I love the oil-change service at the Honda Dealership where I bought my Civic: it costs about half what Jiffy-Lube costs. The thing is, while they have your car on the lift, there is some pretty serious interrogation going on! If they find they don't like the radio stations you've chosen, they'll quote you a pretty princely sum to "fix" them! This time the shoe that was waiting to drop, just about when I was expecting it, was that one of my rear brake calipers was pretty much stuck. I appreciate the warning (-especially since it was actually true...), but the thing is they wanted basically what our original mortgage payment was to fix it!
Brakes and I are not strangers (They and the plumbing in our house are my two greatest nemeses!): back in my twenties I was kind of a hot-rodder and changed my car from four-wheel drum to power front disk, so I dealt with this one myself! I brought that house payment down to less than what this one's car-payment used to be!
Projects like this are dirty, uncomfortable, tiring work. There is a great deal of standing up and getting down. The bolts that need to be removed are often hiding in dark, poorly accessible places requiring all sorts of gymnastics with the breaker bar and torque wrench to get them off and then back on. In this case they have been underneath a car for 130,000 miles and were pretty solidly rusted in place, too.
There is often some kind of surprise. Today, I found out one of my new calipers was missing the bracket for the parking brake. Of course the old caliper had one, but by the time I found this out the old caliper wasn't mounted to the car anymore and breaking those 10 year old bolts was almost impossible. I performed this really awful maneuver involving the trailer hitch on another one of my cars and a half-inch drive socket wrench extension and a great deal of grunting and the temptation towards really foul thoughts and words that finally succeeded in busting those bolts loose. NONE of my Junior-High shop teachers should ever, EVER know! (They would be crushed!)
Tonight, my garage floor is covered with sockets and ratchets and open-end wrenches that aren't back in the nice slots the DeWalt folks provided for them in their case: I got the car back on four wheels, it goes AND stops! -and will deal with this mess tomorrow! (I basically shoveled 'em all inside and closed the door: ENOUGH!)
By the way: If you wonder why is takes a couple of weeks to do CineSea in Pictures: this is an excellent example! (Life often gets in the way.) The good news is now that I've gotten my hands clean again, I can get back to that!
. I totally agree was my reply. I lost track the number of times I threaded up the Westar, but one thing for sure, the look of fascination for 35mm film being projected, is still there and the same as when I worked at Movieland so many moons ago. The projector I should add ran a treat for close to four hours. The 20 minute edited version of "The Dolphin Tale" plus one trailer I made up, went down really well, plus no shortage of volunteers to hand rewind the film, I was more than happy to let them do that to
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loading up one reel at a time, I was sitting with my feet up reading and listing to some music at the same time, timing my check up on the platter loading of "ET" every so often
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