More truck troubles

I’m an easy does it driver. Normally I don’t drive all that fast and I come to gradual stops. That is, until a moose bolted out in front of my truck. Then I matted the brake pedal and tried to put my foot through the firewall. I missed the moose, but my brake pedal felt squishy after that, not a good sign.

I suspected two things. One, that my panic stop might had blown a brake line. (It had.) My second suspicion was that something else had to be wrong with the brakes. (There was.)

Now I’m looking at replacing a master cylinder and a vacuum pump. As if that wasn’t enough, while the truck was on the lift, the mechanic noted I’m going to need a new front axle soon. After the Independence Day holiday, I’ll go down to the garage and see what kind of an estimate they were able to work up for me.

On the plus side, I’ve a friend who may have a gently used axle and who’s willing to help me change it. As for the brake parts -I don’t like to mess around with used parts. It’s a safety issue.
The truck is old enough that I was debating if it was worth fixing one more time. My wife acquired a second hand Caviler from my daughter. The idea was that since it’s a gas burner, we’d only use it for short trips where it didn’t make sense to use the veggie powered diesel. On short trips, the truck doesn’t warm up enough to switch from diesel to veggie.

Now that we are using the car for every trip, I’m stuck buying gasoline, and I don’t like it. I’m used to buying 10 gallons of diesel for every 3000 miles of travel. The diesel runs just long enough to switch over to the free waste vegetable oil I normally burn. Buying gasoline on a regular basis just feels wrong.

Worse yet, until I get my truck back, I can’t haul my sailboat. Already I’ve had to postpone a major boat trip.

Now if I could only convince my wife to live on a sailboat, we wouldn’t need the truck or the car.

-Sixbears