Family and Finally a Garage Day! (Post #328) 4/13/2013

Finally I have a Garage Day! The weather is cooperating and my schedule is clear. I am asking no sympathy for my schedule I do it to myself.

I took the Range Rover to Dibble, Oklahoma to watch my grand daughter play T-ball. I love the two lane highways in Oklahoma and this was an opportunity to drive on them. Specifically highways 39, 76, 74b, and 24. 74b between Goldsby and the intersection with 76 just past Cole, Oklahoma has those great “lose-your-stomach” peaks on the hills.

I rolled into Dibble and they had blocked the parking lot at one end forcing me to either drive a few blocks around to the other lot or just go off the road and turn around. Of course, I picked option two. When I turned in to the lot it was a steep ditch, the approach angle was fine, no worries there, but when I tested the departure angle I contacted the ground. No damage that I can tell, but it was enough to make a furrow in the ground as evidenced by the dirt on my hitch.

I got a picture of our number 9 on third. The weather had just turned with a cold front passing through. Amazing how many Okies attending the game were totally unprepared for a serious change in temperature. Think 81 F to 61 F in three minutes with a 15-20 mph north wind. Making windchill something like 55 F.

We had family pictures this week. We went over to the University of Oklahoma campus and took pictures of my wife’s family. We spotted this Mediterranean House Gecko on one of the columns in front of Evan’s Hall.

Unfortunately for the gecko a Mockingbird had also spotted him and as soon as we were done, the Mockingbird swooped in and had a snack. Much to the chagrin of the grand kids. As we reminded them of the circle of life. They then told us of watching a hawk destroy a squirrel. They thought it was cool.

After this year, I may attempt to see how many different species of reptiles I can see in the wild, instead of birds. I’ve also thought of a quest of mammals.

Mrs. OkieRover with RovErica. That’s her dad Grady on her right. Although he was a Navy man he’s alright with me. His sense of humor is top-notch. He served on the USS Essex back in the day. He started out with a stint with the Oklahoma National Guard at age 15. He told them he was 18. Funny how times have changed.

This is my son-in-law Justin and my oldest Lecia whom you’ve heard referred to on this site as Fireball for her propensity to throw softballs hard enough to register on the Richter scale when you catch them.

Justin you have seen in my historical pictures. Although his people are Pottawatomie and mostly “uncivilized”, he has not totally shunned me teaching Cherokee words to the grandchildren.

Here we have the grand children and my son Diet Mountain Drew. Just out of frame is the princess Prestyn in her baby bucket.

I am greatly blessed by these people and proud of each and every one of them. I couldn’t ask for better people if I made them myself…

The love of family and the admiration of friends is much more important than wealth and privilege.
Charles Kuralt

I couldn’t agree more Chuck. If you need me I’ll be in the garage.

Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.

Two Classics and Their Classic (Post #321) 2/25/2013

You can’t tell me cars aren’t important to people. Such a great video.

What a great story. Thanks for sharing it with us.

Mrs. Okierover and I’s first cars were nothing to be excited about. I guess the 1992 Ford Escort was the first car we bought together. We quickly outgrew it with the addition of Diet Mt. Drew. Our second car was the 1993 Ford Ranger pickup truck. It served us very well. Our first Land Rover? Well, we still have it. 1993 Range Rover LWB.

On a side note, I had a great weekend. I’ll have some pictures and a story up later this week.

Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.

Sooooo Incredibly Busy (Post #320) 2/20/2013

I thought I’d drop a note so you would know I’m not dead. I’ve been really busy with work and school. I completed the fundamentals for Lean/Six Sigma Green Belt (Strong America Now) over the last three weekends. I’ll finish my Green Belt project this summer. My SQL Server (Wikipedia) class at Oklahoma City Community College class is starting to kick my butt. Big test tonight. This is going to require more cycles if I am to be successful with it.

The weather also hasn’t cooperated. I woke up and drove in this morning (February 20) to GIANT snowflakes coming down. This is the second time this year, shoot fire, this month! I was sitting in McNellie’s Pub in Midtown OKC when it did this last. It looked like we were sitting in a snow globe.

We need the rain and/or snow desperately so I am not complaining. I hope it rains a lot more. The drought is the worst I can remember seeing it. Makes me wonder if I shouldn’t read up on the Dust Bowl (PBS) again. The days it did cooperate, I was sitting in the Carson Engineering Center at OU learning Six Sigma and Lean principles. I’m barely smart enough to open the doors of this Nerditorium, however, Scuba Seamus (Diet Mt. Drew’s friend) who is studying mechanical engineering was in my class, so I was able to sneak in with a kind word from him.

I’m at 37 birds for this birding season. I was pleased to see an American Kestrel on the way home the other day. Even more exciting was seeing the Redhead swimming in a local pond. They are migrating back to Canada and it was quite a treat for me to see one.

Grand baby #3, Prestyn, is doing swimmingly well. She is cute as a bug and we have pictures to prove it, lots and lots of pictures. Her Mimi is happy when she gets to visit. When Mimi is happy, everyone is happy.

RovErica is now engaged. She met a young man that Mrs. OkieRover and I really like. Best of all he thinks RovErica hung the moon. Bonus for us (the readers of this blog and I), he’s mechanical. And not the Fat Jack “I can fix it, I’m mechanical.” and then he starts wailing on the outboard motor with a hammer from the movie Splash (1984) either. He graduated from Wyotech while working on his Masters. Yeah, my evil plans to have him fix the ABS relay buzzing problem are already in the works. He needs a nickname for this blog…but I’m working on that.

Diet Mt. Drew is considering moving back in with us and going back to school. It’ll kill him to do it, but I think he’ll like the amount of cash in his pocket and the well stocked pantry and the free internet service and cable TV.

I’m going to the South Central Coalition of Historical Trekkers meet this weekend at Fort Gibson. I’ll take lots of pictures, not that you want to see them, but I want to take them. It will hopefully be a nice break for me. I need to let the flywheel spin for a few turns without me having to spin it if you know what I mean.

My new TerraFirma springs and shocks are in and have been sitting in the garage for nearly a month. I hope to put them on the first weekend of March. Mrs. OkieRover will be away from the house for a lady’s retreat so unfettered Land Rover mechanicing should ensue. I can fix it, I’m mechanical.

Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.

Christmas Snow, No Pudding For You (Post #309) 12/27/2012

Merry Christmas everyone.

I had thoughts of posting another series of posts on the 12 days of OkieRover Christmas and the Festivus holiday tradition of the Airing of Grievances but was just not motivated to do so this year. School was hard on me this semester and my writing energy was hammered by the class.

Also, one of our four-legged children has been down all week and her injuries have me mostly depressed. We are treating her with drugs and hope she can heal. I hate it when we have an injured pet.

After a lovely Christmas dinner at the children’s aunt and uncles house. We took my Father-in-law home (that’s him in the A-Driver position). The roads were no where near as bad as previous years. The most trouble we had was getting the doors on the Range Rover to open with the handles. UGGGH! That is not going to be a fun job to fix. I also heard some suspension noise from the left front. I’m guessing springs will be coming sooner rather than later. And that shock mount I found that was busted will need some welding.

My wife’s sister Aunt SuSu (Susan) and brother-in-law John cook a mean turkey and SuSu’s dressing rivals only that of my wife. SuSu’s banana pudding was pretty good too. My oldest daughter Fireball still has the market cornered on banana pudding. But with the weather such as it was and her with a bun in the oven with only 5 minutes left on the timer, J-man with a wonky back and single digit wind chills they wisely stayed home with my favorite holiday banana pudding. Insert unhappy face here.

The Ford Exploder they drive is 4×4 but has the wrong tires on it for any prayer of staying un-stuck. If you remember the infamous Snowpocalypse of 2009 I had to extracted them from a snow drift in our neighborhood with the then front-wheel drive Range Rover. If you recall, I had a then unknown broken rear axle shaft. The Best 4x4xfar even when limping on a single axle.

It has been a long time since the four of us were in the Range Rover together. I asked RovErica to take some action pictures. The three of them then began mocking me with every turn, exaggerating the effect of the minimal G-forces being exerted on us at 15-20 mph. Good times, good times.

RovErica then got everyone in the back to ham it up for some snaps. It seems like we see the kids only when they need something these days. I guess I was the same way when I was their age. Now I understand the looks on my father’s face and the tone of his voice when I called home “just to say hi” and to let them know “I was still alive”. His tone to me when I hadn’t called home in three weeks pushed all the Catholic guilt buttons on the console. I’d be a basket case if we didn’t have cell phones.

Thanks for reading, Merry Christmas, and Happy Rovering to you all.

Batteries? We don’t need no stinking batteries (Post #299) 8/22/2012

This weekend was mostly unpleasant in the Honda side of the stable. We had not one, but two batteries fail in our Honda cars.

I mentioned to my wife while we were on our 3800 mile trek of a vacation, that the battery in the 2007 Honda CRV would need to be replaced. I had a morning in Montana when I started the engine that it gave that, slow rev sound when starting. We were lucky to make it home without swapping it out.

But that was not to be this past Saturday morning. I was making breakfast, and as it turned out we were out of eggs. My son, Diet Mountain Drew called and told us the Driver’s Education place doesn’t take checks, cash or money order only. So Mrs. OkieRover jumped in the CRV and drove cross-town to pay for the defensive drivers course.

On her way home she stopped at Braum’s to pick up eggs. About the time I had decided, Mrs. OkieRover wasn’t going to come home…ever. She called and told me the CRV would not start. So I ate my plate of hashbrowns, no eggs, and went to get her.

We jumped the CRV and drove home. I grabbed an 8mm deep socket and headed to O’Reily’s to get a new battery. I bought the last one, they had. (This is important for the second half of the story so try to keep up.) I installed it right there in the parking lot. This saved me having a core charge and the hassle of having it reversed on my ATM card.

So a few hours later I have a call from Diet Mountain Drew, and as you may have guessed, the Civic would not start. My eldest daughter was en-route to him, but instead he got a jump from his friend Justin.

So I now had another battery dead. I had to go to the grocery to buy sandwich fixin’s for my newly found biologically related OLDER brother (more on this later) and family to come over for a visit. When I came home I jumped the Civic and drove it to O’Reilly’s. As it turned out…they didn’t have any more batteries for that model. Someone had bought the last one. (rolls eyes, heavy sigh)

I was told there was one on the south side of Norman so I drove down there to buy it. I didn’t bring any tools. If HAD remembered, the 8mm deep socket would have been WRONG! They started using 10mm sockets on the 2008 models.

The kid at O’Reily’s opened a drawer full of sockets and said that’s what we got. What they didn’t have in the drawer was a 10mm deep well socket or a 10mm wrench. They had an 11mm wrench but no 10mm. I wound up buying a set of pliers. I swapped it out and was done.

The two batteries were OEM original equipment delivered with the cars. That puts the CRV at 5-6 years old considering the manufacturer date and the Civic’s at 4-5 years. For a battery in Oklahoma with 120 degree summers and 8 degree winters, not too bad.

I didn’t need the 100$(US) each hickey for the budget but what else are you going to do? Ever push started an automatic? Yeah, me neither.

PS. We swapped a third battery in my eldest daughter’s Ford Explorer. It died on Monday while she was in line to pick up my grand daughter from school. We had a time of it swapping it out. The negative battery connector was too stretched out. We had to cut off the bolt for it had rusted and corroded. Nothing more exciting than generating a lot of sparks with a cutting wheel over a battery. It says expressly to avoid sparks near the battery. So a nice volume of sparks is always entertaining.

Batteries? We don’t need no stinking batteries. 

Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.

Why Children Should Not Drive Your Toys, Part 2 (Post #283) 1/21/2012

If you have read this blog for any length of time, you know that Part 1 of “Why you should not allow your children to drive your toys” was the two years RovErica drove the Range Rover Classic and the four hours I let her borrow the Discovery 2 one fateful April afternoon her Senior year. Two years of RovErica driving the Range Rover resulted in an entire summer up on jack stands and dozens of hours of restoration. Four hours of her driving the Discovery resulted in a totaled vehicle.

Part two of this story is why you should not let your son drive your Range Rover to eat lunch while his Scion is in the BODY SHOP. “BODY SHOP” should have been my first clue why DietMtnDrew should have his wings clipped. This image of my door handle will suffice as the second clue.

Yes that is a cast aluminium door handle torn in half. I blame myself. I should have taught him the trick to opening the door. Instead he just “pulled a little harder”. When it failed to open the door he just crawled over from the passenger side.

The doors on the left side have a nasty problem I have yet to solve. They are not set correctly and require you to push on the door to cause the latch to trip. All this while you are pulling the latch. Its tricky to say the least.

Finding door handles to replace the broken units is getting very difficult as well. The last time I was at Rover Cannibal he only had three total in the entire warehouse. At some point one of us enthusiasts will need to send a functioning unit to a machine shop for them to make out of steel or aircraft aluminum. I can’t imagine what that would cost.

Last Sunday we were experiencing some more of the “I can’t believe this is January in Oklahoma weather”. Temps around the state got up to 72 F degrees. Our normal is closer to 45 F. I took advantage of the beautiful day and swapped out my driver’s side front door handle.

This is a relatively easy job. The good news is both the left side and right side door handles are inter-changeable. The fronts obviously have locks built in to the handle assembly, while the backs do not. The handle fits in either. I had two rear door handles. So using a punch I freed the hinge pin and the handle just slips out.

You must remove the door cards first. I purposefully bought some of the plastic friction pins just in case I break some in the removal process. On the last Wheeler DealerEdd China had a lovely tool I haven’t found yet, to assist in the removal. I used a big screw driver with a nice large flat head. After the door cards are off and the plastic is out of the way you can see what you are up against.

You can now remove the handle assembly from the door. It requires an 8mm socket for the nuts.

Simply remove the nuts and the bracket and the lock comes away from the door. This is fairly simple. I don’t recommend you dropping any of the nuts. You might not find them again.

Once the handle assembly is out of the door, use a common punch to remove the hinge pin and swap the handles. This model has heated door locks so you will have to work with the assembly hanging from the door, unless you want to cut the wires and splice them back later. I opted not to do that and just worked on it from the door.

Here’s a look at the assembly. The new handle is in place. Not pictured and sitting on my bonnet is the actuating rod and spring. It is held in place with a pin and clip. Nothing to worry about. You can see the retaining bolts and you can imagine how badly I wanted to brush off the rust.

I marked the “C” clip because the trickiest part of this job is getting the rod clips loose. They are held in place with a friction spring clip. The one located secured to the unit with the “C” clip was difficult to remove in the door. So I removed it by loosing the “C” clip. You may find your self more dexterous. The last trick to loosen the rod clips is to just use a screw drive and flick (for lack of a better term) them off the rods.

Reverse the dis-assembly and you are back in business. The system of rods and loose fitting wobbly clips is really a poor way to do things in my opinion. There is a lot of room for wear and failure of parts that are probably impossible to find. Once you learn how the door locks are actuated with the electric units, if this doesn’t disappoint you nothing will. Its not elegant or even very clever. Its a nightmare waiting to happen. Again this is my opinion. Its hard to believe the same race that put the brilliant Spitfire in to the air to win the Battle of Britain designed that.

On the OkieRover Difficulty Scale this job is a one. Edd China would call the internals fiddly bits and that is a perfect description. They look intimidating but they are not.

The passenger side front handle is also tearing and I’ll be using my last spare to fix it. I’m still trying to figure out what to do about the doors not functioning correctly. Most of the internal door parts were made by GM. I’m wondering if I can buy new door latches and solve my problem. Another solution is to just take it down to a body shop and have them “adjust” the doors. If I knew what to do, I’d do it myself, but I don’t and haven’t seen anything on the interwebs to tell me.

Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.