My final days in Austin I spent poolside, escaping the heat. I also happened to get a spare wheel and tyre for the truck, something I've been meaning to do for about half a continent. On my last night in the city, Sam took me to Blues on the Green, which was just a bunch of people laying about on grass drinking. It's the simple things in life that are best.
I pointed the car west and headed off the next morning. After sitting on cruise control for a while, I noticed my air con wasn't pumping out any cold air. Playing with things, I discovered that when the car is powering along, the a/c doesn't work. So to get it turn on, I have to lift-off the throttle for a few seconds. So for about eight hours of driving I had to accelerate, lift off, accelerate, lift off, and so on and so forth, just to stay cool. With the stereo no longer working, I pulled out my laptop and my noise-cancelling headphones and rocked out to some playlists for a few hours.
Turning north somewhere in west Texas, I filled up. The area is filled with small oil wells, juxtaposed with fields of windmills at some points. That part of the country is predominantly oil mining operations. Everything on that small highway is a pick-up with safety lights or semis transporting machinery.
A while into my drive up that road, my F150 started chugging and surging, backfiring a little bit and probably pinging. The truck has dual fuel tanks, so I flicked over to the other one and the problem stopped. Bad fuel, I thought.
I arrived at the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico just before sunset. It's a magnificent national park, though not very big. In the flat plains of New Mexico there is a long mountain range, much like Mt Dandenong, but driving inside it is akin to pictures I've seen of Ireland, but with cacti and shrubbery. I spotted a herd of antelope before making my way to the top. They've built an amphitheatre around the top of the cave entrance to watch the bats stream out at dusk. I got there too early and had to put up with annoying children for almost two hours, and without phone reception. The ranger was super cute. The bats weren't like out fruit bats at home. They're tiny. Apparently we'd had a really good night in terms of volume, but it reminded me of a swarm of bees around their nest, only on a grander scale.
I drove into Roswell. Every reflection and light was a UFO in my head. The town itself is filled with little green men and things, but my favourite was a car-sized UFO in the car park of a hotel. After I left my hotel, I topped-up the rear tank with high octane petrol to try to increase the quality of the fuel and stop the surging issue. I then noticed there was a pool of coolant dripping from the front of the car. I found there was a small split in the radiator tank so I drove to a radiator specialist. The rad guy quoted me $120 for a new side tank, or $220 for a new radiator. I explained that those options were $120/$220 out of my budget respectively and I'd just keep topping it up. Once he realised he wasn't going to make any money out of me, he told me to go across the road to the auto parts store and pick up a special epoxy resin to weld the plastic. He said that should easily get me where I was going.
After doing the messy job, I headed north to Albuquerque. The terrain reminded me a lot of Australia -- lots of shrubbery with patchy grass and rock. The rear tank, which had been working perfectly after I'd put in the high octane petrol, started doing its stuttering issue when it hit the 3/4 mark again. I rolled into Albuquerque and headed downtown. The first thing I noticed was that everyone runs red lights. A bad place to be a motorcyclist. The residential part of town had these fantastic Mexican concrete huts.
I dropped in on a family friend, and immediately the truck lost all electricity. I spent a few hours going through the wiring and decided it was more than likely the rusted battery terminals. A quick trip to Walmart confirmed this.
Before I left Albuquerque, with it's oil-painting mountain looming over the city and ancient volcanoes in the distance, I had to drive past Walter White's house. If you don't know the TV show Breaking Bad, then I'm sure you've heard of it. The owners have painted the house a different colour.
The new battery terminals fixed both my air conditioning issue and the rear fuel tank problem. They simply weren't getting enough power when the engine was under load. So I wound the windows up, cranked the a/c, set the cruise control to 80mph and donned my headphones.
I grabbed lunch in Flagstaff and when I jumped back in the car, my brake warning light and ABS lights were on. The brakes seemed to be working fine, so I assumed it was either a sensor issue or the ABS unit was on the fritz.
Five minutes out of town the steering started to get loose. The brakes got spongy. Then a clang, rattle, and hum, of the worst kind. I pulled into a roadhouse and jumped under the car. I could smell a bad smell, but I couldn't see anything. No suspension that was broken. Nothing obvious. And the brakes/steering combination wasn't something that I understood well enough to diagnose. I decided to baby it for as far as possible. I drove in the emergency lane with my hazards on at 35mph for about three miles before it became obvious that this was going to end in tears. I drove to the top of a hill and called AAA.
I got towed back into Flagstaff, chatting with the tow truck driver and his daughter about life in Australia. When he was pulling the car off the bed, he pointed out that my right front brake caliper was in a bad state, but it was an easy and cheap fix.
I reversed the car into a spot between some parts cars and jacked the car up. One of the brake pads fell on the ground when I pulled the wheel off. The pads themselves were still in good condition, so I tried to return the caliper piston but it wasn't budging. The bleeder valve was completely rusted shut. After playing around with it, I hit the rotor and it wobbled. The brake rotor wobbled. The brake rotor shouldn't wobble.
I pulled the disc off and discovered that the two wheel bearings were completely lunched. There was almost nothing left of them, and the wheel would have been hanging on by a thread, literally. By this stage it was about 7:30pm and I was losing light. I was only about a mile away from the local auto parts store so I called them and discovered they had everything I needed in stock, and were open until 11pm. It must have been close to 10 before I started reassembling everything. I've never done anything like this before so there was a lot of seeing how things fit together, looking up YouTube videos, and trying again. Eventually I had the bearings seated. I got a new caliper on there, despite one completely rusted bolt. I even bled the brakes on my own by jamming a log onto the brake pedal.
As I was finishing up, a cop turned up and put his spotlight on me. I put my hands out to show I wasn't holding anything and approached the car with a smile. The fact that I hadn't run and that I had a pen torch duct-taped to my cap had probably convinced him I wasn't a threat. He was nice and wished me luck.
A few minutes later, at what must have been around 2am and with everything bolted in and packed away, I drove gingerly out of the driveway and down the street. The brakes were a bit spongy, but stopped the car. The steering was much more direct than it ever had been.
I jubilantly treated myself to dinner at the only place that was open (Macca's) and headed for the freeway. Literally as I was driving onto the on-ramp, at no more than 25mph, something went clang, rattle, and hum. I pulled over immediately and took a look. The caliper had fallen out of its cradle. I called AAA again and was towed, yet again, back to that bloody car park at the mechanics. As the car was being pulled onto the flatbed, the wheel came off. Not enough that the car fell, but enough to kill my adventurous spirit temporarily. I slept on my bench seat from 4am to 8am in that car park.
So here I am, writing this from a Starbucks a couple of miles from the workshop, with the shakes from fatigue and caffeine. My everything is dirty and greasy and I can only imagine the smell.
I know my tone is defeated and deflated, but really, this is exactly what I was expecting. This is what these adventures are about. The Top Gear slogan keeps bouncing around my head this morning: Ambitious, but shite.
No comments:
Post a Comment