Category: weather

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So much information, so little blog posts (Post #188) 7/19/2010

I am progressing at a leisurely pace on the Range Rover Restoration Part Duex. I have run out of funds for now and have changed gears a bit. I am now working on stuff that doesn’t require any supplies. Its also kinda hard to be motivated to “bust it out” when the temperature is 100+F in the garage. As RovErica said to me the other day when she came home after a long drive around town in her unairconditioned Ford Taurus, “I’m sweating balls out there.” As she said that, I remembered the good old days when I didn’t have air conditioning. Ahhh memories. Nothing motivates a kid more than suffering.

I have started to organize the pictures so the tasks can be broken down in to manageable pieces. This hopefully will prevent me from having novel sized posts about rust removal. I know WTH! I know how you all love to read about grinding rust but I’m sorry you will have to get your War and Peace sized fix of minutia of rust removal from some Jaguar or Jeep website. 

With some new tools, I have decided I could proceed with the rust portion of the project and pull the carpets in the front of the Rover and see what kind of damage is up there. I was NOT surprised to find rust. I was surprised to find holes. The good news is it was only two holes. The bad news is they are not in easy places to work. I also believe before long another seam will begin producing holes.

This is a picture underneath the passenger side seat. You can see the hole in the floor and the rust along the seam there. There is a bit of rust a little further back that is even worse than this. Therefore the entire passenger side seat and electrics will need to be removed to get to the problem spots. If I don’t, its only a matter of time before my passenger is ejected through the floor board. I only allow people I ACTUALLY LIKE to ride with me in the Range Rover so I should really try to fix this correctly. While I’m at it, I think moving the engine management computer to place higher up would be prudent. We’ll see how that all pans out when I get closer to reassembly.

I pulled the carpets and mats and to my surprise they were still wet two weeks after the last rain. We have had 90 plus degree heat for over a month and except for a drive during the flash flooding on July 4th she has just sat in the driveway. We did have quite a bit of rain during the early part of the month so I have to assume this rain is coming from somewhere above the rust. My first guess is the windshield seal. So add to the list of things to do, pulling the windshield and replacing the seam. More expense and more time. This will have to be professionally done for I have no way to pull the windshield. The guys across the pond on the TV show Wheeler Dealer hire this out and I will take their lead and do the same. If it’s good enough for Edd China, its good enough for me.

So with wet carpet and very, very wet sound pads coming out, are we at all surprised there is rust on the floor boards? Rhetorical question! Lets get a look at it.

In these pictures there is a pre and a post picture. The PRE pictures are before any grinding was done. There were some pads glued to the floor and they were very rusted underneath. The goal was to get to bare metal and remove the rust. I will probably hit all this one more time before the acid etching primer goes down and the entire area is covered in new sound deadening material.

Driver’s side

Passenger’s side

I mentioned two holes. It was somewhat comforting to find the stainless steel screw that holds the seat facia firmly embedded in the rusty metal. Here are the pre and post pics for each hole.

I think perhaps it looks worse than it really is. I stopped by JagGuy’s shop on Saturday to show him the pictures of all this rust. He said, “That ain’t rust.” He proceeded to show me a Jaguar with rust so bad entire sections of the body were gone. The surface rust I had was not even to be concerned about in his eyes. He says a liberal application of Rustoleum paint will slow down the rust. Even better would be some Waxoyl or the like. I’m still investigating which one I will go with.

So overall I felt pretty good about that. But he had not seen the footwell pictures yet. He had only seen the pictures from the rear of the Range Rover. And those my friends, will be in the next blog post.

Stay warm and Happy Rovering.

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Hail Yes! (Post #178) 5/18/2010

Victory is mine!
Okay, I was the successful bidder on one of the trailers. 465$(US) and its all mine. I still have to get a pintle hitch setup for the Range Rover but by the end of the month I’ll have the trailer at the house.

I now have to get busy on mechanical repairs, mainly my viscous coupling. I am going to attempt to repair it either this weekend or next. I also have to fashion a gate in the back yard to store my trailer. I had dreams that I could store it on the side of the house. But sadly the builder gave me the wrong property lines and now I don’t think I have room for a gate. So I’ll have to pull it out through the field behind the house. That’s no big deal except I won’t be able to get to the trailer if it rains very much.

But hey! I have a trailer. I have already been thinking about a battery system and some modifications. It would be nice if I could store the propane tank on the tongue and have a place to store batteries to power lights and such.

Well if you have not been living under a rock you should have seen by now some video of the hail storms of May 16th, 2010. Unreal only barely describes the ferocity of this storm.

The white stuff in the middle isn’t rain. It’s hail. A veritable column of hail falling from the sky.

You can search YouTube for more videos. The damage throughout the city was horrible. Thankfully we didn’t get any of this in Norman. I was driving home from my father-in-law’s house. The sky to the North was black. As I turned on to Robinson to head west I felt the temperature drop 20 degrees. My friend has a great pic of the hail in his step-son’s driveway.

As my friend GiGi said on Facebook after the tornadoes blew through, “You have to be made of tough stuff to live in Oklahoma.” I couldn’t have said it better GiGi.

I’ll post up some pics from the trip to pick up the trailer and such later in the month.

Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.

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Tornados wreck Oklahoma (Post #177) 5/11/2010


We are all safe. The main cells went North and South of us again. Hwy 9 is just 4 miles away. The marina at Lake Thunderbird is about 8 miles to the due east. Moore got a small tornado that was about 6 miles north.We didn’t even get any hail out our house. We did loose power for 6 hours.
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Snow…one more time (Post #172) 3/23/2010

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.

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1 x Coveted Mug (Post #166) 1/28/2010


Coveted indeed.

It is official I have finally been rewarded for sending in a Sighting. Rovers North gives away their very coveted mug for a submission of a Land Rover sighting in popular culture. A month or two ago, I sighted a white Land Rover Defender 90 behind Jay Leno during a commercial promo. It was a quick shot of the Defender driving by, when he was doing one of his man on the street segments. If you blinked, you missed it. Me and two other gentlemen caught it. I even sent in a screen cap.

You can find the page in the Rovers magazine that hit your mailbox in January 2010. What is that you say? You don’t get Rovers Magazine? Why not? It’s free. You should contact them and get on the mailing list. Its got great articles and helpful tips. Hell, Bill Burke, master of off-roading, even contributes a column. And as you know from reading my blog, I could use a few tips from Bill about getting unstuck. And I’m sure if you like to off-road you could use a few tips from Bill as well.

The mug could not have come on a more perfect day. It was 65 degrees outside when it arrived. Very unseasonable weather for Oklahoma in January. But what seems like unseasonable is only normal for Oklahoma as the next day the weathermen were predicting an ice storm. I have already enjoyed a cup of tea and am on my second cup of hot chocolate. Yes, I’m buzzing pretty hard.

Jed Castles (a local weatherman) on his Facebook page said we would quickly forget the Christmas Eve 2009 Snowpocalypse. The Snowpocalypse was a true “once in a hundred years storm”. It set the record for snowfall in a 24 hour period for Oklahoma. This storm was also a blizzard that shut down the state for 4 days. Thirty five mile per hour winds with gusts to 50 mph caused snow drifts that closed highways all over the state. As is the custom in news, we must name the latest storm, because that’s what the newscasters do. So my friends are sure this has to be ICEPOCALYPSE 2: Electric Boogaloo.

When we get ice storms in Oklahoma we normally lose power due to the ice on the electric transmission lines. SO, Electric Boogaloo seems totally appropriate. So far this morning it has only rained and the temperature has finally dropped below freezing. Sunday night’s forecast called for 3-4 inches of ice and 6-7 inches of snow after that for central Oklahoma. Schools and businesses were announcing they would be closed while we were enjoying the 65 degree day. Last night the news scaled the storm back and said 1/4 to 1 inch of ice and 2-3 inches of snow. We all know why they do that, it’s so you the gullible viewer will tune in to the ten o’clock news every night where you normally get to hear that Mrs. Johnson’s third grade class made balloon animals in art today at some elementary school you never heard of and to hear the latest news on the end of civilization as we know it the coming ice storm.

So this morning after we were cut loose from work I got back to Norman and I gassed up the Range Rover, picked up a gallon of milk, some cinnamon rolls, crackers, and bacon from Braums. When you shop you must totally grab random things as you progress to the check out line. That way the clerk will think you are crazy eclectic. I took the movies (that were late) back to the video store. And now I am sitting here in my office rocking out to Devo’s Oh No It’s Devo, looking North at the wet landscape and wondering if we will all die tonight when the rain begins to freeze. Do not fear my fair reader, the good news is it will be 50 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday and all the ice will be gone. And civilization will not have come to an end, and every one that raided the Super WalMarts last night to stock up on provisions will wonder if they can drink all that milk before it spoils.

Thanks for Reading and Happy Rovering.

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