In a previous life, when I worked as a mechanic in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, I shopped for my first new vehicle.
I sought my boss's advice.
"I'm the wrong guy to ask," he said. "Everything I see is broke!"
Except for my truck, everything I own with wheels seems to be in disrepair.
My latest casualty is my boat trailer, a frequent member of the injured reserve. As always, lighting was the issue.
When it works, it's a sight to behold with its pretty little amber running lights and its jaunty red taillights, but folks, let me tell you, this trailer is possessed by a demon.
Lights flicker. I stage an intervention and cast out the flicker demon. It merely possesses another light.
Three years ago I had enough. I pulled all the wiring and installed a brand new harness. I sealed splices with marine silicone and wrapped them with electrical tape. I secured all wires to prevent wear from vibration. I even bolted the ground wire to the trailer chassis.
When I finished the project, I hooked the four-prong flat to my truck and voila, lights!
They worked fabulously for quite some time, but trouble began right about this time two years ago. I trace it back to a misunderstanding at a boat ramp on the Little Maumelle River while fishing with my daughter Hannah.
As we prepped the boat to launch, a couple of elderly fellows prepared to leave. One of them said, "You picked the wrong day to come out here. Fish ain't biting today."
"They'll start now that we're here," I quipped.
I meant to be funny, but they evidently were affronted. When Hannah and I returned, the red trailer light lens on the side next to where their truck had been was smashed. We got the last laugh, though, because we did indeed catch a mess of fish.
The battered light still worked, but the intact light and its companion running light soon stopped working. I couldn't find an obvious problem, so I rewired that part of the circuit. Voila, lights!
The came the day Rusty Pruitt and I fished the Ouachita River below Blakely Dam.
I always unplug my trailer lights when I back a trailer into the water, but I forgot to do so that day. That was also the day one of the bunks broke from dry rot. I left Pruitt to fish while I took the trailer to Hot Springs and installed a new bunk behind Arkansas Furniture, owned by my lifelong friends Mike and Elaine Muzny, who graciously loaned me their tools.
The new bunk is solid, but the lights haven't worked right since. They recently blew three fuses on my new Ram truck. Yeah, it's got a Hemi! It's also got these weird little mini box fuses that are expensive, and good luck finding a 20-amp variety. I visited five different auto parts stores before I found one, and it was the only one in stock.
Blown fuses means a wire is shorting somewhere. I inspected the entire wiring harness and found no obvious insulation breaks where wires could touch metal. A closer inspection of one suspicious spot with a magnifying glass revealed one tiny little nick where the pigtail comes out of the wiring channel behind the ball hitch. I wrapped it with electrical tape and, voila, lights!
While I was at it, I replaced both incandescent taillights with new light-emitting diode models. LEDs resist vibration better than the delicate incandescent elements, and they're brighter.
I have never lost a trailer wheel due to a failed wheel bearing, but every summer I see a half a dozen boaters that have suffered that calamity standing forlornly on the side of the road.
Uneager to join them, I pulled my tires, used my handy-dandy little bearing packer to repack the wheel bearings with high-quality marine-grade bearing grease. I'm not so rash as to say I'll never throw a tire, but I don't expect it to happen this year.
When I was done with that, I noticed an amber running light was out on my kayak trailer. That necessitated another trip to the store where I debated paying $2.97 for an incandescent model or $6.97 for an LED. Go big or go home, they say. I did both.
After another expert wiring job with splices that would impress any surgeon, I plugged in the four-prong flat and voila, lights!
This is a good time to talk about my adventures with my Suzuki four-wheeler. From the back, it looks like it's trying to roll at least two different directions thanks to a bent frame resulting from a car collision. That's a long story, but lately it had started blowing its main fuse, usually in the dark and almost always a long way from my truck.
My first solution was to carry a great big bag of fuses, but that's like gobbling cough drops to cure strep throat. It doesn't work. Fuses blew with increasingly shorter intervals.
The culprit was a short circuit where the insulation on the main power supply burned away from contact with the exhaust manifold. The damaged wire was under the seat. I wrapped the wire with tape and bracketed it to the frame with a cradle made of -- you guessed it -- duct tape. Voila, power and lights!
There is a reason I delight in such simple things. My mechanically inept father trained me to be mechanically inept, as well. Dad couldn't even change a tire. His motto was, "That's what mechanics are for."
I could at least change tires and oil, but well into young adulthood, the mere thought of wiring anything would have terrified me into paralysis.
Dad could afford to think that way. I cannot. Poverty and curiosity got me past my raising.
Even so, I wish I didn't get so darned much practice.
Sports on 02/11/2018