It’s always something

Friday I decided that I needed to get either the Lincoln or the Challenger out for a drive. It has been a while and they needed the exercise. I finally settled on the Challenger for no other reason than I just picked it.

The plan for Friday was to drop Devon off at school, then I would swing by and pickup the Challenger before returning home to do some more laundry. Later I would pick Devon up at school, bring her home, do another load of laundry while waiting for time to pick Cason up at his school. Cason and I would then leave directly from his school and go look at the El Camino.

The reason for all the running about was because it is semester finals at school. Because of some strange rule normal classes are not held on finals days, so if you are not testing you don’t have to attend school. It is all very confusing and I don’t claim to understand why it is done this way, but because the kids are allows to stay home when they are not testing Devon only had to attend school for 90 minutes on Friday, from 11:45 to 1:30.

Anyway, after dropping her off I zipped to the storage facility to retrieve the Challenger. It started readily enough, but after I backed it out, I noticed there was a problem. One of the tires, the right rear, was flat. Not low … flat, and because the car is fitted with run flat tires there is no spare in the car. I didn’t want to drive the car with the tire flat because I suspect that while driving it with a flat might get you safely home, it would probably ruin the tire.

In place of the spare Dodge fits a compressor to the car to reinflate a tire, so I broke it out and hooked it up. After it started pumping I carefully watched the tire. It didn’t appear to be inflating, even after watching it for five or ten minutes. I didn’t know if the problem was the tire was losing air faster than that little pump could pump it in or or the pump was just that slow. It is a big tire, so that could be that the pump is just slow, but I had no way to know. Plus I had to get the problem solved before I had to leave to get Devon or put the car back in storage with the tire still flat.

Finally I decided that the tire wasn’t going to inflate, so I walked up to a car wash place nearby and asked if they had a portable air tank I could borrow. I wanted to see if the tire would inflate if I put air into it faster than the little compressor could. They did have a compressor, a nice big one on wheels too, but they had lost the chuck. So I walked across the street to a garage as asked if they had one I could borrow. They had a pony tank, a tank that could be charged from a compressor, but their compressor was being repaired and they couldn’t charge it.

Discouraged, I decided I was going to have to get the Civic out and drive home to get my own compressor and bring it back. As I was crossing back across the street, a big utility truck pulled into the storage lot and stopped. I chased him down and asked if he had compressed air on the truck. He didn’t but he offered to let me use his small battery powered compressor, similar I’m sure, to the one I was using. I declined the offer and walked back to the car.

I had spent a good thirty minutes chasing compressed air and by the time I returned to the car the tire was inflated. Over inflated actually, with nearly 50psi of air in the tire. I unhooked the compressor and bled off some of the air. I put everything away and drove the car to the local Firestone dealer where I buy all my tires.

When I arrived I explained what happened so they took a look and found a nail in the tire. But because I has spent so much time fooling around trying to get the car into condition to drive, they didn’t have time to fix the tire before I had to get Devon. I told them I would be back, then left. I ran home and started another load of laundry, then raced over to Devon’s school, arriving just before the bell rang to release her.

After Devon got into the car, I made another trip to Firestone. Upon further inspection, they decided they didn’t want to repair the tire. Firestone’s policy is to dismount and patch a tire rather than plugging a tire and they were afraid their old tire machine would damage the wheel. So they sent me to the dealer.

When I arrived at the dealer they were very busy and it took several minutes before I could even work my way to the service bay. But after I did they took the car into the back without further delay. A few minutes later the service guy brought me a nail. It was just a tiny little thing, so small in fact that I kind of doubted it was culprit. Not only was it tiny, but also it was not shiny like it had been polished by the road, but I assumed they checked that the nail was shot through the tire while it was broken down. $12 later we were done and on our way to pickup Cason.

While I was waiting for Cason’s school to release, I inspected the tire. It was still lightly over-inflated from when I inflated it, so I now knew they probably hadn’t broken the tire down or wasn’t paying attention to their job when they inflated. Either way, I knew I needed to let some additional air out of the tire. I also looked for and found the repair made at the Dodge dealer … a plug. Since the Dodge dealer didn’t break the tire down there was no way to know if the nail actually punctured the tire or not unless they checked for a leak after they removed the nail. I have no way of knowing if they did or didn’t, but combine the size of the nail, the fact that it didn’t look like it had come out of tire because the head was still covered with rust, and the fact that Firestone indicated that it was a larger nail in the tire, I am doubtful the tire is actually fixed. In a week or two I will go back to the shed and check the tire on the car to see if it is still in fact aired up or if it has gone flat again.

After picking Cason up, we dropped Devon off at home then raced over to Murphy Rod & Custom to see the El Camino. Taking care of business there, Cason and I raced home, met the rest of the family for dinner, then Cason and I went to jui-jitsu. While he was in class I returned the car to it’s home in storage.

So I got everything done, but what should have been a mostly normal day turned into a mad scramble. Which, now that I think about it, is how most of my days are.