Life Goes On...

 I am terrible when major equipment in my life has to move onward.

That is to say, I do tend to become very attached to some major purchases of sorts.

Tomorrow my Expedition is likely to wander off into someone else's sunset.  Too early, in my opinion, even though the thing is 20 years old.  And has been ours for about five years now.

I suppose it rolls back to the difficulties we've had in keeping wheels going in this nuthouse.  But it's not been all that terrible, overall.  Just ... a struggle.

The latest departure is our 2001 Ford Expedition, a big old vehicle that was purchased when we needed to be able to get back and forth to Iowa to visit my mother-in-law, before she passed away, and, well, move from place to place.  It replaced a Dodge Caravan Minivan that had served the same purpose for a few years.  

That vehicle did pretty well until one Christmas, I think long about 2004 or 2005.  I had to head down to Iowa and pick up Grandma and some furniture from her home to move to ours.  As I started down towards Iowa, alone, I realized the heat really wasn't heating.  I noticed the engine temperature was staying fairly low, which was about what one might expect when the outside temperature was in the teens, and one was moving at about 70 mph on the freeway.  

I started thinking that if the vehicle was going to remain cold the whole way down and back up, Grandma was gonna be miserable, and so was I.  Then the brain cells decided they could warm me up by working.  The brain said "hey, dummy, when's the last time you checked the coolant levels?"  That's right, sports fans, if your vehicle is not blowing warm air into the passenger cabin, there are three or four problems that might be the root of the evil, but the easiest one to check is your coolant levels.  And so as I drove down I35 southward, I believe I was round about Albert Lea or so, noticed a Walmart sign, and pulled into their parking lot.  I picked up three gallons of coolant, a funnel, and a towel.  I went back to the van, I popped the hood, opened the radiator, and noticed I could not see liquid in the radiator.  

Hooray for the good news.  That is, the easiest problem to resolve if the vehicle isn't heating is low coolant levels.  Add coolant.  If you have plenty of coolant and there's no heat, then the problem is more than likely the thermostat - that's a little device that sits on top of the engine, lives in a tube from your radiator, and helps to share some of that warm coolant with your passenger cabin.  I suppose a simplified explanation of a motor vehicle's cooling system might be helpful.  Your radiator is pretty much a big old tank full of liquid - and a lot of surface area.  That surface area is made from this tank having spaces where air flows through the tank - it does not allow liquid to leak out, but it does allow the liquid to cool down.  

That liquid circulates throughout your engine, where it takes the heat from all of the explosions - that's right, that gasoline blows up inside your engine to make the car move, right?  And those explosions create heat - as does friction and other things.  So that heat is carried away as cooler liquid passes by hot areas.  It becomes hot, and is carried to the radiator, where it gets cooled.  

How does it get to the passenger cabin?  Two things.  The first is that lever, button, or electronic gadget that you set to heat, or cool.  When it gets set to cool, it doesn't pull the heat from the engine into the cabin.  When it is set to heat, the liquid that's passed around the engine also passes into the passenger cabin.  Just like the radiator under your hood, there's another device inside your car's heating and cooling system that takes that hot coolant and passes it through another radiator - a tank that allows air to flow through it without leaking.  And that air carries some of the heat from the coolant into the air, which blows into the passenger cabin.

And yes, if none of that moves around there's this think called a water pump, usually mounted on the front of your engine, that circulates the liquid - and sometimes that goes on vacation.  That is the extremely expensive repair that can get the heat flowing through your vehicle again.

Back to that pre-Christmas trip.  I drove out of the Walmart parking lot, back onto the freeway, and in only a few minutes, I noticed I had heat.  It got comfortable.  Then as I got down into eastern Iowa, I got uncomfortable.  Not because the interior cabin heat, but because the weather outside had changed from plain old winter gray to snowing.  Which ain't good when you have a twelve hour day going driving back and forth to Iowa.

I got to Grandma's, loaded the desk, the chair, the footstool, Grandma, her Christmas presents, and her luggage, into the vehicle.  We grabbed a quick bite for lunch, I went to the bathroom, and we headed back to the northwest.  The trip down took a little over 5 hours, whcih was much quicker than it usually took with a number of family members needing to use the bathrooms and etc., but the trip back took nearly 8 hours - because I had to take it slow and steady.

But that was the initial warning.  By the end of life, long about 2015, that vehicle required at least a half-gallon of coolant per trip - most of it leaking into the passenger cabin while I drove.  So that was just not good.  

The Expedition was found by my wife, I think in a Facebook post, and we headed over to Wisconsin.  The next day, $3000 less rich, we had a new, solid vehicle.  A few days later, we attended my friend Tom's funeral.  Tom had killed himself.  And none of us to this day understands why.  But he's gone, and we're still here.

And that big old Expedition made several trips up and down to Iowa.  It also took my wife and I to St. Paul in August of 2019, when Queen was playing.  And one of the drive shafts snapped on the vehicle as we drove into a parking ramp.  Which was, honestly, the beginning of the end there.  

It had begun to display a few unusual issues shortly after that.  One of which was a coolant leak.  No obvious puddles, smells inside the passenger cabin, or anything else, just ... weird things.  Strange electrical problems.  A vampire drain on the battery, strange radio issues, very strange electrical issues overall.  They would stop when I would disconnect the battery then go into work.  I'd punch out at the end of the day, head out to the parking lot, reconnect the battery, start the car up, drive home, disconnect the battery, and all was well.

Then the pandemic hit.  I was lucky.  My job allowed me to work from home.  And so could my wife, which really took advantage of the new, expensive adjustable desk which we'd bought for her new home office.  And I also had a son who was going to school to be a mechanic.  So I thought hey, bud, since I need the help, you can work off a little of your rent.  

After a couple of dig and scratch and try this things, we found that it wasn't a leaking radiator hose, it was a leaking manifold.  That's right, back to the motor coolant system.  On top of this big metal engine there's this plastic gadget called a manifold.  It allows the hot coolant from the engine to flow up into it, and then into the radiator.  It also allows the fuel to flow from a line that connects to the gas tank into the top of the engine, where it's distributed down into the cylinders to go bang.  

Somewhere along the bottom of the back of this thing, it had cracked.  20 year old plastic that saw too many freeze-fry cycles, most likely, so it needed replacing.  And our best guess was that any electrical connection that had been soaked and sprayed with hot engine coolant may have experienced a little ... well, short circuiting.  So the basic idea was we'd remove the original manifold, replace it, and be back in business.  

Now, the engine has a lot of parts, and the old school brain I carry around in my skull says "we're fairly deep in the engine, is there any other maintenance that may be needed here?"  Yes, you, sir, in the back, who said Spark Plugs - you're my kind of people.  We killed the truck.

What's that?  Well, there are a few things professional mechanics know that we don't.  And one is that, in this particular era, the fine engineers who designed Ford engines had a bit of an off day.  And some fuckwit designed the spot where the spark plugs go that had never seen, worked on, or had any sort of education regarding engine maintenance and the things you need to do.  That's because the engine in that big old truck out there has a problem when you put those spark plugs in there, and my son and I found it totally by accident.

He tried to remove a spark plug, and it broke.  Because of the way the engine was designed, the spark plugs sit down in holes, and you can't get there.  So when you get down that far and something breaks off, it's a whole new level of hell.

We went through a dozen tools, and I built a few to try to extract this stuck collar.  And we weren't able to do it.  So this entire motor vehicle is going to the land of the dodo because of one $2 part which broke deep down inside the engine.  I've got about $500 of new engine parts in a manifold, a gasket set, a new set of engine header bolts, new radiator hoses, and other stuff that's going to leave the yard with the vehicle tomorrow, because they don't do me a fart's worth of good sticking around here, unless I find another Ford 2001 Expedition with the same 5.1 liter engine.  So I learned my lesson.  

I will miss that vehicle for a number of reasons, the biggest being that I had really wanted to, at some point, take my family camping with it, our pop-up trailer, one of the pickup trucks the kids had (they both owned pickups for about a year or so), and just enjoy the together time.  But that's not going to happen.  And we'll have another space in the driveway, fewer feet of vehicles dangling out into the frontage road, and ... well, I'll miss it.  

I've removed my Millenium Falcon Windscreen sun shield, my license-plate frame that says "My other ride is the Millenium Falcon" and my little Darth Vadar figure that hung from the rear view mirror.  And the bolts I'd ground down to fit in the luggage rails on the roof so that I could mount the fiberglass luggage bin on the roof for more cargo capacity, and ... well, I'll miss that thing.  We fit together well.  I'm oddly proportioned, and I got very comfortable with one arm on the door armrest, one elbow on the central console cover, both hands on the wheel, and driving back and forth to where ever I needed to go.

I'll miss that thing.  I need to take some pictures tomorrow.  It was exceptionally free from body panel rust or dings, ran like a top for years, and ... well, it was one of my favorite vehicles.  I doubt I'll ever find one as comfortable.

And it joins the very long line of "no longer in my family" vehicles.  They start with my father's 1957 Ford Thunderbird which I never got to ride in, but it did get me a pair of parents.  My father picked his future wife up with it for a number of dates before they were married.  And it unfortunately got wrapped around a tree as Dad was bringing his mother home from Sunday Morning Mass - true story.  The first family vehicle I do recall is a red Volkswagen, round about 1963 vintage.  That was followed by dad's 1972 Ford Station Wagon, dark green with the nearly black interior - bad choice for kids with shorts to land on after it had been in the sun for a few hours.  One of my sisters did her best to fix that by power-puking in the car.  Did you know that vomit in the 1970s interior of a car could turn spots white?  That's right, folks, stomach acid acts as a bleach.

That station wagon led the parade for many more years.  The 1976 Ford Gran Torino wagon that lasted almost 5 years.  Would have gone longer if those Mobil folks had done a better job with Mobil 1 - that "first synthetic motor oil".  Good for 25000 miles, they guaranteed.  Which was why dad got one hell of a deal on the 1981 Crown Vic wagon - fully loaded - that was the end of the line for their station wagon days.

My very first vehicle was a 1968 Pontiac Catalina with a 450 - that's right, a big old engine.  It roared like a beast - a few times, anyway, until my father got a look at it and decided no way in hell.  I sold it to a buddy of mine for $20 - not bad, I only took a 50% price drop on it.  It was replaced in my world with a 1973 Pontiac Luxury Lemans.  That august vehicle joined the family fleet when my father got a good deal from a used car dealer recommended by his normal fellow whom he patronized to buy all of those station wagons after he bought that sweet sporty Thunderbird.  The Lemans cost a total of $454.54, including tax, license, and dealer prep, etc., back in 1982.  

It became my mother's car, and my daily driver as I drove to college, and to work.  Then college went out of the way for a while.  And then came back when the work thing went back down to part time.  And the Lemans stopped opening the driver's side door, so I traded it in, with my father's blessing, for a 1978 Dodge Ram 1500 pickup.  That ran a few weeks, then blew the oil drain plug out, drained the oil, and needed a new engine.  

After I got that done, I had a good local car.  If I drove it more than about 45 miles, it would literally break down.  Turned out there was an electrical problem, it kept burning out main wiring harnesses.  Go figure.  

So that car went away when my father and I made a deal, in 1986 or so, on a 1984 Ford Tempo.  Brown in color, it ran, back and forth, did what I needed to, except haul loads of lumber home from the local lumber yard.  So it goes.  And it moved with me to the Twin Cities, when I did.  And it rather promptly decided to ... grow long in the tooth.  It kept running for a few years, until my father decided he wanted it back.  So it goes.  So he got it back, and my wife and I had to replace her car, which was totaled after we'd dumped a whopping $900 in repairs into it, so we bought our only new vehicle together - a 1990 Ford Tempo.  

All of about three months into owning that vehicle, it was T-boned at an intersection in Eden Prairie Minnesota, on my father's birthday (3 days after mine), after I'd dropped my wife off at her office and was on my way to my job.  The woman who hit me ran a red light in her 1991 Pontiac Grand Am, and bounced me into the front bumper of a 1989 Cadillac El Dorado.  Despite saying, right in front of the Eden Prairie Police Officer "I couldn't see the light, so I sped up" she was not ticketed.  

The Tempo went back to the dealership where we purchased it for repairs, and the 1991 Taurus Wagon they loaned us became our honeymoon car.  That's right.  Neither my father nor I honeymooned in our regular vehicle.  The Tempo was repaired and finished and the oil change I'd requested they do they failed to do, so the next weekend, as we hit the coldest night of 10 years, the weekend before Christmas, my car would not start in the shopping center parking lot where I worked. 

So my wife and I figured out how to get me to Iowa for Christmas, it being our first as newlyweds, and her first without her father, who had died a few weeks before, six weeks after our wedding.  So we were able to borrow her brother's car to get back home for work the day after Christmas, and that started the downward spiral for me to leave retail.  

But the good news there was that the following May I got a company car with my new job.  And that stayed in the family for six years, as the Tempo continued to do yeoman work.  Then I was able to purchase a vehicle from a friend of mine who found herself having to unload some of her late father's possessions.  So the 1988 Mercury Cougar became mine for a few years.  And we kept it going.  

Then things got ... well, lucky, mostly.  We were able, with the assistance of a friend, to purchase a used minivan, helpful for our growing family.  And then we were able to find a very good deal on something I'd long wanted - a pickup truck.  That could replace the by now long-in-the-tooth Tempo.  Unfortunately, the Tempo died, but we were even less lucky with the pickup.  

You see, much of my coolant system knowledge came from that pickup, which for unknown reasons kept blowing out it's water pump.  So we got rid of that.  And for a few years, we had both a minivan and a Eagle Vision TSI.  The Eagle did not last nearly as long as the minivan did, but eventually, the Minivan became a problem, but it did do very well by being donated to the local high school automotive department.  That was, I'm certain, where my son got bit by the mechanic bug - taking apart and fixing some parts of our then-former minivan.

And then another minivan rolled into our lives, and that stretched it's life out until we could get the Expedition.  Which is now soon to be formerly ours.

My wife, about a year and a half ago now, decided a non-running vehicle was not cool for our family, and found a way to manage to fund a not-that-old Ford Explorer.  I am not a fan of that vehicle in many ways.  The now-required-by-law backup camera brings inboard a large video display.  I honestly believe that those should be outlawed as distracting, because if I want to adjust the fan to blow warm air to defog my windshield, I want to reach down to where the buttons and levers are, and make that adjustment, instead of having to pull off the road, put my attention on the view screen, find the "Environment" button from where it's hiding in this particular display configuration, change the temperature slider on the screen, change the fan speed on the screen, then ... well, that's minor.  When I want to change radio stations, I really miss the buttons right there on the front of the unit.  

No, I'm not a luddite.  I'm a driving purist.  I believe that when you are responsible for controlling a rolling hunk of metal that weighs at least half a ton and is moving at seventy or more miles an hour, your attention should be on the road - forward, backward, left and right.  Not down to the right for where the freaking button is this time.  

Clearly, I'm not the product of a video-game world, used to poking touch screens all the time.  I am a baby boomer.  And for all those kids who say "hey boomer" dismissively, look, punk, some of those boomers and the Greatest Generation folk put a man on the moon in your history books.  Some of the technology - like the internet, etc - wouldn't exist without us.  So get used to it.  You damned kids.  Now get off my lawn.  Just kidding, you can walk all over, where ever you want to. There's plenty of fresh dogshit to step in.