My interview is tomorrow. Broke out the leather dye and shoe polish and made my boots a little bit more presentable! Also got a new pair of slacks and a nice shirt. Dress to impress.

 

Morning all,

Have a fun Tuesday! Be back after a bit....

 

Good luck with the interview Trey!

 

We had an eventful weekend. Headed to the Sierra thursday night for a 4 day weekend. Heading up the Cajon pass, the truck was blowing 28#, and I was admiring that the new PCM calibration had only lost about 1#. Not as big a loss as some have reported seeing. Anyway, I was smiling big along about the Cleghorn area when BAMMMM. Turbo boot blew off. Pulled over in a hurry and luckily there was a good turnout point to park the fiver. My smile was even bigger when I remembered that I had bought a couple spare clamps last year and all I had to do was install.


I even used my free Ford gloves to protect my soft hands. Ken Grody worked on my truck last week to install a glow plug. I didn't think that job should include removing the turbo pipe, but now I think that it did and they didn't get it installed correctly. They should always use new clamps, but they are too cheap for that.

On my free inspection report from Grody, it noted that my batteries were weak. I should have paid attention, and in fact I already suspected that one was failing because my cranking had felt weak for some time and I had been watching it on the Insight monitor. With Interstate batteries only 28 months old I convinced myself that it was my imagination. Pretty dumb looking back. Saturday morning the old girl barely started up in the cool mountain air at 8,000'. By all rights it should not have started, but I'm proud of the Powerstroke for kicking over anyway. The volts were so low that it reset my radio settings. We found an Interstate dealer in Bishop that sold me two new batteries, and she really spins over now.

We did some rock crawling up very steep trails on Saturday and Sunday. It was pretty rough for the worn out Continental street tires I'm wearing. Got back on the asphalt Sunday and had a really bad shimmy in the front end even at 35 MPH. I crawled around under the front end inspecting stuff, and other than a tie rod that felt slightly loose rotationally, everything looked good. Lugs were tight. Tires looked cut up, but nothing that I thought would cause that shimmy. Luckily it smoothed itself out at 65 MPH heading back to camp.

After parking at camp I took another look and immediately saw this.


A quick pull on it and the hissing air told me it was time to drop the spare. So jacked her up, got the front drivers tire off, and then found this.


This was causing the shimmy. I mounted the spare, which is 2" smaller in diameter, but the steering was fine from then on.

Further inspection found this on the drivers rear tire.


Had to drive home on that one, but we made it fine. Ordered new tires last night, and will have them installed on Saturday.

We managed to have fun anyway. But with the glow plug, and the FICM that is questionable, the truck issues are annoying lately.

 

Nothing like a little campside auto maintenance. Been there, done that.
What brand of treads did you go with?

 

I went with the new BFG Rugged Terrain. 275/70/18E. That tire is a new model released just a few months ago.

Since my spare is a BFG Rugged Trail that shipped with the truck, I bought a new one of those too. I really hated riding home on that old tire, but now that we're here it looks like it made it fine. It's only a 265/70/17E.

 

Bill - Damn...ate them tires up! Had good tread left on them too!
Atleast you had fun anyway. Glad you made it home safely.

 

I've had good luck with the BFG's. I ran 2 sets. The original's and a nearly new set, and got well over 50K miles on each. In fact the last set was replaced moreso due to age than mileage. A good tire.

 

Wow, the tire dried out or something. Good thing you made it back fine.

At least we are able to wrench on out own vehicles to get them going again. I saw a girl in a corolla broke down just sitting in her car in the middle of the road. I offered to push but she said "I called triple A" and just sat there in the middle of the road.

 

Good job Bill! Way to be prepared!

 

I checked Tirerack.com and printed out a quote. They have that tire for $192, plus shipping of $16 each. I expected to have Americas Tire match them, which they have done for me before. But AT sells that tire for $198, so they were already lower. And they had a $100 rebate for sets of 4 tires. So they beat Tirerack easily.

 

Not sure the mileage on your tires Bill, but BFGs come with a 50,000 mile guarantee. Americas Tire Co also offers a warranty, but based on tread depth. I paid about $80 for the extra Americas Tire warranty. Was it worth it? Who knows. But it protects me from nails, rocks, and other road hazards.

 

The tires that were on it were Contitracs. I bought them as throw aways just to get the Lariat wheels, but the tread remaining was good enough that I ran them for a while. They are not much of a tire to begin with, but they certainly are not made for off-roading. Even so, those tires didn't owe me or anyone else anything. I also bought the road hazard coverage on the new tires.

These are not my pics, but this is what we were climbing when I think the damage was probably done.



Then we bounced over this rocky fence trail for a while, and just made it worse.

 

Oh ok. Well sounds like you got good life out of them then.

 

Good afternoon SoCal! I hope all of you are having a great day. Looks like you all had fun Bill.....all things considered.