Okay, we all have had a less-than-perfect day from time to time...but have Ya ever had a day where you had all those good intentions, but the whole thing just went to heck in a hand basket anyway, and it involved yer old trucks? Well, me and Mrs. Bounty Hunter have had a lot of 'em...the story that follows is one of many...
Well, after a days’ work at our “regular” job, there was still plenty of daylight left…so why not pack up and go get some more firewood? We heat our house with wood, so we have to cut lots of wood in the forest to feed the old “Fisher” Papa Bear woodstove. So we loaded up the big wood trailer and hitched it to “Old Grumpy” our ’77 1-ton Chevy 4 x 4 utility truck, and the splitter to Mrs. Bounty Hunter’s ’79 Chevy 4 x 4 shortbed, “Cinnamon Girl”.
Up we went to the Los Padres Forest, with 4 saws bouncing around in the trailer: A Stihl ms220T, for small limbs, a ms260 Pro for small to medium wood, a ms044 for medium to large, and a ms660MAG for large to “darn that’s really BIG!”
The fire roads through the forest are rough and sometimes steep, but decent. Near the top of the pass we see a group of downed trees that looked good…except I had already passed them with the lead truck, and on a fairly steep downhill grade. “I’ll just back up” I said (First mistake…unless you count going out that afternoon, in general).
I was watching the trailer back up, and didn’t realize how close the truck itself was to the embankment…a vertical ledge of dirt and rock about 2 feet high. I steered the trailer away from the embankment, and the right rear tire of the truck went right into the ledge (mistake number two).
I was greeted by a loud Whoosh and HISSING…A tire losing air FAST! and plenty of shouting by Mrs. Bounty Hunter.
Flat tire…Ah nuts…and this beast wears 36” x 15.5” x 16.5” tires…no room for a spare with the utility body (mistake number three).
But your Bounty Hunter has a backup plan, right? I have tire tools and a tube, plus an on-board compressor…”we will fix this right away!” I say, as I dig out the recycled ammo boxes that store the tools and tube. Guess what…the tube is gone…it’s not in the ammo box labeled “tube” (mistake number four).
“Remember the trip to the Kern river? Didn’t the Kimberly take a tube?” Oh great…now we’re in a fix. “Let’s get the trucks down somewhere level, and see what we can do” I say, while attempting to seem totally confident (while thinking: we’re screwed…)
I look at the tire…the valve stems broken off! “We Have spares!” I happily exclaim, and break out the tools. I exchange the stem, but the big tire is now totally pulled away from the bead of the rim, and needs to be inflated. I try all the tricks…ratcheting tie-downs around the tire, both of us pulling and pushing, but that heavy 10-ply just won’t mount with the wimpy compressor (mistakes five, six and seven).
“Okay…this isn’t working. We gotta take the tire down to the Flying J truck stop…the mechanics there can mount it”
So, we load up the tire and wheel in Cinnamon Girl…but I don’t want to leave the saws, the trailer, and certainly not the splitter. There’s no one up on these mountains, but who knows? Solution? We loaded the splitter in the trailer with the saws and the rest of the gear, and hitched it up to Cinnamon Girl. Leaving Old Grumpy looking pretty sad…we took off down the mountain.
An hour later, at the Flying J, the mechanic said “Having a bad day? Well it’s about to get worse”.
“There’s a big cut in the sidewall of the tire…it can’t be patched” (mistake number eight, sort of. This actually fits better in the “We’re screwed” part of mistake number four).
Now its 8:00 at night…there’s nothing open…no where to get a replacement tire, especially one that size. “How are we going to get that stupid truck off the mountain?” I snarl, I thought for sure there was a spare tire and wheel back at the ranch… (Mistake number nine).
Plus, no one we know has a 1-ton we could swap a wheel, even temporarily, to get the truck back.
Then, like the proverbial light bulb, an idea comes to me…”I know where there’s a wrecked truck off the road…been there for months…I think it’s a one-ton!”
Off we speed, and sure enough, one tire on the wreck is seemingly okay…at least it had some air, which was better than what we had. I get it off, and speed back up the mountain.
The bottle jack is too short to jack up the truck (ten mistakes!!?
).
We still had the saws, so I fire up the 200T and cut an 8” round about a foot long to act as a jackstand to support the truck while the jack is reset.
Then realize we can’t put the “loaner” spare in the back axel…it’s got a Detroit Locker differential and different size tires would be a PROBLEM (mistake number…Shoot! Darn! I'm not counting these mistakes no more!)
So it’s like “Musical Chairs” switching wheels around to wind up with the spare in the front.
Air it up, and off we go. Down the mountain, it’s now almost midnight.
The next day, it was INSULT to INJURY…our son walks by the trucks, sees the single 8” round lying there, where I tossed it in after finishing with it as a jackstand, and says “You guys went out for wood and that’s all you got?”
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