12 Year Old Truck

If you haven't guessed that I have a 12 year old truck from the title then let me make it more explicit. I have a 12 year old truck. Yesterday, September 1, 2010, said truck decided not to start for a while as I was sitting in the parking lot of our daycare provider. After I opened the windows, to let some air in so my daughter wouldn't get hot, I popped the hood of my Ford F-150 and I think I heard it laugh at me. I checked the plugs and wires and looked around for anything really obvious and didn't see anything wrong and figured it must be the starter because it had been making a stupid noise for a while. So I closed the hood and got back in the truck and tried again. No luck. I called my wife and as we were talking I tried again and it turned over. Yes!

I put the truck in gear and drove home. Later that night I went out to Auto Zone and bought new plugs and wires (the truck had been running rough) and a new starter thanks to Arrow Contracting. This morning after getting my wife and daughter out the door I went to work on the truck. I got the old plugs and wires out of the truck and the new ones back in. This took about an hour which is no big deal. Then I jacked the truck up and went to work on the old starter. This was a real joy! I was trying to get my massive man sized hands and arms up into a space that is big enough for a tiny child. It was not a pretty contortionist act. Just undoing the two bolts holding the starter to the bell housing of the transmission and the two nuts holding the wires on the starter took about an hour and a half. Then came the fun puzzle of how to get the starter out of the space blocked by two transmission lines below the starter, the transmission to the left, the frame to the right, and the headers above. The correct sequence only took half an hour.

Then it was time to do it in reverse. This should have gone more quickly than taking the old starter out. It always goes more quickly putting the new part in after taking out the old part. You already know what to do. You just do it in reverse. Yeah, not so much. Once I got the new starter up in the space it was time to reattach the nuts and bolts. I put the easy one in first and it was done in no time. Then it was time to put the bolt in the top of the starter. Little did I know that the old bolt was bent just a little (I think from taking it out because it was corroded). So I started the long slow process of getting the bolt back in and I got almost to the end and it started to feel funny so I backed it out. Once it hit the bend in the bolt it started stripping threads off. This is normally a really bad situation and I was a little panicky. When a bolt comes out stripped usually the threads in the hole it came out of are stripped too.

I called my wife and asked her to come get me so I could go to the parts store and get a new bolt and hope I could make it work. They didn't have what I needed. We got in the car and went to Advance Auto Parts they helped me find what we thought was the right bolt. I drove my wife back to work and I took the car just in case I needed to go get something else. Good call! The bolt was not the right one. It was off just a fraction so I took them back and finally found the right one and went home. I got the tools out again and got under the truck to see if this would work and sure enough it did. I bought a grade 8 bolt to go back where an ungraded bolt was. Thankfully the transmission bell housing was harder than the old bolt so the only thing messed up was the old bolt. It was softer metal which is probably why it bent in the first place. Thankfully I got the problem fixed and now my 12 year old beast is working correctly again. It took a lot of prayer and contortions but God blessed me in the end.

I think one day God is going to tell me to get a new truck. It may be something subtle like finding a great deal or it may be something obvious like my truck falling into pieces while I'm driving down the road and ending up with a very bad case of road rash on my bum. (I hope it's the subtle way God)