I mentioned how the van took a day off from starting earlier this week. Well today I was out and about, driving it on a wild goose chase to find a new mower, and we ended up way over in Portland when it decided it had started enough for the day, and refused to run anymore 😦 I was pretty annoyed, because not only do I NOT need another mechanic bill, but I hadn’t even found the elusive ‘great deal’ on a new rider mower I was trying to hunt down. So the van is now at a Ford dealer over in Portland, and my cousin gave me a ride back home. Kind of a lousy way to waste an otherwise beautiful day.
Category: cars
New tires for the van
Last Thursday I drove the van into town to meet my husband at the theater and thought ‘boy this thing is riding like..uh..poorly’. Yes, that’s what I thought 😉 But when I got downtown and Dave and I walked around it, we didn’t see anything wrong. So I drove it a couple more days, and then Saturday I drove it to work, and walked back outside to get something out of it and saw this on the inside of the passenger side wheel!
Holy crow! I’ve never seen a tire do that!!! As you can see it doesn’t go all the way around, so you only see it if the van is parked just so. Well, actually…
This is what it looks like when you roll it over – it’s even bigger! I knew it was getting bald, in fact we were at the tire store on Wednesday and they pointed out that they were getting bald, but the tires we want to put on it had to come from the warehouse, and we can’t go without the van on a workday so we scheduled to have the new tires put on tomorrow. Just a week too late! Thank goodness this didn’t cause an accident. Tomorrow the van goes in for all new tires all around. Plus some suspension work, new shocks, oil change, etc, then we’ll be all ready for another summer of hauling toys and trailers around.
Cars and Trailers – random stuff
First off, recent windstorms yanked the top off the vinyl carport that protects our old Airstream from rain. This is the second time we’ve had to replace the roof. The frame has been holding up just fine since it’s attached to the shop, but the fabric has a more limited lifespan.
And here’s a picture of our car parked at work, next to the landlord’s car – same car, different colors! His is a newer model, so there’s a few other differences, but I did have a customer come in on a day when the yellow car was there and our green one was not, and ask if we’d had our car repainted yellow!
Dodge Stealth
Dave’s car is a 1993 Dodge Stealth, and for the last few months we’ve had a broken window regulator on the passenger side. When I first looked for a replacement part, it was around $170! So we wedged the window up and put up with it for a few months. After Christmas we decided to splurge, and found the part for around $100, so tonight I spent a fun evening installing it.
Installing the new part was no problem, but when I reassembled the door and put the door panel back on, I went to shut the door and thought – I should test the door locks. To my horror, they refused to lock! They would lock and immediately unlock again. Argh! I took the door panel back off and fought with a bit, thinking something was jamming it up, brought Dave out to help, and the solution seemed to be that it didn’t want to lock the doors with the key in the ignition and the doors open. Maybe it’s programmed to stop you from locking the keys in the car? Either way we eventually decided enough was enough, put it back together, and called it done!
Steff Does Stuff! 
