Mark's Off Road Warehouse Fire Thread (1 Viewer)

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A couple of hours later, the first spring was reset.

Shackle angle much better.

 

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I had also had to do a little sheet metal trimming years ago when I installed the extended shock towers because of the sweep of the 13” travel shocks.

Moving the axle slightly forward also remedied static angle of the shocks, something I had been looking forward to for a very long time.

Overall, I am extremely satisfied both with the job, and the fact that I have a shop full of kick-ass tools for doing this kind of stuff. Even if the work occasionally kicks my ass.

 

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Oh yeah, you can hit the like button to let me know you stopped by.

 

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My grandson did something that annoyed mommy and got banished to the playpen. Older sister exercised her prerogative and said she wanted to be in there too, even though it’s obvious she’s big enough to get in and out by herself!

 

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Passing of another era perhaps. I took off my front bumper racks this morning. I built them 15 years ago for the Canyonlands expedition that landed me on the cover of the Landcruiser calendar.

I think I last used the racks in 2016, before the warehouse fire. At this point, having not used them for six years, I feel like a poser having them on the truck. And if there's one thing I can't stand, it's posers and wannabes, with their maxxtrax sand boards, RTTs and Light Bars.
@Dusty66 said it best in summing up the FJ Cruiser/Fourrunner crowd: It looks like they drove through Pep Boys with a crap magnet on!

Back to the simpler lines of the @HawkDriver bumper.

 

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1971-The Rite Of Passage.

As I mentioned earlier in the story about Malcolm, the family handyman of my youth, I knew that from the time I was four, and watched Malcolm make a set of stairs at our house, that more than anything else, I wanted to learn to build things, make things—work with my hands—for the rest of my life. And as I sit here today in 2022, I now see that I have fulfilled the dreams of my youth.

I persevered through a lot of crappy self-starter, no-supervision woodworking projects (mostly shelves) until I was about seven. I was self-entertaining, even if the learning curve was slow. I didn’t know if anyone was paying attention, and I don’t remember particularly caring. Then when I was seven, I got a really big surprise: my aunt and uncle (father’s brother) gave me a junior set of woodworking tools!

A claw hammer, saw handle with three interchangeable blades, hand drill, small square, and a tote-sized toolbox to carry/store my new treasures in! I knew nothing of the competitive dynamics between my father and his brother. All I knew was that someone had noticed me trying to learn a skill. It wasn’t until years later that I came to understand the long heritage of craftsmanship in my family.

Summers were long, and many were the days that my parents would take me in to the jewelry store where they worked rather than leave me to my own devices at home. (I’ll save the Dennis the Menace stories for another time!) I watched the employees work, having particular interest in the tools they used, and how they used them. I had already realized that tools were essential to making things. I tried not to get in their way, but I’m sure I was rarely successful. The shop was small, and it had a lot of tools.

When I was 10, my father said he had a job for me. I thought he was joking. He melted down some silver into a small ingot, then slowly ran it through a mill, each time bringing the opposing drums closer together, until the ingot became a metal plate somewhat thinner than a 16th inch.

Then he handed me a snuff box which had an inlaid silhouette of a ballerina on it, along with a marker, and asked me to duplicate the silhouette on the metal plate. His customer wanted a pendant to match her snuff box.

It took me almost an hour to make a replica of that 1” tall ballerina, but I did. And I was pretty proud of myself. It was a very challenging job, even though I had no idea that it was a job. My dad wasn’t big on compliments, but he more or less conveyed that it was good enough.

Then he sat me down at HIS workbench, handed me a jeweler’s saw and told me to cut the silhouette out of the plate!

For those of you who are not familiar with jeweler’s saws, the blades are extremely fine, on the order of dental floss. And in 1971, they were as brittle as mechanical pencil lead, which is to say, extremely brittle. Suffice it to say, I broke the blade(s) a lot. I can’t say that I mastered the cutting technique that day. But I can say that before the day was done I, a precocious boy of ten, handed my father an exact replica of the ballerina on the snuff box.

(to be continued)

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Posted a new story in Chat:

https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/the-legend-of-cowboy-russ.1301756/

@Kofoed , this was just a few blocks from Doug Boes, off McVine.

 

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Updated an old thread today:

https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/there-is-a-special-place.117281/page-3#post-14775303

 

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Way WAY back at the beginning of this thread, I posted a pic of a box of instrument clusters that were damaged in the fire. Well, I ended up using part of one in my 45 yesterday. Shortly after I left home, the speedometer started squealing and the needle jumped from 20 to 55 mph in second gear.

I pulled over and disconnected the cable from the transfer case before it exploded. Pulled a toasty cluster off the rack, tested that the speedometer was still good, and proceeded to swap it out. Of course the small rabbit hole took its toll, and the one hour job became 4, as I decided to detail several things that were more accessible while the cluster was out.

 

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It's frankly a little amazing that the 59 year old weatherchecked paint on the dashboard still cleans up as well as it does.

 

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Our son is in town for a short visit:

 

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He had a little project he wanted to do for a floating shelf in his apartment that required creating a channel in which to embed an adhesive strip. So he was finally interested to learn how to use a router. I bought both the router and the table new in 1979.

 

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I demonstrated the technique once, he took one practice cut, and then went to town. Cut #2

Brought a tear of joy to my eyes. I have closed a lot of circles in my life that were started by my father. Today my son closed one of mine.

Please hit the like button so that I know you dropped in.

 

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I don’t often try to type with tears in my eyes, but today is one of those days: Marlin Czajkowski has passed. Marlin was many things to many people: a friend to all, a mentor to me, and most of all, a MAN amongst men.

Some random thoughts (I’m actually not capable of anything more at the moment, as I discovered when I tried to drive my truck)

Ive posted the iconic pic of Marlin riding in the passenger seat of Ruftoys with me at the first TLCA Rubithon in 1989 a few times. That is where we met. We ran the Dusy together later that year and solidified our friendship. And a couple of months after that, I can remember him grinding a power steering plate off a carcass in my backyard, before I even had my shop. IOW, we go back.

The American Hotel Cerro Gordo/Thanksgiving 1990, Surprise Canyon/ Thanksgiving 1991, Santiago/Thanksgiving’92, LosCoyotes/Thanksgiving’93. All places lost to us now, things we would reminisce about when we saw each other.

In a lifetime of choice and chance, I don’t know how many mentors most people end up having. I was fortunate to have 4. The first was my father. The second was Marv Spector. The third, Jim from Downey. And last but not least Marlin.

If you haven’t been fortunate enough to have one, in my experience the difference between a mentor and an idol/role model is the degree of interface that you have. Few ever even meet the people they idolize. Some try to emulate role models. But mentors are people of similar enough circumstance, and approachable enough to engage in dynamic conversations, where you get to not only share your approaches to different situations, but the attitudes and sometimes even principles that shape those approaches.

There’s a fair amount of compare and contrast that goes into both the dialogue, and the subsequent musings. One example. I was just telling my old friend Morgan yesterday that one of the things that I learned from my father, who ran a very successful business, was that I didn’t have the stomach to sell things on credit like he did. So in the process of narrowing down what I would do with my life, that was an important thing to know about myself.

Marv (and Kay) Spector made me dare to dream that I could do this. Jim from Downey gave me my first glimpses of what the really big rollercoaster of what I THOUGHT I wanted looked like (and made me reconsider) . But Marlin more than anyone else made me see my limitations. A lot of people respect me, respect what I have done, and what I know. But Marlin’s success was built on an equal measure of being well liked. He was an amazing people person with infectious enthusiasm as well as knowledge. And being well-liked counts for a lot in this world, and in business.

So even though I listed Marlin as the last of my four mentors, this is why he was ’not least’: he was the one who made me 'get real' with myself about how far I would likely go in my career with my personality. I’m too much of a loner to ever give as much of myself as he did, though I have certainly done my share.

I can remember walking through a Walmart supercenter in TX in 2006 with him while we were attending the Lone Star Roundup and his cellphone ringing. He took the call from a customer who needed tech advice on a transfer case assembly. I was aghast the customer even HAD his cellphone number, and purely puzzled that he would take the call while on vacation. But EVERYONE who knew Marlin would vouch: that was Marlin.

To wrap up for now, for anyone like myself who ever found themselves in a situation where you asked WWMD, that is proof right there that Marlin was a MAN amongst men. Thoughts and prayers to the family and the Toyota world that knew, respected, liked and loved him.

Please hit the like button to let me know that you stopped by.

 

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Ever since I drove my Landcruiser to Texas in 2005, I’ve known that there are actually TWO kinds of tall tales: the ‘once upon a time’ variety and the ‘y’all ain’t gonna believe this sh-t’ type. Well, this story definitely falls under the second category.

A couple of years ago I posted a story about one of my three baby teeth that have stayed with me my whole life, and a fateful trip to the dentist. This is actually a followup to that story.

The tooth the dentist had wanted to pull in Y2K and replace with a bridge finally broke in August of ‘21, a few months after I posted the story. Compromised since childhood with a filling, the inside of the bicuspid calved like an iceberg. It left the outside, along with a very jagged exposed filling, which I did my best to file down with some very non-dental equipment, adopting a ‘let’s see what happens next’ approach.

The filling hung on, unsupported, for over a year, a testament to my old dentist’s preparation when he installed it in the early ‘90s. When it finally fell out, the remainder of the tooth still felt strangely good.

On a Friday at the beginning of February this year I was eating breakfast when I felt a pop in my mouth. I knew immediately that the rest of the tooth had finally broken loose. Still, other than the discomfort of having something loose in my mouth, there was no pain, just some sensitivity from the root being tugged on. I told myself that I was extremely lucky, considering all the horror stories I’d heard from friends and family. I texted a friend who is missing several teeth to tell them that I would be ‘joining the club’ shortly.

I made an appointment to see a dentist the following Monday for a consultation to explore my options, figuring I’d already beaten the odds by getting 23 more years out of that tooth. Thinking about it A LOT over the weekend, I started having very faint memories of what it felt like losing all my other baby teeth fifty years ago. And I began to think that for as very, very vague as my memory was, that it was somehow still familiar with what was happening now.

So Monday morning came. I dutifully drove myself down to the dentist’s office, sat down in the waiting area, started filling out all the forms. Then I stopped. The form was SO invasive, it made me stop. I was only there for a consultation and they wanted my SSN among other things. I told the hygienist that I had changed my mind, and I walked back out.

Three weeks later, the tooth fell out of its own accord…EXPOSING A BRAND NEW TOOTH!!!

What makes this EVEN MORE INCREDIBLE is that the tooth wasn’t there 23 years ago, or the old dentist wouldn’t have proposed a bridge in the first place. And the following dentist never mentioned anything unusual either. So the odds are, incredible as it seems, that I literally started growing a replacement tooth sometime after turning 40.

I live a charmed life.

As is customary, please hit the like button to let me know that you stopped by.

 

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Another month. Lots going on. I’m still hot-and-heavy remodeling at the house, getting ready to host another party. This most excellent occasion marks 40 years of marriage! Neither of us can fathom where all the time went. Then again, we can barely remember the relative children we were then.

In the midst of all the preparations, we also had to carve out time to go camping with our desert friends. We just returned from the high-desert semi-ghost town of Darwin where, for 48 hours, the town’s population tripled!

A friend snapped a not-so-candid picture of me in front of the Darwin Station, reprising a pic taken there in 2015.

 

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In the post-pandemic world, the absence of many of my old friends from the event underscored for me how another corner had been turned, and that it was high time for me to think some more about moving on with things.

After a lot of soul searching, I decided to put the Karma Cruiser up for sale.

For Sale - SoCal: 1969 FJ40 The Karma Cruiser

Selling vehicles is not my forte, so excuse my presentation. After 13 very enjoyable years of adventure with this great sleeper rig, it’s time for me to start downsizing my stable, and this truck is the first to go. I have a writeup in the 40 section about how I built this rig up during the ‘90s...

forum.ih8mud.com

The backstory on this great rig can be found here:

Ruftoys #4- my 'new' 69 FJ40

I've been going along for the last year and a half now [since I sold my 84 FJ60] thinking that if I were to add another LC to the stable, it would be another FJ60 to replace the one I was really starting to like when I was offered a good price to sell it. I really, REALLY, did not plan on buying...

forum.ih8mud.com

Though this thread remains locked, the other two are not. Friends are welcome to comment there. You are still welcome to hit the like button here to let me know you stopped by.

 

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Another month. Our anniversary party was a huge success. Several of our friends commented that it was magical. Couldn’t ask for more than that. Three days of music and laughter, capped in part by two people who met again for the first time in 25 years.