[Today’s run: 4 miles]<\/p>\n
We arrived back home from our trip to Germany just before midnight on Wednesday.\u00a0 We had started out from the hotel about 7 AM, and arrived home 24 hours later after three flights and a three hour drive.\u00a0 Getting back into a normal sleep pattern has been harder coming home than going out.\u00a0 I was told that westward travel was a harder adjustment.<\/p>\n
Today we drove up to Olive Branch and took possession of my government surplus pickup truck.\u00a0 It is a 1994 Ford F-150.\u00a0 It had some engine problems, so a local shop in Olive Branch towed it in for me and fixed it up.\u00a0 Today we drove it 150 miles back from Olive Branch.<\/p>\n
The only problem on the drive was that the right front shock absorber is completely shot, so we had bad tire-hop at speeds over 60 MPH.\u00a0 It took a bit longer getting home because of that.\u00a0 But we got home around 3 pm.\u00a0 I spent some time cleaning up the interior.\u00a0 Judging by the parts and junk in the back, I’d say this truck was used by the water department.<\/p>\n
Overall, the truck looks OK.\u00a0 The interior is dirty.\u00a0 The radio is broken and the antenna is broken off.\u00a0 The passenger side door handle is broken.\u00a0 The knobs for climate control are missing.\u00a0 The seat is in pretty good shape for a ’94.\u00a0 The tires look almost new.\u00a0 The truck has 155k miles on it.<\/p>\n
The engine problem was interesting.\u00a0 The man at the shop discovered that 2 of the cylinders in the in-line 6 were not firing.\u00a0 The previous owner (City of Olive Branch) had done some patchwork to try to get them working.\u00a0 It turned out that there was a problem with the positioning of a valve push rod.\u00a0 I think that means the valve never closed completely.\u00a0 Oil was getting in to the combustion chambers and generally things were not running right.\u00a0 I’m not sure how a push rod would get displaced like that.\u00a0 Maybe somebody over-revved the engine and the\u00a0 rod out-ran the valve return spring?\u00a0 Anyway, the thing also has no catalytic converter.\u00a0 I suspect the steady diet of burning engine oil probably ruined it.\u00a0 And they replaced exhaust system with a “glass pack”\u00a0 (a cheap high-flow, noisy muffler).<\/p>\n
Anyway, the guy at the shop in Olive Branch took the valve cover off and evidently figured out the valve problem.\u00a0 The thing ran fine for 150 miles on the way home.\u00a0 I have ordered shock absorbers for the front, to put on tomorrow.\u00a0 I’m hoping that will solve the tire hop problem and then I’ll have\u00a0 pretty good full size truck.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Today’s run: 4 miles] We arrived back home from our trip to Germany just before midnight on Wednesday.\u00a0 We had started out from the hotel about 7 AM, and arrived home 24 hours later after three flights and a three hour drive.\u00a0 Getting back into a normal sleep pattern has been harder coming home than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5042"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5046,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5042\/revisions\/5046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}