Diet Mountain Drew – Page 3

December 27, 2012May 15, 2023

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.

August 22, 2012May 15, 2023

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.

January 21, 2012May 15, 2023

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 Dealer, Edd 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.

January 4, 2012May 15, 2023

That’s not supposed to happen (Post #280) 1/4/2012

QUICK! Name three things you didn’t expect to happen when you got home today.
Was one of them “finding a puddle of brake fluid in your driveway?”
No?
Me neither.

This is what I came home to today.

You will remember in my last post that we had a brake rotor we thought was warped. On first inspection of it, I didn’t see anything like that but the evidence (sound and peddle surging) was there.

My son, Diet Mt. Drew, called today and asked to drive the Range Rover to lunch. He first asked, via text, if it was “safe” and “reliable” enough to drive. THE NERVE! He had to ask to drive my Range Rover because his Scion xB was in the shop. It was in the shop because he hit a curb in front of the Cleveland County Fairgrounds while traveling 40 MPH. Yes, a cell phone was involved. Yes he bent the lower “A” Frame, destroyed two rims…etc… but I digress.

In any event…he drove the Classic today. I did not expect the brake caliper to fail with him at the wheel, but apparently it did. He reported all this to his mother, the noted blogging mechanic in the family “that he had severe braking issues” while driving her today.
Did anyone call me or notify me by text?

I’ve rebuilt that caliper at least once. So today I ordered a couple of re-manufactured brake calipers. They were half the price of new and free shipping, so I bought one for each side on the rear. No core return, so I can rebuild my old and tired ones again and have a spare….just in case Diet Mt. Drew drives to lunch again. (wink, wink)

If you remember the last major brake restore (I keep referring to these previous posts like you all are AVID readers) I swapped brake hoses and ground off all the rust (theoretically) and re-sprayed the brake calipers with some acid-etching primer. It was kind of silly because brake fluid is a paint solvent. But I felt obligated.

When I had them apart I noticed a lot of rust. Especially inside the caliper. I even took a picture of the rusty bleed screw, see below. The picture doesn’t show it very well but it was pitted with rust.

When I did that project, it was determined that I had a bad proportioning valve. I vaguely remember replacing it. But quite honestly if I hadn’t seen the picture labeled “Valve that failed” I wouldn’t have remember it.

It is likely that these old tattered calipers are past their prime. I’m a bit surprised with only 191,000 miles on them. (okay I’m not really all that surprised).

I’ll let you know how the replacements go and whether or not I’d recommend the company as a source for parts for your Range Rover.

Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.

May 30, 2011May 15, 2023

William Andrew Stephens (Post #260) 5/30/2011

The announcer read his name…William Andrew Stephens. And on cue our family and friends yelled as loud as we could for my son had graduated high school.

I remember the little boy Drew, as he is called, more than this six foot version standing over me now. I remember him wearing a path in the grass of the Quanah Parker home’s lawn with his battery powered Jeep. I remember begging him to play that first game of baseball after all the weeks of practice, telling him if he didn’t like it after the first game THEN he could quit. I remember dropping him off at Oklahoma Christian Cage Camp and pulling his luggage for him because it was bigger and heavier than him. That is the Drew I remember.

This new taller graduated version of Drew I barely know. Yet I created it, formed it, comforted it, coached it, counseled it, disciplined it, he is me. And I barely know him. I know I will have decades to “get to know” this emerging man before me. I am excited to see what he will become. Yet at the same time, we start over again, worrying about his future now more than ever. For everything he does now is harder and the consequences are greater.

These days I find myself no longer focusing on the lower portion of my hourglass but at the top portion. The end is inevitable and I can’t help but think, did I do enough? Did I do it right? I’m running out of time to course correct the ships of my children’s lives. Or perhaps it is the ships that no longer are so easy to correct. It is as if the ship’s wheel no longer responds to my efforts to turn it.

What ever the metaphor may be, that first lighthouse has been passed. I remember vaguely my graduation. I remember how it was time to work now. I had joined the United States Marine Corps Reserve and had a semester of college at OU ahead of me. Little did I know at that time that neither would be my course. I wasn’t scared of the future, I was standing on the deck of my life’s ship watching the waves come over the bow and never flinched.

Right next to me my father sailed his ship cringing and worrying as he watched what must have seemed to him to be a ship foundering in the sea. My ship. But as I sailed my ship away from him he grew to worry less and saw the course I had laid out and how inevitably it would be okay. I wish that great old man were here today so I could ask him how to do that very thing, as I watch Drew start to sail his course.

Congratulations Drew. I love you and I know you will do well.

Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.

July 9, 2010May 15, 2023

Real close to starting Range Rover Restoration Part Duex (Post #186) 7/9/2010

I’m getting real close to (or as we Okies say, I’m fixin’ to) moving the Range Rover into the garage for her latest restoration project. The infamous Range Rover Restoration, Part Duex: RovErica’s Revenge. I say I’m “fixin’ to” start the project because I am determined not to use my wife’s side of the garage to store the ~~crap~~ valuable items on my side of the garage. Currently I have a full size box spring for a bed, a giant rocking chair, a box or two of miscellaneous glassware, a book shelf, all my reenacting gear (in stackable tubs), and several other loose items on my side of the garage. There is no room for a restoration project.

Should I have a garage sale? Probably. Do I hate to have garage sales? Definitely. I am waiting for the garage sale because I know when we start working on my mom’s house there will be tons of stuff to sell at a garage sale. Why have a little garage sale when a bigger one will be better?

So I will get the kids to help move the reenacting stuff up to the attic where it was before I used it back in April. I will reorganize the other items and reduce their floor space foot print. Once that is done, I can move the Range Rover in and get started.

Get started? What are you going to do OkieRover? That is a great question oh gracious and loyal reader. Let us begin by describing first why anything has to be done at all. Maintenance, that’s why. When you allow a sixteen year old to drive a 15 year old vehicle of British manufacture, things magically stop working. I know that is hard to believe with kids as great as mine but it is “a true fact” as Diet Mountain Drew would say.

When you can’t get to the vehicle because:

it is busy being a taxi for a dozen children who’s parents were smarter than to give their kids cars,
it is sitting in front of some kids house while your daughter is putting around in that kid’s car because, “Oh, I forgot to tell you, the air condition isn’t cold any more.”,
it arrives home each day on average about 25 minutes after you have gone to bed,
and lastly, because you are only allowed two sentences each time you see your daughter exit the house on her way to work or somewhere else she is late to, and you are sure as hell not going to let her forget to clean her room and do that random chore you asked her to do yesterday before the door shuts and she is gone again. You don’t waste those precious moments on, “how’s your car running?” Which almost always elicits a response like, “Good! That weird noise it was making for the last 3 weeks finally stopped yesterday.”

See, kids don’t equate noises with problems like mechanics do. Just listen to one hour of Car Talk on your local public radion station Saturday. I dare you. Hell, I double dog dare you. I swear I hear the brothers ask the caller, “How long has it been making that noise?” at least 10 times per show. And almost every caller responds with the same answer, “oh, I’d say aboot six munts or so.” [end New Englander accent]

These clueless callers think their mechanic or in my kid’s case, daddy, can sense any automotive problem with his amazing super powers 30 miles away, at work, talking to callers who’ve locked out their accounts on the system for the fourth time that day or can’t remember the password you gave them ten minutes ago, while listening to The Beat Farmers Radio station on Pandora or my Those Darlins CD, while thinking about the roast beef and provolone sandwich he is going to enjoy at VZDs when lunch time rolls around. All the while dreaming up things to blog to you about. (I know what you’re thinking, yeah, I’m a busy guy.)

So after a couple of years of this behavior things get beyond fixing pretty fast. Let’s us now compile a list of just the things I can remember right off the top of my head. In no particular order:

Viscous Coupling
Sun Roof
Brake Discs
Brake Reservoir
Air Conditioning System
Bushings
Sound System
Cosmetic items inside, outside, and under the hood
Cruise Control
Door Locks
Head Liner
Complete Fluid Service
Drive Shaft Seals
Power Steering Hoses
Possible CV Joints
Possible Failed Transmission

That’s about it. If I were to take this bad boy down to a mechanic I’m pretty sure the labor alone for all this could buy a pretty nice used late model LR3 or Range Rover. That leads us to the obvious question, why fix it? Well, you didn’t read this far down this blog post to ask that question, you know why. Because I, like you, love your Range Rover and can’t imagine not having it sitting in the driveway waiting for me to jump in and tear off down the road.

I hope to have all this fixed in time for the inevitable Snowpocalypses of 2010 and 2011. And with my new utility trailer I hope to make a few camping trips with my wife next year.

The good news for my readers is the fourteen new entries to the Tech Tips Section of www.OkieRover.com these projects will create.

All this and I’ve been thinking about reviving the local Land Rover Owners club for the OKC metro area. So look for more info on that in the coming months. I have a photographer and former Land Rover driver (RovErica), anyone know a good web programmer that works cheap?

Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.