Sunday, April 13, 2008

The joys (or not) of owning of an old junky truck

Yesterday I put a new pitman arm and idler arm in my truck. $425 later and it rides better, and I'm not afraid that it will crash off the road every time I hit a pot hole while going around a corner at speed.

So today, just after I get off the highway near our home, I smell something getting hot. I check my gauges, and nothing is registering from my truck. I figure it must be the car in front of me. 1 block from my house, my truck starts to squeal under the hood. Curious. Just as I turn into my alley, the truck starts to sound bad, not running quite right, clearly something is wrong. I pop the hood as I enter the driveway, and see that my serpentine belt is barely turning, I've lost tension. I quickly shut the engine off and investigate. A pulley has locked up, the bearing will no longer turn and this caused the belt to jump off this tensioner pulley. So it looks like I'll be working on my truck the rest of the afternoon once I'm able to get parts. It'll need a new belt, as I could smell the rubber burning off the existing one. Of course it is a fairly new belt, I just installed it last November.

Cars are money pits. Bleh. But praise God it died just as I got home safely and it wasn't something worse!

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