffler guy look about them, but they had no time for me today. Oh well, with the brake work I was going to get done on top of it they just lost out on several hundred of my hard-earned bucks!

So screw you Art’s Muffler in Idaho Falls! May this blog post float to the top of a Google search and haunt your sorry ass forever.

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Flow

I realized this morning that I hadn’t run the new carb/header setup on my truck past 45mph so I took her out for a spin. Once we pulled out of Tetonia into the 65 zone I let her loose. She rapidly shot up to 3300 at 75mph and roared like a lion. Maybe I should get a muffler I thought briefly before quickly discarding the thought from my mind. This old girl runs! I pulled into Lookout Point, shut her off, and popped the hood. There was minimal heat and the clakety clack noise I used to hear as the emissions hardware cooled down was completely gone. I closed the hood, smiled broadly, then took this photo of the Teton River over it’s bank. Who cares about that…

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New Carb

Our mechanic Bob came through big time for me this week and installed this gorgeous little Weber Carburetor that I bought off Amazon. My sweet little travel truck is purring (actually, I should say roaring) and ready to roll this summer.

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Old Engine

Our long time mechanic Bob needed some photos of my old engine, so I made a blog post out of it. Click the photo below to see the set, if you like. The old girl is running rough so we’re going to see about fixing her up…

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845 Again

My main ride (802) went down this morning with rear light issues and I had to slide over into our backup bus, 845. This is an old friend of mine, I drove her for many years a few years back and I’m surprised to see just 130K miles.

I’ve been putting up with a lot of little issues with my big ol 802 (no am/fm radio, one camera out, rear heater out and the little knobby on my two-way antenna was lost to the cold some time ago), just so I could keep 16 seats up here (yesterday afternoon every seat had a kid in it), but I finally had to put her down for a rest when my brake lights and rear tail-lights went south.

I snapped this shot of 845 with my new little Amazon tablet and it came out long

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Sand Bed

I bought some sand bags at Ace last year to add traction to my drive train in the snow. The weight worked well, the canvas bags not so much, they seemed to tear just by touching them. I ended up dumping all the sand into our wheelbarrow last Spring, where it’s been sitting until today.

I distributed the sand into six heavy duty plastic bags, secured them with Gorilla tape and put them inside the cab directly over the rear end. Steph picked up a nice blanket for $10 at Kings which I put down first, protecting the insulation sheet below. This leaves plenty of room in front of the bags for groceries and Walmart swag. Pretty sweet.

Next weekend I’ll swap my snow tires on and be ready for Winter…

Much nicer than last year.

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Old vs New

There are at least three Nissan Cubes running around the Valley and I’ve been parking next to one lately at our base. Ya know folks, I just don’t get it. I’m sure these homely little things aren’t cheap, I don’t see them as fun to drive and I certainly wouldn’t want to sleep in one.

I know I’m massively prejudiced but compared to my 30 year old solid steel sweet truck, I think she wins hands down in all departments.

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Green Fluid

When I was visiting my boy Riley recently I popped the hood on my truck (which he used to own) to get his opinion on the state of my oil viscosity and I completely forgot to show him this thing of beauty that I know would have brought a smile to his face: my radiator fluid!

I had my mechanics do a radiator flush, with fresh fluid added, prior to last Spring because I was heading down into the dessert. It’s since gone through a Summer, a Winter, and another Spring and it’s still looking as fine as the day it was done and I haven’t added a drop. Sweet!

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Knee Guard

Every road trip I take exposes weaknesses in my travel system, and I like to fix those when I return to base. My trucks tailgate performs two primary functions when deployed, a place to put my knee as I launch myself into the bed of my truck, and a place to set my ass while I converse with camp buddies, tan my body or watch a sunset over the Pacific Ocean. (Ok, haven’t done that for a while…)

Lately, the tailgate has been exposed in the raw form of it’s origin as just a piece of steel with indentations, hard on the knees and the ass. So today I bought a couple of rug things at the Dollar Store, hooked them up with the board that used to be there, and screwed them down. The result is a great addition to the system and Steph topped it off with little floor protectors over the bolts. Sweet!

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Locksmith

I was out in the garage today thinking about getting my truck up to Victor tomorrow so that my buddy the locksmith Doug Aslin could help me secure my new canopy. I ran into him at the lumber yard when I was setting up the baseboard for my truck recently and he looked at the locks and said he could help.

I had my scanner out in the garage today because, well, I’ve become addicted to knowing what’s going on in our Valley and I heard the Sheriff in the Broulims parking lot concerned about a pooch (i.e. dog, Tony’s from New York) locked up in a car. Hey, it was 78° and people leave their dogs in their vehicles all the time around here, but…

He wanted to break into the car and free the dog so he asked dispatch to call the locksmith. Her response was “Doug’s out of town”. Wait a minute, that’s my locksmith and he was my plans for tomorrow!

Hmmm, the dog issue got resolved when the owners came out of the store from shoping and I was left scratching my bald head wondering what to do now…

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