Sunday, January 31, 2016

Back on Track's

Well it's been a strange few weeks
 and thanks are in order.

After many years of hard use and little to no maintenance 
I had to do some repair work on our track set-up.
A call to David at
  "American Track Truck"
got the project started,I have to say he's great to work with.
Not only is the service and shipping well above average
 but his pricing made the repair very reasonable.
I had everything I needed in just a few days!
Thank you for being such a great company to deal with!

Thank you
"Tire and Auto Lodge"
The four turns of the front torsion bar was perfect,
that raised the 1999 Rodeo a strong 1inch

Big thanks to
 Dean Berneking,
The use of the heated shop with a swinging boom chain hoist,
 and his help,  made the job an easy one.
  
Installation is much nicer in a warm shop

Last but not least,
 "Cook County Towing"
 for their great service. They picked up the truck at
 Dean's and delivered  it within 3 miles of our house.

Now to the next problem,
With the shoulder surgery late in the fall I didn't get a chance to stage my winter equipment properly.
This became painfully obvious when I needed to get my drag out to groom the road.  
Not only was the drag behind a pile of snow, it was behind a loaded two place snowmobile trailer  that was behind the snow pile.




Here is a photo of what piss poor planning (PPP) looks like:


The thing sticking out behind the trailer is the tongue for the drag.

By this time the snow pile is rock hard, 
I came up with a elegant solution,
ram the crap out of it with the back of my pick-up until it was soft enough to shovel.

Ramming it got me to this point.


After shoveling to find the tongue I hooked on to it with a strap and 
pulled the tongue right out from underneath the trailer. 


Thank god Pat was there to give me that look of
  "What the hell were you thinking"

So now I have a heavy box of snowmobiles that I can no longer move
and the snowmobiles only unload out of the back. 
Someone I know described this as
"screwed"
That was enough damage for one day, so we decided to try again the next day.

Over night I came up with a plan,
 not a great one, but the only one I could think of.
We started by cleaning off the top of the trailer so we could open the top,
 I then ran two straps,
 one under and the other through the trailer connecting them together in the back
then closed the trailer. 


This finely worked and the trailer was free, 
I now had a opening to retrieve my drag,




Running straps to the drag
 we were able to pull it onto the driveway.




after the pull



ready to pull

That's two day of my life I'll never get back.




Here is a short video of the drag in action.


 

My cat Itchy had a visitor last week, 
normally it's the white menace (snowshoe rabbit)
but this week it's a brown menace (pine marten?)


More later, thanks for reading