Neanderpundit

And the new Sploder is settling in fine.

There are some things I’m getting used to. It has better gas mileage by about a mile and a half a gallon. I think this is partly because it’s missing several hundred pound of skid plates the older sploder has. Some other changes, like this one has sway bars as big around as my wrist. And a panhard bar that is attached like the hubs of hell.

it doesn’t make it a sports car, but it does have the decades old, solid 302 ford V8 in all it’s cast iron glory. And last night, I ended up on a job fairly far away from home, and I didn’t get finished with the job until fairly late.

So I had some empty expressways for the trip home.

And I put her through her paces, carefully.

The lighter frame makes her a little nose happy in wet but the suspension improvements compensate well. The Yokohama tires are pretty forgiving, too, they tend to let you hang it out a little bit more, then they bite down and carry you into the apex, as long as you don’t puss out and back off the gas at the last minute.

No. Not a race car. But capable and plenty strong for my purposes, and just fun enough to push a little, throw the ass aroiund a curve, raise a little hell.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I worked at a Coke plant. One of the jobs you got early in your machinist’s apprenticeship was to tighten hogrods; hogrods are the big threaded bars that hold the coke batteries together. They’re twenty feet long and three inches in diameter. There are two on each oven, and 120 ovens on the battery.

The rods stretch. They are holding together millions of tons of refractory brick that is surrounding coal dust being heated to 2100 degrees. The temp of the rods is usually several hundred degrees.

SO every week some poor bastard has to take a 120 lb impact wrench, with a socket the size of your head, and lift it up on a scissor lift, and tie the impact off to the battery, and sit for a half hour EACH NUT and tighten the hogrods.

After you’ve done this two hundred times, in August heat, in a coke battery tied to an oven whose surface temperature melts lead, you want to make it stop, please sweet Jesus just make it STOP.

So on my third trip around this merry go round of the damned, I was all for doing anything that would make it last longer between jobs, so I tried to tighten just a little bit more. In normal operation, you would connect the impact wrench, and turn it on, and stand there while it went “THAK THAK THAK THAK” at about 90 db for a half hour, usually causing the nut to rotate one revolution (approximately) before it stalled.

I knew that I could use steam on this impact, and that the steam would make it a bit more powerful than air, so I cranked away, getting a full turn on each nut in less than fifteen minutes, and on every one I could, I tried to get another at least half turn.

The impact was heating up even more than usual because of the steam, but you wore heavy hot mill gloves for everything there, so who cared? Anyway, I had gone through about fifteen rods and was on number sixteen when I thought, Damn, I’m gonna get one more full turn on this bastard and I won’t have to hit it again for another two weeks!!

About three quarters of the way through the second turn the bolt snapped. The force of a 3″ bolt snapping caused the 20′ rod to be propelled out over lake Michigan, where it spashed down next to a marker buoy, and the broken nut and stub caused the whole scissor lift to sway back and stand, for a few anxious seconds, on the balance point of it’s outside two wheels.

I felt a little funny in the pants, for a moment, as my testes attempted unsuccessfully to reinsert themselves in my inguinal canal, and my buttcheeks grabbed the handrail of the scissorlift, and then it settled back down, bringing the impact and my helmeted head into clanging contact with the side of the battery.

Thus was born the One More Turn award. The broken off nut and rod stub was sandblasted, gilt, and mounted to a board. I was honored with the first occurrence, but it got many other engraved nameplates after I left.

Two years ago, I replaced the front axle bearings on the Exploder and the lower and upper balljoints. Monday, I replaced the bearings AGAIN, and discovered one of the balljoints was bad AGAIN. So tonight I swapped it out, and in the process fo reassembling it, managed to SNAP THE 12MM BOLT THAT HOLDS THE UPPER IN.

Don’t know my own strength, even now.

Thought I had gotten a warped rotor, so tonight I picked up the Sploder and discovered that the left front wheel bearing was only attached to the rest of the vehicle with the gossamer fabric of fantasy. So I went to get a new one, the THIRD i have installed on this vehicle. (Two lefts, one right) I bitched at the Autozone guy, who looked it up and said “You know, you changed that last four years ago” which means about 170,000 miles. Guess I got my money’s worth.

Pathetic, really, that I have done this so often that I was able to do the replacement without even putting my reading glasses on; it’s a 32mm socket for the hub nut, a 10mm wrench for the t brake caliper, a 15mm wrench for the brake frame and the bearing housing, and I put in the ABS line strictly by feel.

I been doing this shit too long.