It eliminates the difficulty of backing up your trailer….

https://nonoriginalrants.blogspot.com

One way or another they deserve their fate.

Small molded rubber hoses have been around a long, long time but they pretty much exploded on the automotive scene in the early 90’s.

Heater hoses, bypass hoses, emission hoses especially, you will find them all over an engine anymore.

For a long time they were a Dealer Only item and really expensive. Eventually regular auto parts stores began stocking them but with so many different car makes and so many different applications, nobody could possibly stock them all and often they had to be special ordered.

Well I just came across this Youtube video of a guy showing how you can custom make virtually any kind you want with these spring kits you can buy, a heat gun, a clean rag and a screw type hose clamp.

It’s pretty obvious that English isn’t his first language but it is quite easy to understand what he is saying.

Me and 5 other guys had to go in yesterday and install a huge gearbox that has been under emergency repairs at a machine shop for 3 weeks.

They had been working ungodly hours in shifts trying to get it fixed.

Fabricating shafts with gears, sending them out to get heat treated, hand grinding some gears for proper mesh, getting bearings, setting clearances etc.

They kept having problems setting the end play on the shafts until they discovered one whole side cover was warped so they had to take it back apart and machine it flat.

Meanwhile the Big Wigs at our company were having kittens of course.

This machine is their money maker.

It flattens and cuts those huge steel rolls.

This particular gearbox is for the Large Leveler, a machine with two sets of basically hydraulically operated roll pins that smash the rolls flat and to whatever thickness they need.

That thing weighs 18,000 pounds empty and it holds 350 gallons of 85/140 gear oil.

Bottom left you will see 9 black colored Torque Limiters, the tenth one isn’t on yet. They are basically clutch packs.

When it’s installed in place, there are heavy truck drivelines bolted to them that run across and bolt to the rollers on the Large Leveler.

240 bolts to hold all those drivelines in alone.

There was the three of us from our Maintenance crew, a guy we talked into coming in who runs the crane on that line who lifted everything and swung it into place for us and two other Millwrights from another outfit who work on these things all the time.

I put in13 hours, another guy was there before me and wound up working 15 and nobody worked less than twelve.

I was wiped out and hurting like a sonofabitch when I got home.

Pain pills wouldn’t even touch it and then I didn’t sleep for shit because I had leg cramps all night waking me up from being on my feet all day.

My damn legs are still aching right now.

So that’s why I didn’t post anything yesterday and I’m here to tell ya,

I ain’t doing a damn thing today except sit here on my ass in the recliner with the heat and vibrate functions going full blast all day.

There is going to be at least one full blown nap coming my way too.

2025 Maserati Gran Cabrio Folgore

EV batteries should last 20 years according to latest study. https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1339-april-22-2024-plug-electric-vehicle-battery-replacements-due

Liebherr Electric Excavator

GM’s V2H could power homes for 6 Days.

3D Printed Screw bike

Volvo has delivered 1 million all-electric vehicles globally through March 2024

In January, 47 recipients received $623M to build EV charging stations. Tesla was not included but plans to build a charging corridor for Semi-trucks from Calif.to Texas.(TESSERACT) Connecting Austin to Fremont. ALL Taxpayer funded monies…

Battista Reversario

Voltpost lamppost charger

2024 Mustang Mach-E has more range, quicker acceleration, and faster charging.(2 min. Video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClaT2MnkYd4

Toyota’s Hydrogen cars face a crumbling infrastructure. Farewell “Mirai” ?https://insideevs.com/news/708375/toyota-mirai-hydrogen-stations-close

Honda Saloon Concept

In 2023, battery-electric transit buses made up 100% of purchases in Luxembourg, Ireland and Denmark, and 98% in the Netherlands.

Tesla is opening one new charging stall every hour (approx). Supercharger EV access will be going next to Polestar, Volvo and General Motors (GM).

Driverless Electric Sweeper

SpaceX has launched 31 times in the 1st quarter of 2024, including Starship. Group 8 Satellites, now 12 of the 5,744, connect directly to cellphones.275th successful landing of a Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship. To Better spy on you? What say you Igor?

Linnae drives a 70 tonne(metric) electric logging truck. Her model is from 2022. (2 min video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LdqkjYDBAw The Swedish logging company’s 2024 model will have a self loading crane. Elmo, put away your stinky diesel logging trucks.

Robotaxi

Researchers found that between 2018 and 2022, CO2 emissions in the Bay area dropped 1.8% each year, mostly thanks to EV’s. https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/04/04/evs-are-lowering-bay-area-s-carbon-footprint

Nissan’s next-generation electric cars will cost 30% less to manufacture than the Leaf or the Ariya. Many other EV makers see a similar price cut.

2024 Toyota bZ4X

Coast to Coast electric pickup truck race. F-150, Rivian, Silverado, and Cybertruck. Part 3-video(4 hours) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1Jii4xI9PU 

Tesla has produced it’s six millionth electric car.(The 5 millionth in Sept. 2023.) More than any other automaker and now at almost 2M per year. I see most of them on diesel car haulers been shuttled around…

Right On Dude, you just expressed the sentiments of millions of us.

I got home from work and the Wifely Unit made a half snotty comment about her needing to get into the little chest freezer I bought in the middle of the Scamdemic.

The sarcasm was well deserved because while I was out there re-arranging shit a couple weeks ago the top of it had turned into a Catch All for a bunch of empty boxes and some other shit,

On top of that, I had moved a bunch of boxes into the little pathway I kept open to get into the thing also so there was no way she was going to get into it.

So I go out there, move a bunch of shit, flip open the lid and OH MY FUCKING GOD.

Sure as hell, the miserable Chineseium Piece of Shit had died sometime in the not too distant past and everything in it was fucked.

I mean it smelled pretty bad but it must not have been too long ago that it croaked because it could have been much, much worse.

I have experienced that in the past, where it’s so bad that you duct tape the fucker shut, wrap several chains around it to make DAMN SURE it won’t open up and drag the whole shootin’ match out into the Toolies to open it up so it won’t kill people like a Biological Weapon.

Three inches of juice in the bottom and about three hundred Biden Bucks worth of steaks floating in it

Fuck me.

So I opened the garage door, grabbed a box of Yard Debris bags and started in emptying the fucker out.

Of course the very first bag snagged on something trying to get out with it and it trailed a bunch of that funky juice all the way from one end of the garage to the other.

So now I have 3 bags of rotten meat and some really dead Frozen Dinners sitting in the back of my truck and I have the extremely envious job of moving a shit ton of stuff out to make a pathway wide enough to roll that bitch outside some time this weekend.

I’m gonna have to call around and see if my son or a buddy can come help me get the thing into the back of my truck so I can haul it off next week. She said she was sorry she even mentioned in but I told her I was really glad she did!

It could have been so, so much worse and I don’t even want to contemplate just how much worse it could have been.

Of course we then had the obligatory conversation about how you can’t buy any fucking thing worth a damn anymore and swapped stories about the freezers and refrigerators our Parents and Grandparents had.

That meme is 100% spot on true, I bought it in 2022 and it died 2years later.

I distinctly remember the old GE chest freezer my Grandmother had sitting in the back laundry room of her old house that was there for at least forty five years that I know of and was still going strong the day she had to move out so they could tear the place down and park a new Double Wide on the lot.

We have decided that we aren’t going to replace the damn thing at this point, it was something I bought when all the lock down and supply chain bullshit was going on and you couldn’t find one for love nor money.

I caught hell from her for over a year saying we didn’t need it.

Somehow that tune got changed over time and she was using it on a regular basis but at this point I’m not going to run out and get another one.

It’s going to be enough work to get rid of this piece of shit now.

Hat Tip to Kyle Becker on Twitter for posting it and to Steve Quayle for linking it.

I work around these fuckers every day and I have personally seen two of them roll off a stack and hit the ground rolling when I was ten feet away. Thank God they went the opposite direction.

Some things, you only do once.