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In the aftermath of another great hike this morning, I ended up posting another piece of my life story, including a humorous anecdote about an installment customer, in a chat thread.
Mark's Off Road Warehouse Fire Thread (1 Viewer)
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- #842
A little history about my grandfather:
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Time for another update. After several months of on again off again work on sanding plaster, it was finally time to paint the kitchen in the guest house and get the long-overdue flooring project under way. Just finished the kitchen today. A quarter of the living room is also done to ensure continuity.😉
Please let the “Mrs” know she has impeccable taste…😁
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Just another biased grandfather.
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It took an hour to match the contour of the hearth. Living room is done. Guests are due Friday.😉
Looks nice Mark. Who’s the pic of the “handsome devil“ on the shelf? Celebrity no doubt.
The cast iron “Dutch Oven” is an avant-garde piece of ”old timey” cookware….High Cotton..!!!
The cast iron “Dutch Oven” is an avant-garde piece of ”old timey” cookware….High Cotton..!!!
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That picture is cropped! There were actually two handsome devils in the original pic.
The other gentleman who was sitting next to me in the uncropped pic was an amazing, eccentric desert dweller known to all his friends as ‘Saw Jim.’ He was among other things a fellow musician who played the guitar, harmonica, and most notably, a musical saw!
Here’s a link to a video of him made about a decade before he passed:
Jim was also an avid astronomer who built his own planetarium at his home in the desert. He found and got to name three stars. I bawled like a baby at his memorial before uttering one of what I consider to be one of my most profound sentiments:
Freed at last from the mortal coil, Jim can now explore the universe on the other side of the telescope.😊
Feel free to hit the like button if you liked the story.
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😇 You were blessed. Extraordinary fellow.
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I’m not sure when the last time was that both our kids were home at the same time, but I’m thinking it was pre-pandemic. Well, the planets finally aligned, and we got two very full days of hang time.😊
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Enjoy your family time Mark.
And no masks required!
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Taking advantage of the temporarily unencumbered floor space in the guest house, I’ve started pulling down my magazine collection to move it down the road. First up, 20 years of Peterson 4Wheel&Off Road, spanning 1978-1998. Approximately 150 issues, with basically full years from 84-94.
Could use some help on value opinions. Thanks.
Magazines are now listed in the classifieds: https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/so...eel-off-road-magazines.1291369/#post-14565819
Could use some help on value opinions. Thanks.
Magazines are now listed in the classifieds: https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/so...eel-off-road-magazines.1291369/#post-14565819
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Under the category of older but not necessarily wiser, I took a really big chance and took a really big ride yesterday, on one of the hottest possible days of summer. Hopped on the 6am southbound train, exiting in Oceanside, with the plan to ride back to Long Beach via the inland route (Capistrano/Irvine) Even though I was never more than 15 miles from the coast, temps soared well beyond predictions into the high 90s.🥵 I drank over 4 liters of liquid on the 84 mile ‘route’ (quotes because most of it was improvised on the move) and still ended up dehydrated.
This was a once-and-done ride just because I have always wanted to see the inland counties from the seat of a bicycle. I went through Oceanside, Camp Pendleton, San Onofre, San Clemente, Capistrano Beach, San Juan Capistrano, Laguna Niguel, Mission Viejo, Lake Forest, Laguna Hills, Irvine, Santa Ana, Fountain Valley, Westminster, Stanton, Los Alamitos, Signal Hill, and finally Long Beach, where I grabbed the Metro back to downtown LA, where I left my truck.
Forecasts are not likely to improve in the near future, so I’m switching back to the ANF.😉
Apologies to all who called Monday or yesterday. I’m going to try to get calls back to everyone today.
This was a once-and-done ride just because I have always wanted to see the inland counties from the seat of a bicycle. I went through Oceanside, Camp Pendleton, San Onofre, San Clemente, Capistrano Beach, San Juan Capistrano, Laguna Niguel, Mission Viejo, Lake Forest, Laguna Hills, Irvine, Santa Ana, Fountain Valley, Westminster, Stanton, Los Alamitos, Signal Hill, and finally Long Beach, where I grabbed the Metro back to downtown LA, where I left my truck.
Forecasts are not likely to improve in the near future, so I’m switching back to the ANF.😉
Apologies to all who called Monday or yesterday. I’m going to try to get calls back to everyone today.
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Knowing the local weather these past few days, I am sweating just thinking about your bike ride, Mark!
Channeling my inner Hill Street Blues precinct captain: “Be safe out there.”
Kudos to you for continuing to challenge yourself!
Channeling my inner Hill Street Blues precinct captain: “Be safe out there.”
Kudos to you for continuing to challenge yourself!
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I guess it's time for another update. First the good news.
My wife and I had a great, extended weekend camping, visiting, and partying with our friends in the San Bernadino mountains in our van conversion, which now has two 100W solar panels, running through a charge controller to a 100AH battery.
Hopefully we will have our first 12V fridge by next week. Getting out of the LA bakeoven for 5 days was very much sanity saving. I got to hike every day😊 and had a lot of time to reflect on life, and MUD.
Which leads me to the other NEWs.
Fate being what it is, MUD has become an ever larger part of my life over the last 18 years.
Having five straight days away from home to put some perspective on the changing demographics and attitudes of this forum, I have decided to stop answering tech. This has not been an easy decision for me. But the fact of the matter is that at 61 I just never seemed to have acquired enough of a thick skin to just shrug off certain things, instead asking myself why its necessary to shrug those things off when they conflict with your principles.
The lack of any meaningful reciprocity in the form of patronage has been disappointing for a long time. Some feign neutrality that is a farce. Now it's gotten to the point that people who come to the forum asking for help, and the rest who benefit from my input can't even be bothered to hit the like button any more. i think this situation is terminal. And my sense is that is a reflection of how the outside world is changing. If I am wrong, I wouldn't know it, because MUD P&R was my only portal to the outside world, and Woody took that away. :sad:
Fortunately, I still get a lot of satisfaction out of fixing things, and I think people will continue to ask me to fix things for them. That is fun, and satisfying.
Anecdote: when one of my neighbors who I played volleyball with for almost 20 years stopped playing at one of our mutual venues , I asked him why. He said he lived by a simple rule, when something wasn't fun anymore, it was time to stop doing it. While I didn't consider him to be the 'sharpest tool in the shed', it has also been said that you can learn from fools as well as sages.
I finally realized this weekend that answering tech to a field of crickets isnt fun either. Having people attack the messenger because they don't like the message isn't fun either. And having your supposed friends just sit on the sidelines with their feigned neutrality ...nuf said.
When I joined, there were several other master-class techs to interact with, including Mark W, Poser, and Jim C. One by one they have all left tech. They didn't retire. They still have shops and fix stuff, and probably enjoy doing that (though I haven't reached out to any of them for a couple of years now to confirm that). Still, It's not hard to imagine that they all left because the 'juice wasn't worth the squeeze' any more.
My wife and I had a great, extended weekend camping, visiting, and partying with our friends in the San Bernadino mountains in our van conversion, which now has two 100W solar panels, running through a charge controller to a 100AH battery.
Hopefully we will have our first 12V fridge by next week. Getting out of the LA bakeoven for 5 days was very much sanity saving. I got to hike every day😊 and had a lot of time to reflect on life, and MUD.
Which leads me to the other NEWs.
Fate being what it is, MUD has become an ever larger part of my life over the last 18 years.
Having five straight days away from home to put some perspective on the changing demographics and attitudes of this forum, I have decided to stop answering tech. This has not been an easy decision for me. But the fact of the matter is that at 61 I just never seemed to have acquired enough of a thick skin to just shrug off certain things, instead asking myself why its necessary to shrug those things off when they conflict with your principles.
The lack of any meaningful reciprocity in the form of patronage has been disappointing for a long time. Some feign neutrality that is a farce. Now it's gotten to the point that people who come to the forum asking for help, and the rest who benefit from my input can't even be bothered to hit the like button any more. i think this situation is terminal. And my sense is that is a reflection of how the outside world is changing. If I am wrong, I wouldn't know it, because MUD P&R was my only portal to the outside world, and Woody took that away. :sad:
Fortunately, I still get a lot of satisfaction out of fixing things, and I think people will continue to ask me to fix things for them. That is fun, and satisfying.
Anecdote: when one of my neighbors who I played volleyball with for almost 20 years stopped playing at one of our mutual venues , I asked him why. He said he lived by a simple rule, when something wasn't fun anymore, it was time to stop doing it. While I didn't consider him to be the 'sharpest tool in the shed', it has also been said that you can learn from fools as well as sages.
I finally realized this weekend that answering tech to a field of crickets isnt fun either. Having people attack the messenger because they don't like the message isn't fun either. And having your supposed friends just sit on the sidelines with their feigned neutrality
...nuf said.When I joined, there were several other master-class techs to interact with, including Mark W, Poser, and Jim C. One by one they have all left tech. They didn't retire. They still have shops and fix stuff, and probably enjoy doing that (though I haven't reached out to any of them for a couple of years now to confirm that). Still, It's not hard to imagine that they all left because the 'juice wasn't worth the squeeze' any more.
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Another month, lots of adventure.
I mentioned in tech that I spent a couple of weeks going through my lwb45 to make sure it was ready to take me out and back from Death Valley. With less than a week to go, I discovered one of my front spring hangers was cracked. The other one had cracked a couple of years earlier, and I welded it up, thinking ‘I’ll get a round tuit’ and upgrade to the RuffStuff hangers like I put on Ruftoys. Bombproof stuff there. Well, I couldn’t find the hangers I thought I’d bought, so I just welded up the second hanger and off I went (of course I found them the day after I ordered two more pairs!)😛
And then the day before I left, my engine started cutting out. I had done a basic tuneup and reset the carb idle mixture, and it seemed ok at first. But then it shut off on the freeway, which had me more concerned. Determined to go anyways (I always keep a rebuild kit onboard) I reached out to @John McVicker fora potential backup in case I miscalculated. He was very obliging, and with a couple of borrowed tools from a friend in Ridgecrest (that I hadnt thought of before I left) I was pretty confident that I could get myself out of whatever I got myself into..
Had a great week in Death Valley, hiking, soaking, and playing music with my friends. And when I finally did take another look under the hood, I found the mixture setting was WAY off. Apparently when I had previously set it, I hadn’t paid attention to how far off it was, or I would have realized I had adjusted it for a partially blocked circuit, and it was now too lean once the bone-jarring ride into the valley knocked the dirt out of the circuit! D’oh. Just goes to show you, it can happen to the best of us.😉
Well as fate would have it, I was supposed to start work on @daveb Landcruiser yesterday. Dave is only the 4th vehicle I’ve agreed to work on since my mom died 21/2 years ago. And Dave got a last-minute lucrative offer to work instead. So I dove in to my suspension for the long overdue hanger upgrade/relocation. Relocation you ask?
Why yes. Like most 40 owners with off-the-shelf lift kits, the springs never seem to be designed long enough to compensate for the increased arch, resulting in poor shackle angles. I have modified a number of truck over the last 13 years to deal with this, including both my 40s.
So out came a litany of measuring devices and scribes, chisels, punches and finally grinders. It didn’t take but 10 minutes to take a chunk of skin off one of my knuckles. 😱Wrap it and keep going. Since I don’t consider myself proficient enough to call myself a welder, I was pleasantly surprised to discover in trying to separate the old hangers from the frame, my ground out welds were still tenaciously holding on to the hangers.
I mentioned in tech that I spent a couple of weeks going through my lwb45 to make sure it was ready to take me out and back from Death Valley. With less than a week to go, I discovered one of my front spring hangers was cracked. The other one had cracked a couple of years earlier, and I welded it up, thinking ‘I’ll get a round tuit’ and upgrade to the RuffStuff hangers like I put on Ruftoys. Bombproof stuff there. Well, I couldn’t find the hangers I thought I’d bought, so I just welded up the second hanger and off I went (of course I found them the day after I ordered two more pairs!)😛
And then the day before I left, my engine started cutting out. I had done a basic tuneup and reset the carb idle mixture, and it seemed ok at first. But then it shut off on the freeway, which had me more concerned. Determined to go anyways (I always keep a rebuild kit onboard) I reached out to @John McVicker fora potential backup in case I miscalculated. He was very obliging, and with a couple of borrowed tools from a friend in Ridgecrest (that I hadnt thought of before I left) I was pretty confident that I could get myself out of whatever I got myself into..
Had a great week in Death Valley, hiking, soaking, and playing music with my friends. And when I finally did take another look under the hood, I found the mixture setting was WAY off. Apparently when I had previously set it, I hadn’t paid attention to how far off it was, or I would have realized I had adjusted it for a partially blocked circuit, and it was now too lean once the bone-jarring ride into the valley knocked the dirt out of the circuit! D’oh. Just goes to show you, it can happen to the best of us.😉
Well as fate would have it, I was supposed to start work on @daveb Landcruiser yesterday. Dave is only the 4th vehicle I’ve agreed to work on since my mom died 21/2 years ago. And Dave got a last-minute lucrative offer to work instead. So I dove in to my suspension for the long overdue hanger upgrade/relocation. Relocation you ask?
Why yes. Like most 40 owners with off-the-shelf lift kits, the springs never seem to be designed long enough to compensate for the increased arch, resulting in poor shackle angles. I have modified a number of truck over the last 13 years to deal with this, including both my 40s.
So out came a litany of measuring devices and scribes, chisels, punches and finally grinders. It didn’t take but 10 minutes to take a chunk of skin off one of my knuckles. 😱Wrap it and keep going. Since I don’t consider myself proficient enough to call myself a welder, I was pleasantly surprised to discover in trying to separate the old hangers from the frame, my ground out welds were still tenaciously holding on to the hangers.
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