It’s not like I have a great deal of spare time lately as it is but in between work, trying to move a blog, fighting with brain dead people on the internet who are sending me missives of death and a few other things, life goes on and shit needs to be taken care of domestically.
Since my Wife’s Mother passed away a couple of months ago, she has been driving back and forth to her Dad’s place and taking care of him because he has Altzheimers.
It’s a 35 mile one way trip to get there and she has to get through the North East side of Portland and cut through half of Gresham to get there.
As we are all quite well aware of lately, the days are getting shorter and it is getting dark earlier.
Something that has bugged me for a couple of years now has been the sorry state of the headlights on her little Hoopty.
Actually it’s been more like five years.
You know, those newfangled plastic headlight assemblies that get sand blasted over time and get all fogged up looking.
I did that whole polish the scratches bullshit to them a long time ago and that is pretty much a joke.
Take my advice and don’t waste your time with that.
A week ago when I noticed that it was indeed starting to get dark early and I happened to be out in front of the garage I happened to look over and spot those nasty fucking headlights.
Right then and there I came in the house, got on Ebay and ordered a new set of headlamp assemblies for that POS.
Something like a hundred bucks for both of the damn things and the shipping was free.
Dirt fucking cheap for something like that.
Made in Taiwan even, of course.
The Wifely Unit complained and griped about it saying it was a waste of money and that she didn’t need them because she doesn’t drive at night much.
I love her dearly but sometimes I just have to ignore her, take the abuse and do shit anyway because I know it’s for her own damned good.
They got here yesterday and I went at it this morning.
Umm, yeah.
She decided to go to her sisters to have a yak session and watch a movie tonight. She left just as it was starting to get a little dark and when she pulled out of the driveway and pointed down the street I could see a HUGE difference just standing on the porch.
She will see the difference herself when she comes home but she is as stubborn as a Missouri Mule and I would bet she won’t admit that it made a huge difference.
That’s fine because I know and now I feel a whole lot better about her safety and being able to see out of that damn thing.
POS anyway.
She did say that they looked pretty. I’ll take that and put it in the win column.
While I was thrashing and cursing on her car, there is this guy that lives around the corner and down the street that comes by walking his Pit Bull once in a while and he stopped to chat.
Nice guy, about my age.
We have chatted a few times over the last year and the last couple times he was asking my advice about this gear box thing he can’t get apart that is for the out drive on some fucking boat he has that was built in 1962.
He says it’s got some seal leaking on it but he’s no mechanic and he can’t figure out how to get it apart.
Not being able to see what it is he keeps talking about, I told him to take it to any Heavy Truck repair shop and they will damn sure be able to get it apart.
Apparently that never happened.
I’d show you my shocked face but I don’t want to scar anyone permanently.
So he kinda asks me if I am going to be around later because he sees that I’m busy.
I said look, I’m here now, can you go get this thing and bring it over here?
I’ll take a look at it anyway.
OMG.
The guy almost ripped the poor dog’s head off getting turned around and hauling ass back home.
I went back to what I was doing and a few minutes later a car pulls up.
Out he comes, gets in the trunk and brings me this thing.
I’m like WTF is this?
The damn thing is almost exactly like a rear end pumpkin.
A drop out third member kinda thing with a Planetary gear set in it.
It took me a few minutes of studying it and then it took me fifteen minutes to dig out a gear puller, the right socket, do a Fonzi on the fucking air compressor that didn’t want to come on and drag out an air hose.
I wound up pushing all the shaft and bearing out of the thing and now he is going to have to take it somewhere and have the flange and bearing pressed out to get to the seal.
I told him to replace the bearings while he has this thing apart too. One of the big ones was a bit crunchy.
That one.
My little home made press isn’t near big enough for that job. I wouldn’t even be able to get it set up.
Happy?
The guy was beside himself that I got that thing apart.
Tried giving me money and shit.
I told him that it took me longer to dig out the tools than it did to get the thing apart and you are going to have to pay someone to finish this job now.
Oh he was excited though. I’m thinking this has been sitting around waiting to get done for a long time.
He kept wanting to pay me and I ain’t taking no damn money for it.
I told him that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
People helping other people , especially neighbors and shit.
I am definitely getting the Squeaky Liberal vibe from the guy but I ain’t talking politics with him.
Not everything is about politics, race, religion and that kind of shit. Sometimes it just about people that need a little help with something.
I have no problem helping someone out and he’s a nice guy.
I was glad to help him out, it didn’t take long and he appreciated the hell out of it.
Win Win in my book.
It ain’t everybody that has the kinds of tools and experience that I do.
The Snap On Puller I dug out has been sitting in my tool box for years.
It’s one of those things that you don’t need very often but you are damn glad you have when you do need one.
So yeah, Haters that actually help other people, whoda thunk it right?
I can even remember a time I helped a straight up Muslim once when he walked into the shop and needed a Pitman Arm taken off a steering gear box.
Head rag, broken English and all.
I didn’t charge him anything either.
Dude must have said Allah Bless You thirty times before I could get him back out the door.
The way I see it is that if you are OK to me, I’m OK to you. I don’t give a fuck what color you are.
I especially used to like helping the Mexicans down in San Jose.
It was Comedy Gold trying to communicate. God that shit was funny.
Fucking pointing and arm waving, gesticulating and mimicking strange noises and shit, me absolutely butchering the Spanish, them trying to find the words in English, it was almost a game sometimes to see who could get the other one to understand what the fuck we were trying to say first.
I gotta say, there weren’t very many times we had to go find someone who could translate though.
So yeah, what comes around goes around, right?
I’m still having issues with this new blog set up.
It kept wanting to load pictures sideways and I spent two fucking hours messing around to get this post ready to go.
I had to go through a bunch of old help forum posts and try a bunch of shit before I found one saying that unsupported browsers were causing the majority of the problems.
I had to actually use the (GASP) Microsoft Edge browser to finally get them to post straight and even then I can’t just pull them straight out of the download file like I used to be able to do.
I have to download the image, sit and watch the Spinning Wheel Of Death for a few seconds, delete the damn picture, go back in and select ‘Image” then go into the Media Library and select it from there to get it to load.
Pain in the fucking ass.
There is going to be a very steep learning curve to using this new set up I see but I am a stubborn sonofabitch and I WILL figure this thing out eventually.
That is what true men do. Do shit and don’t take stuff. Pass the goodness on.
Yaknow, everything the leftist communists say they want but don’t do, because commie-socialists are all air and no action.
Real men, on the other hand, don’t care what the other dude or dudette looks like, as long as the job gets done. Code of the West and all that.
Neighbors help neighbors, because that’s what neighbors do. It’s the reason why Western Civilization is still the gold standard of, well, civilization.
As to the wife’s car, yep, amazing the difference between fogged plastic and clear. Some places you can also get a brighter light to replace the bulb, if the bulbs are replaceable that is. You know she’ll love you for it.
life a bit weird at times. back a few years ago I rented a 3 bay garage around
the block from my house. had the old english sports car bug bad.
I had a few of them over the years but i really liked my old mgbgt 69
fun car, drop a bigger engine in it and had a blast. got divorced sold it
anyway, kids used to bring their bikes to me to fix and shit. hell, kids I never
saw before where showing up with broken bikes. got so bad I got a buddy of
mine who ran a scrap yard to be on the look out for bike parts.
blew out my back bad and I had to stop everything. thing is as I getting
the garage cleaned out for the owner and moving my stuff. I got a lot of help from teen age boys I didn’t know. seems like a few years of fixing bikes helped
these kids out and they didn’t forget the old guy who did it.
one of them was a bit older, like 20 I think. told him to take my place as there where a lot of kids around without dads. gave him all the parts. tubes, tires and
brake parts and chains I had and set him up with some tools he didn’t have.
last I heard, he was still doing it on weekends like. people are not all bad.
just have to find the good ones. assholes make themselves known to you !
Good on ya Dave.
need a new key board !!!
I went in and fixed it for ya Dave, I see what you were trying to say.
You just reminded me of an old guy my Grandfather knew who lived a long ways out of town but close to the port. I can still see him, name was Red.
Big guy, hands on him were huge, always wore the old blue coveralls.
He had a big shed that was overflowing with bike parts and any time one of ours needed something, Grandpa would load us up and head over to Red’s place. Ol’ Red wouldn’t hardly charge Grandpa nothing. I have no idea how they knew each other to this day.
I have to think God has a special place in Heaven for guys like you and him.
thank you ! I fucked up and didn’t check it until after I posted
it. growing up, mom was always about being fair with
others until showed otherwise scot-irish, do not get her pissed at ya ! anyway, that where I learned it from.
had that garage for close to ten years before I left.
fixed a lot of bikes and a few other things for the people
living around the place. never had anything stolen from
the place either. got drunk one time and left a few tools out
still there the next day after work. more than one person
told me they going to miss me. guess I did okay.
never got the car done though, sold it as parts.
Did the same on my wife’s car a couple years ago. Bought them on ebay and they were made in Taiwan also. Don’t buy the CCP crap, but Taiwan makes good stuff. Like you and Dave, I don’t do the things for wife and neighbors just to show them I can; I do it to show myself that I still can. My only “payment” is seeing the look of sincere gratitude on their faces. You’ve replaced a small bit of agony in their lives with happiness in that brief moment. Yeah, the rest of the world still sucks, but there seems to be a moment of refuge in that simple bike repair, or the replacement of those headlight assemblies. And on top of knowing that us old farts still have a little use left in us, it makes us feel good knowing we made that moment of joy in that other person’s life. That’s the way it should be.
God Bless you Phil. I thought that for a while this migration thing was gonna be an ass kicker, but you’ve seemed to have gotten the better of it! I was worried that one of my favorite blogs was going tits up, but not to worry. Regarding you replacement lamps on the wife’s car, I have just replaced a light on an escape which was for me just about more than I wanted, but old age and perseverance won out. thankx for going through the b.s. to keep your blog alive, for those asshole trolls BFYTW!!! Still don’t get the notifications on the phone though. Probably because I’m just a dumb okie. Peace for you and yours.
Hey Phil,
Where did you buy those new headlamp assemblies? My (much better than me) better half could benefit from such a swap. I have the buffing compound for plastic but given her ride is a 2002 … it may be a losing battle. She leaves very early for work (winter darkness) so I KNOW she’ll benefit.
I got on EBay and typed in the year and model and then Headlight Assemblies.
There were quite a few to choose from so I picked the cheapest ones I could find that had free shipping.
The only thing I saw that was cheezy was the rubber water strip across the top the hood presses on liked to tear at the top corner where it meets the fender.
I fixed that and they bolted right in.
She didn’t mention anything about them being pointed wrong when she got home last night either. One of the other reasons I was replacing the old ones was because it was pointing up in the air and wouldn’t adjust back down.
Forgot to mention .. I sent you something to an old “protonmail” account … didn’t get a bounce-back. Please be on the lookout for an inbound … it’s coming from the email address associate to this comment
I buy 95% of my parts from Rockauto.com. Most of the time can’t find them any cheaper, plus the warranty and easy returns. Check out the Depo or TYC headlight units, a lot junk on ebay. Love your blog too!
Good on you. I just finished up a roller for an old forklift. He offered to pay, and I said, whatcha got to trade. The look on his face!!!! He knew were were cousins at that point….
I need to remember that.
Good story. Thank you for sharing. You are a man to be emulated and respected. I need to and will try harder. Thanks again
Hey Bustedknuckles,
Have your neighbor go here: https://www.transmissionmarineinc.com/catalog.php#
Then left column – “Catalog Parts”, then – “Paragon Power”, then – “P series reduction assembly “early style””. The exploded view looks to be the animal of which you assisted him with, perhaps they’ll be able to lend some assistance. Also, Paragon now (bought by Great Lakes power) here:
Great Lakes Power
7455 Tyler Blvd.,
Mentor, OH 44060
P: 800-325-6880 24/7
P: 440-951-5111
F: 440-953-1052
E: sales@glpower.com
TNfltsafetyguy
Excellent, thank you very much for that info.
I will try and remember that the next time I see him.
He doesn’t come this way all the time, mostly when the weather is nice.
Black live matter.
I was pissed that I couldn’t replace a cheezy plastic lens on my wife’s Honda Civic. It’s an “assembly” and only replaceable as a unit. Had a shop do it as I value my time pretty highly these days, and it was near $300; it would have taken me a whole weekend at least. Book rate had an hour of shop time–I looked ahead of time and couldn’t even see the fasteners for the damned things. Made a world of difference though. We do as little driving at night as we can get away with, but she’d been using her brights to get around town the lenses were so fogged. It’s a lot of open range country around here, and the ranchers favor Black Angus beef–those coal black bastards are invisible at night, and dumber than deer.
I will have to remember that line “whatcha got to trade?” Barter is in our futures in a BIG way once our greenbacks are worth less than toilet paper.
You have my deepest sympathies Phil about futzing with software. I fought with computers for a living, and have almost zero appetite for learning anything new on them.
Black Lives Matter.
They clearly don’t to black people. In any given year black people, who are just 13 percent of the population of the USA, commit at least 54 percent of all murders. Invariably in 94 percent of those murders the victim is also black.
The number one cause of death for black males aged 15 to 35 is gun shot wound.
So if black lives actually matter to you then kindly implore them to stop murdering each other at nearly 4 times the rate of the rest of the population.
Certainly law abiding taxpayers from all sections of the population would be grateful for the reduction in the costs of police, judicial and incarceration of such offenders.
We created the conditions which hold Black people down. We created institutional oppression. We profited off of their slave labor. Women of color have to deal with the oppression of not just racism but sexism too. Women of color are the backbone of this country, yet all you people do is bully people like Militza. She already has to deal with both of the fathers of her children not contributing to her household, and society devaluing her personhood very day, and now she has to deal with reports from CPS and nonsense which happened at work two years ago. I can lie my way out of situations but she doesn’t know how to deal with police due to her lack of education and socio-economic status. It’s unfair. I hope you all go to jail. I will back up whatever she says because the police will take it more seriously if it’s coming from a white man. Then you’ll know what it’s like to have the system used against you.
Or you could just shut your cockholster…
Maybe if she hadn’t spread for the boys, she wouldn’t have to worry about chasing child support. If only there were some kind of warnings out there, that this kind of thing was going on!
Good on ya as usual Phil. We are patient so save a few cuss words for later you may need them to finish this thing.
How is this even partially germane to the post?
And for your infotainment ALL lives matter. Not one group or the other.
Go piss in your own toilet
You replied to the wrong person, Paul.
No steak for you today.
Paragon, one of the trusted names back in the day of Marine reduction gears. Many many boats, especially in the recreational class, used them. Were well built but HEAVY. Both left & right turning versions so you could use standard automotive turning engines without having to install different cams etc, thereby making left and right turning engines, one for port, the other for starboard. Worked on many back when I was a younger lad.
Tidbit of Marine lore: How did the word starboard, meaning the right side of the boat/ship, come about.
It’s in reference to the side, typically the right (looking forward) the “steering board” was attached to. Which is still why many many captains prefer to land “Port Side To”, so you wouldn’t mash up the steering board. And with the advent of self propulsion and typically left turning single screw boats, it’s easier to back off the pier when you are port to. being that in reverse, the screw turns right thereby walking the boat away from the pier in reverse. If it still works, leave it the hell alone. So know you know.
That’s why we Respect ya, Phil.
BLM.
Big
Labia
Munchies
?
Misogyny. So classy.🥰
BoweL Moves matter?
Boiler Location Map.
Bean Lunch Menu
Bite Lotion Meter
And, no. According to black people, black people don’t matter, else black people would stop killing, well, black people.
Simple answer. Follow God, get off the drugs, stay married, take responsibility for one’s faults and just live. Until the Black culture does this, black people will continue to kill black people, and asians and whites in a disproportionate number and percentage of other people doing unto blacks.
Want to make a real change? Clean your own house first before demanding the rest of us do anything to ours.
It’s OUR fault Blacks want to kill us. What don’t you understand about the HISTORY OF SLAVERY you stupid white man?
What about the Irish you simp. Oh I forgot, they were called “Indentured Servants” just another fucking political correct term of it’s day to mean a fucking white slave. You were slaves at one time ya fucking wop, slaves to “Musselman” (muslims) then to higher ranking Romans and Italian noblemen and were slaves to Germanic tribes. History? you ain’t a fucking student of it, only a student of which glory hole you can secure and you don’t give a fuck which species or whore you can procure.
Have had the occasion to help someone once in a while. Get that initial confused look when I refuse any money payment. Boiling things down to just money seems like a poor trade-off for self-respect and other (to me, higher) human values.
Hopefully these events can get some of the confused ones to looking a little deeper into life.
The comrades can’t fix anything and won’t last very long when mommygov and her apparatchiks bolt to their hide outs or the CCP!
As for the rump ranger Walt Disney blog disrupters, they are lonely pathetic anuses with not much to do when the weed runs out and the video game is all out of levels.
you may piss and moan about stopping what ya are doing to fix a kid’s bike, but
the smile you get afterwards is worth it and by the way, most of them kids
didn’t have dad’s around. lots of welfare moms around back there in philly.
like my parents taught me, didn’t matter what color you was ,a kid is still a kid.
a few moms tried to pay me a few times, I always said no, just keep a eye on my
place and stuff. they did too. never had anything stolen from me there.
you might not be able to change the world, but you can make a difference in
somebody life.
And the nice thing is, if you let them watch and help, they’ll begin to learn skills that aren’t taught anymore. Advanced tool use, just knowing what tool does what, is sadly missing in this fallen world.
You did great work, Dave, and even better, you passed the torch and the mantle of civilization on to someone younger.
Had a guy living on the other side of the fence when growing up. Between him and my dad, there wasn’t a darned thing mechanical or toolish that I couldn’t find out. Never had the opportunity to do machine shop things, but if so, I’m sure Dad and Col. Leverette would have been able to teach me.
you’re a good man, Phil
Yes. Yes he is. He keeps going and going, doing his thing, in a world that seemingly hates everything he is and yet he just keeps going.
The world needs more Phils and Daves.
You rock, Phil.