Category: viscous coupling

This weekend I let my daughter drive the Range Rover. We had a final (fingers crossed) snow storm this past weekend. I don’t have to tell you it was weird to have 5 snow storms this year. In any event, RovErica claimed she had not been taught how to drive in the slick-ish conditions in her Ford Taurus. She wanted to take the Range Rover due mostly to the ride position.

I was apprehensive to say the least. RovErica has had a poor track record of wrecking the Rovers when she “borrows” them. But I let her drive it anyway. I did caution her to drive carefully and to take it easy on the old broad.

She was good to her. She took care of my weekly driving task. And by running her she took care of the battery maintenance that I have failed to do for a couple of weeks. What makes this whole episode worthy of comment is the fact that she gave her new boyfriend a ride in the Rangie. He seemed tense. RovErica asked him why he was nervous, “Is it my driving?”. His response was not what she expected.

“This thing road walks.”
RovErica was quick to dismiss the issue, it’s always done that. Apparently it was enough to make the new boyfriend pretty nervous. To describe him would be difficult as we have not known him long, but to put it in a word, we could use “country”.

He is country. By that I mean he dresses the part, he’s in the oil business, more specifically he is a rig mechanic, he hunts, he guides hunts, and if we are getting the story accurately he had a scholarship offer to shoot at Texas Tech. That last part needs some confirmation but for now we’ll leave it there. He should be used to vehicles with eccentricities. Hell his pickup truck doesn’t even have a muffler that is up to code, nor does it have heat, RovErica mentioned a few other things too, which was precisely the reason they wanted to take the Range Rover.

Spring is now upon us and it is time to start working on the Range Rover in earnest. I want to the family camping this Spring and I need to get some things fixed first. The list seems to grow every month, but right now its the viscous coupling on the transaxle that demands immediate attention. With RovErica’s new beau’s concern for safety, maybe I should finish the bushing project I started last fall as well.

I have to get the garage cleared first. There is just entirely too much stuff in there to work on the Range Rover. I think I could do the bushing job laying underneath the Rover if the garage was cleared of storage stuff. It would be better to do it on the lift at JagGuy’s shop but I may need to make this a multiple weekend project. Which I really can’t do at the shop.

So I have the wife convinced we need a storage shed. She has said we needed one since we moved into this house. I had been holding off because I thought I wanted a shop instead of a storage shed. But all I really need is storage. I can still use the garage as the “shop” if I had a place to put all the crap.

And by crap I mean, a box spring, the mower, Diet Mountain Drew’s weight lifting bench that he never uses, half a desk, my table saw, the big ladder, the camping gear we never use, my lathe, and probably half a dozen computer parts. There is a bunch of crap in there.

So after I spend a weekend building the storage shed, a weekend of repairing the viscous coupling, a weekend for the bushing project, a weekend camping, a weekend of Chicago Fire soccer, a weekend at Maribone Springs playing cowboy, a weekend at Fort Washita reenacting the Fur Trade period in Oklahoma, and probably a weekend shooting a docu-drama on the Seminole removal, and several weekends at mom’s house getting it ready to sell, it’s football season again.

Will the madness ever stop? Probably not.

Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.