| Operation Trailer Haul |
[May. 3rd, 2006|08:42 pm]
wetkneefarm
|
It's been a week since I've blogged, and my life certainly hasn't been boring in that time. Luckily for you, I'm bound to forget half of the things I thought were definitely worth recording here. Even what's left is bound to be long....
The main event of the past five days was Operation Trailer Haul. As some of you know, I lived for a year in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia in a little camping trailer, a 1972 Minimax. For a while now, I've been planning on dragging this trailer down to Sinking Creek as a quick and easy living space until my house is built. Before Mark entered the scene, this goal included hiring my scary mechanic to do the hauling since he had a big truck and wasn't afraid to drive it. Once Mark entered the scene and Joey bought his big pickup truck, the operation became a lot easier...
We borrowed Joey's pickup on Saturday and headed north up 81. Arriving at Sheila's, I was dismayed to see how my poor trailer had fallen into disrepair. Granted, it is older than me by a good many years, but it had been in good shape when I lived in it, due to some careful caulking of leaks. Four years later, the trailer had started coming apart at the seams, quite literally. The metal pieces which spanned the corners had slipped loose on three sides and water had leaked in. Not so bad that it wasn't worth repairing, but it took two tubes of liquid nails and a few screws to paste the trailer back together again.
The tires were, unsurprisingly, flat. We pumped them up and they leaked only gently - the best one went down from 30 PSI to 28 PSI in 24 hours; the worst one down to 20 PSI. We had a spare which looked a little newer and leaked only half as much as the bad one, and we bought an air tank to fill up the tires on the way if necessary. Using a big piece of metal in addition to the tire iron, Mark was able to loosen the rusted lugnuts on one tire, but the other one snidely resisted his efforts. When we bent the tire iron, we gave up. (Sorry about the tire iron, Joey, but we did buy you a jack, which you were missing. And the tire iron is still quite useable if a little bent.) Luckily, the tire which wouldn't come off was the good one, so we figured it was worth hitting the road as is.
After ripping off the bumper (it was half fallen off already) and cleaning out Sheila's shed (it was full of useful building and farming supplies, aka junk), we headed out. Joey's truck pulled the trailer quite happily, though I spent the first few hours with my eyes glued to the side mirror, half expecting the trailer to tip over or to fly apart.
The first problem was wiring the trailer to Joey's truck. The trailer's connector was old and had obviously been fiddled with. We bought a new connector for the trailer and succeeded in getting the tail-lights to work, but the brake lights and signals resisted Mark's best efforts. By this time, it was already 10:30 and I could see daylight slipping through our fingers, so I made the executive decision to press on.
Problem number two was one of the supports for the awning. These fold up nicely against the side of the trailer, but one had come loose and started to drag on the driveway. I duct-taped it in place, but obviously not well enough. Zipping down 81 at 60 miles per hour, the awning support came loose and started to jump along the pavement. We pulled over rapidly and I taped it better as traffic rushed past across the camper from me. As a tractor trailer passed us, I could feel the trailer swaying toward me in the wind. I got back in the truck ASAP and we pulled back out onto the road.
By problem number three, I was starting to feel sleepy from the ride, but the expression on Mark's face woke me right up. The worst corner, on his side on the front, had been ripped loose from its bandage of liquid nails by the high speed wind. A thin layer of tin was flapping in the breeze. Again we pulled over on the highway shoulder, and this time Mark duct-taped the tin down while the tractor trailers rushed past only feet away. Later, we would stop at an exit and add more liquid nails and a new layer of duct tape, which held until the end of the trip.
At the liquid nails and duct tape exit, we also went out of our way to find a tire store. The tires were heating up a lot, and Mark was worried that something would happen to the good tire, leaving us in the lurch since we wouldn't be able to change it with its tight lug nuts. The manager in the tire store came out and helped us himself, laughing repeatedly. Turns out that cars from the sixties and seventies often have the lug nuts threaded differently on different sides of the vehicle, so we had been bending Joey's tire iron _tightening_ the stubborn tire's lug nuts. A twist of his air wrench and they were loose. The heat of the tires also wasn't really anything to worry about. The tires were ?bias ply? and heated up like that even when new. "Remember," the tire guy told us, "The lug nuts on this side tighten to the left. See the L printed on the nut?" We thanked him and carefully wended our way out of the garage, narrowly missing the doorway with the edge of the camper.
After that, it was smooth sailing. We arrived at Sinking Creek at 7:45 pm, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule, and backed the camper a short way down my driveway. We'll leave it there until the driveway's finished and we can pull it back in to the barn area. Operation Trailer Haul was a success! |
|
|
