THE OLD MOTOR - Dave and our mechanic Roy look at the old, rusty crappy motor. It had to be reassembled on a stand to send back to the company that does the rebuilds for parts.
Believe it or not we got the truck back on Friday, May 17th as expected, YAY! But,( isn’t there always a but with this thing!) we immediately noticed a rattling noise that wasn’t there before...CRAP! It sounded like it was coming from the middle of the dashboard when ever we hit a bump. Considering they had to take the entire cab off to replace the motor I guess it’s possible something didn’t get tightened back up properly...sigh...that means another trip into the garage on Monday.
So we drove it around on the weekend and the new motor sounded good, thank God, but the rattle was driving us crazy. We finally figured out it wasn’t originating in the dashboard but from the floor. In fact it sounded like it was coming right from under the hump in between our seats. That’s where the transmission gets hooked back up so we definitely want it looked at again.
On Monday, we took it back, Dave took the mechanic, Roy who worked on it for a drive to hear it and when they got back, they put the truck on the lift to check it out from underneath. After a few minutes of looking in the area the noise is coming from Roy spots what looks like hammer head...seriously! Luckily there’s enough space for him to reach in and get it...sure enough it’s a HAMMER, but it’s not one of his tools, he checked his tool box and he had his two. So someone else in the garage left one sitting there at some time during the 3 weeks the cab was off. Anyways, we and all the people at the garage were very happy to have found the source of the rattle so quickly....I was so sure they were going to have to take the cab off again to find it and that wouldn’t have been a quick job.
Oh yeah, Roy told us there was enough space for the hammer to have eventually fallen out on it’s own...wouldn’t that have been great going 70 miles an hour! All of a sudden the noise would have stopped and we’d have been left wondering what the hell fell out? Some crucial piece of the transmission?? Or even worse...at those speeds, the hammer could have been turned into a wicked projectile and done serious damage to some other part of our truck or trailer or hurt some one else!
Anyways, one of the things they recommend with a new motor is that you do an oil change after about 800 miles. That’s to make sure any bits of debris in any of the parts gets caught in the oil filters. So we checked with the RV park owners to see how much longer we could stay in our spot, they confirmed we were good until June 1st. Then our spot, and all the others in the park would be full with their summer residents. But that gave us 2 weeks to drive around and feel comfortable with the workings of the new motor and get the oil changed by the same garage before we left.
I’m VERY happy to report that all went well during those 2 weeks, it’s like we have a new truck...technically, we just about do so we’re as happy as we can be considering we really didn’t want to fork out $18,000.
Boy it was nice to have our own transportation back. We drove all over the place just to put on the miles during those two weeks. Despite being able to fish in different locations other than Port O’Connor, the catching still sucked! Not a single keeper until our last fishing day there on May 26th.
Besides fishing we got to see the town of Port O’Connor host their 7th annual Warriors Weekend. Wow, it was pretty impressive to see the town transform...American flags everywhere to welcome the 750 wounded soldiers from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and take them and their families fishing for the day. Absolutely everything was paid for and there were hundreds of volunteers. We watched them arrive and get loaded on to the MANY boats. It was well organized chaos that’s for sure.
Check out those pics and few others from our last 2 weeks in Port O’Connor.