Dave was my wife’s cousin. Extremely solid dude. Dave was an artist, a sci-fi and sci-real fan, a connoisseur of fine cigars, fancy pipes and good beer. Reach out to people around you, we’re all on this earth to support and love each other. If you see someone who’s down, pick them up and try and lighten their load.
Please send out some positive vibes and prayers for my family, especially his little girl.
Dave also liked Chevy trucks and Smashing Pumpkins.
Till we meet again Dave.
Picked up a new to me vehicle on Friday. 2006 Xterra 4x4 accompanied by Señor Manuel. Paint and interior are in great condition. Engine and tranny feel great. Reminds me of driving my Wrangler, but with more power (baby). Very truck like ride. This will be my wife’s car as my quarter million mile Tundra is still going strong. Seats aren’t as comfy as my Tundra, but the ride is a bit nicer and much quieter. I’ll be swapping fluids and restoring the headlights and trim over the next week or so. Other than that I’ll leave it be.
May the gods of plastic grant my twenty year old fuel injector connectors strength as I pull the intake manifold off the Toyota today. I’ve been dreading this starter replacement for a while.
Update 1
Got the manifold off! Prayers worked and I only cracked one clip, but I’m thinking I’ll be alright. Didn’t even have to curse and only lost a little bit of blood. Little bit of gunk around the cylinder head openings, but they look pretty clean inside. Don’t worry, I plugged them after I took this pic. Took about two hours, but I made sure to go slow as I have nothing to do today. Enjoy some topless 2UZ porn. The fluid around the head gasket area is from me spilling coolant from the throttle body. Definitely need to swap out the valve cover gaskets, though.
Might need a new intake hose, last person to take it off buggered it up a bit. This is the bottom of the hose, so I had no idea it was crumpled. Might try putting a bit of heat on it, as it feels pretty solid.
Update 2
Got everything back together. I went slow and it was actually pretty easy. I hit the intake house with a heat gun and it redounded nicely. All my fuel injector plugs went on nice and snug, and I didn’t have any issues reconnecting all the plugs and hoses. I tested the starter real quick before reinstalling everything and the engine turned over perfectly, so I already knew I was gtg there.
The truck fired right up, sputtered a bit, which I was expecting on account of removing the fuel line, and ran. But then it threw a code (P1126). I cleared the code and restarted the truck, but the code came back. I checked the throttle and it was dead. Doesn’t do anything until I reach the kick down at the bottom which manually opens the throttle, at which point it accelerates normally. Truck starts up and idles fine, so I’m thinking something screwy is going on with the throttle actuator. Joy. Time to bust out the FSM.
Watching my wife give birth is the most spiritual experience I’ve ever had. Truly mind expanding. We were at dinner with friends when my wife started having contractions. We visited our midwife afterwards, who told us we had one day left before our lives changed forever. She told my wife to go home, drink a stout, and get some rest for the day to come. We split a Rogue Shakespeare Stout.
The next day my wife gave birth to our first beautiful baby girl, surrounded by family and friends. About thirty minutes after ushering a new life into this world, my wife was hanging out with family, eating pizza, and taking a much deserved break. It’s been a wild ride ever since. Props to all the mom’s and kids out there, you keep us idiot dads in line.
I’ll start off with my appreciation for @jminer and the rest of you who helped set this place up. We have some Opponauts (this one included) going through some shit this year, and it’s been very uplifting to see people get support on a car forum of all places. Here’s to hoping everyone can harness some of those positive vibes into the New Year.
I’m cruising around on the Harley, and make a left onto a metered onramp to get onto the freeway. I make note of the fancy new Tacoma next to me, also making a left onto the freeway. I check my mirrors as I enter the onramp, making sure no one is riding my ass approaching the red meter light. The teenager in the Tacoma must have been staring at his phone, because he hasn’t even started making the left yet. Good, so I head towards the freeway, briefly thinking I should just blow through the meter since I’m the only one on the ramp. I decide to be a good boy, and slow my roll as I approach the meter, stop, and wait for it to turn green.
Before it does, I hear screeching tires behind me. Fuck. I immediately start to release the clutch, and give a little peaksy in my mirror, just in case I might be able to see death right before he careens into me. As I look innthe mirror, a big white blur passes maybe a foot from my right arm. It’s the Tacoma, and homeboy is the Oppo champ, as me managed to avoid both me, and the retaining wall, correcting his skid and merging into traffic like a boss.
After giving a round of internal applause, I notice there’s another white Toyota, this one a Four Runner, sitting diagonally across the onramp, a couple feet from my rear fender. I give the driver “what the fuck?” hands as I point at the meter light, and he rolls down his window and apologizes.
I get the hell off that onramp, and see the Tacoma getting off on the next exit. Against my better judgement, I decide we should have a chat. Really bad idea, but I figured after two near misses, today is my lucky day, and he probably won’t shoot me.
We stop in a grocery store parking lot a quarter mile down the road, and the kid rolls down his window. I pull up next to it (again, really bad idea, but I was on a roll). The kid is in tears. He starts apologizing, saying he dropped something and looked down to grab it and didn’t see me sitting there. I wasn’t angy, and am starting to question why I even followed this guy. I was filled with adrenaline, but it was “happy to be alive” adrenaline, not “I want to fucking kill someone” adrenaline. I tell the kid I’m ok, but to remember this feeling, and be extra cautious while driving, especially around motorcycles. I give him a fist bump, and head into the grocery store to buy a lotto ticket.
I don’t know what the deal was with the Four Runner. Only thing I can think of is he was trying to beat the Tacoma to the zipper merge, and didn’t realize the onramp was metered. The Tacoma beat him, swerved to miss me, and then inattentive Four Runner driver sees me sitting there as he’s full throttle down the onramp. Thank god it stayed dry all day.
Holy shit, I need a La Croix. Post epic saves.
Went from 113F in southern Oregon to 60F once we hit the Redwoods. Fantastic camping in these ancient forests. Cutting all these magnificent trees down was one of the biggest of humanity’s blunders. Headed back into the abyss, so I’ll catch you all in a week or so.
Nearly stepped on this western Diamondback while dropping my kids off at grandpa’s today. My daughter spotted it before I did.
Gramps grabbed his snake stick and relocated it to the desert across the street. The snek was not happy about having his sunbathing interrupted.
It was an exciting morning.
We’ve driven across Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Washington and Oregon. We lost a turn signal, half a quart of oil and a bit of coolant. The new rad cap has kept the coolant at bay since SLC. We have two more weeks of Montana camping coming up then will probably hang out in the canyonlands for a few days. The dogs and kids are still going strong. Feeling grateful to live in a place that still has open space, and hope it stays that way for a while longer.
@dr-zoidberg Those guys buried something in your yard. Go get a metal detector.
@kiltedpadre said in Thoughts on ancient megalithic sites:
@Nibby I think the first one was run on fresh-pressed dino juice. Why drill for oil when there are dinosaurs running around outside?
We used to use whales for this purpose.
@WhoIsTheLeader I road tripped across Ireland in a manual Camry at the end of 2019. It was actually pretty fun to cruise around those windy Irish roads.
@Jan__Bosik The theory I’ve seen regarding pre Ice Age civilization is that a global cataclysm wiped them out, destroying most evidence of their existence. The erosion lines on the sphinx is supposed to be evidence of this, as well as the flood stories which are common among cultures throughout the world. If you go back even further you have the Great Unconformity, which provides evidence that climatic events have the ability to erase large swaths of Earth’s geologic history, and is recognized by mainstream archeologists.
I think it’s good to think about these things while also recognizing there is very little physical evidence to support these theories. However, that doesn’t mean we won’t discover more as time moves on. I highly doubt it was aliens, though. I think that’s lazy thinking. Humans have been around for around 300k years, and we keep finding older and older skeletons outside of Africa. I don’t find it all that shocking that civilization could have restarted several times throughout the world. We’ve seen societies recover fairly rapidly from local cataclysmic events in modern times, so I think it’s plausible this has happened on a larger scale in the distant past (albeit over much longer periods of time).
@RallyWrench Heard this on the news the other day and have been on a pole shift conspiracy theory kick all week.
@415s30 I first saw in theaters on a date in high school. It’s one of my guilty pleasures.
@Dr-Zoidberg These are the most satisfying types of fixes. I found the latch for the center console lid at a junkyard a few weeks back. I smile every time I hear that click as I close it.
@Exage03040 There’s still a wide spread in the Southwest. Plenty of biker gangs still around. The clubs have a mix of actual criminals and office workers cosplaying as bikers. My local HD shop is almost exclusively staffed by guys in their twenties and thirties, with the old timers working as mechanics. Very few of them ride traditional cruisers. Most of the bikes are built for speed with small fairings built around Dyna-esque platforms.
@GrindIntoSecond Yeah, they should have just made a cafe’d version of the XR750 instead of just making the road race bike. However, I don’t think it would have sold either as the AMF HD’s were POS’s and people would have been better off just buying a CB750.
@glemon Yeah, they also made the XRTT 750 which was built around their famous flat tracker. Pretty great looking bike IMO.
@GrindIntoSecond Harley did make a cafe racer once upon a time, but it did not do well.
I could see them doing this again with the new Sporster, which is quite a departure from the old Sportys.