At my last job the tractor of a tractor trailer was blocking our loading dock. The driver got into an argement with his dispatcher, left the keys on the seat and stomped off in a huff. No one but me had ever driven a vehicle without a synchromesh transmission and couldn't move the rig. I had the division manager write a nice letter with the agency assuming all liability before I moved it out of the way. It took a few false tries but I managed to move it a 100 feet onto the grass.?
The company that owned the truck was beyond upset that someone without a CDL dared touch their precious truck and even more upset I'd parked it in the grass where the front wheels sank about 8 inches.
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Our first car was a 1969 VW bug and I kept trying to double clutch the poor thing. It was the worst snow Lexington has ever seen and a friend loaned me the car so I could get home. The advantage to learning to drive a clutch car on snow/ice covered roads was, once I learned to not double clutch, if I let the clutch out too fast the rear wheels broke free just like every other idiot on the road. It was 11 miles to home and by the time I got there, an hour, I was pretty good at shifting.
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That was the winter of 1977~78. I hope to never experience a winter like that again. We had 20 foot snow drifts in Fayette County. The next day after I got home I rigged a sled and we walked a mile to a grocery store to load up on supplies. A VW will go through almost anything, but 2 feet of snow lifts the car off the ground and it's no go time. By the time we made it to the store and home again, and took long hot showers and curled up together in our joined sleeping bags we were beyond beat. We'd just gotten a kitten who joined us.
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This last winter sucked because we got 5 or 6 inches of snow, then a half inch of rain that converted the top inch of snow to hard ice, then another 4 or 5 inches of snow. Our landlords spent 4 hours digging the top layer of snow and ice off, I used a broom to remove the bottom layer of snow, but we were too tired to go anywhere. Fortunately my wife learned a hard lesson back in 1978, keep enough food on hand. There are times I catch her looking in the pantry with an odd satisfied look on her face.
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This year she was out of the fun, had total right knee replacement on January 31, so walking in snow wasn't an option.
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Trust me, when you wear your knee out and it's time to replace it, go for it, yea it hurts, PT is a cast iron !@#$* but it will be well worth it. I had both of mine done last summer and there is now way I could have helped with the drive if I had my original knees.
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And it is snowing again. I'm so sick of the white stuff I could scream. I think I'll go to bed instead.
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About the jeep, unless you lived fairly close, it would have cost a fortune to move, and transferring ownership from someone in Kentucky to your state would have been a nightmare. There were several times when I was ready to send it to the crushers because of the legal nonsense. I lucked out, my younger sister saved all of Daddy's important papers and she had the original bill of sale and shipping order and we had photos from "Way back when." After a few hours of talking with the Sheriff, a state police detective, a motor vehicle enforcement officer and the county clerk everyone agreed the jeep wasn't stolen and there was no back tax because it had never been registered to begin with. What a PITA.
NCIC had no record of the serial number, which was a bit of a hassle.?
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I wish the new owner success with the jeep and hope he has it ready for the Independence Day Parade here. I included a stripped R392/URR and the mating T-195 transmitter with jeep mounting platform. The T-195 was complete but I removed and destroyed the dynamotor. [like I need 1000V at 100mA] There's no way the T-195 would meet any modern transmitter specification and the high voltage could be lethal. It looks complete so the new owner is happy, although the R392/T-195 were really Korean conflict era comm gear. I tossed in some late WWII era "walkie talkies" and field phones. I pulled the crystal from the walkie talkie transmitter. No sense having someone come up around 50 MHz and get in trouble.
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