Лытдыбр, Uber Bragging Rights:
I'm very sorry, this got wordy.
Mt. Tremblant was pretty cool, good cottage, great weather, good skiing, crowds on the slopes, met my boss on the lift - that's not what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about how cool and utterly badass I am.
I left at 9 pm. The way there is supposed to take 7 hours, 6 hours if you speed. 5 hours if you are fucking stupid. I'm not stupid, but I _was_ planning to speed. And I did, for about 3 hours. Then, at midnight, as I was passing Quebec border, there came great big BWAHSHH! from somewhere under the seat, and the car started making the Vroom-Vroom engine sounds much louder then before. Oh, and a persistent metal-on-asphalt scraping sound appeared, almost as if a chunk of the car came loose and was scraping the road, raising sparks that were visible to everyone but me. Plus, some nice people on the road honked at me, that also clued me in.
Naturally, I panic, pull in to the nearest gas station and look under the car. A big piece of it is hanging down. I don't actualyl know what it is. The pipe from the engine to the muffler broke in the middle, and the half that's attached to the engine is hanging down. The muffler and the other half are hanging on tight. So I come up with a preliminary plan. The plan was to *not* get a motel room, tow the car home and cancel my vacation, but to fix it somehow, and go through with the vacation pretending that this is business as usual.
I come into a gas station/quickstop and take stock of the potential inventory. There is a lot of useless crap there, but also a few cool things. I buy a bunch of semi-random crap. Some of it never got used, but a few things were crucial to the plan of getting me to a warm place with alcohol.
Then I get the front wheels of the car onto the curb and that gives me enough vertical space to crawl under the car. It's a middle of the night, -10 degrees outside, wind is howling, and I'm lying on a piece of cardboard under my car, attaching loose parts back on with rigid, bleeding fingers. Oh, and pieces of rust keep breaking off and falling in my face. Doesn't get more extreme.
It took me about an hour of duckquackery under the car and two more trips to the gas station to figure out what attaches to what and which bits need to be secured how, but in the end I made an awesome contraption from thick bungee cords that held the loose piece of exhaust pipe up, and an equally awesome contraption from hose-clamps and baby bungee cords that fixed the two pieces of tube together. Feeling immensely proud of myself, I continue my interrupted trip.
Unfortunately, my first trip to the gas station took long enough for the exhaust pipe to cool down, so I never got a sense of how hot it gets. 10 minutes after I left the gas station, a painfully familiar "BWAHSHH!"-"VROOM" sequence happens, and the fucking pipe starts scraping the asphalt again. Bravely diving under the car, I retrieve a bunch of half-cords. The bastard got so hot it ate through finger-thick bungee cords in two Splin tracks. So I come up with a better plan. I connect the hooks from teh burned cords together to form a chain and 30 minutes and a few more cut fingers later I rest the pipe on a bed of hook-chain and suspend the hook-chain on both sides with spare cords. This way, the pipe is only touching metal and won't transfer any heat to the meltable parts, while bungee suspension provides enough flexibility fopr the whole contraption to not break on the first bump.
Then I cut tops and bottoms off a few Red Bull cans, cut them through to make sheet-aluminum, roll it up to match the width of the exhaust pipe and feed it into both broken ends of the pipe. Now the detached pipe doesn't swing from side to side, and the chain-cord widget doesn't let it fall.
And this sick unwanted child of engineering held all the way to Mt Tremblant. AND BACK. I am so incredibly proud of myself. Really-really proud.
Oh, and that red-bull didn't go to waste - I got to the cottage at 5 am, completely exhausted and drained of life-force.
This beats the shit out of that time we fixed our hookah using a beer can, a condom, some candle wax and a pile of rocks. Complexity wise and extreme wise.
I fixed a car. From underneath. Using equipment I harvested in a convenience store. While fighting harsh elements. I fixed a car. With my own hands. And bungee cords, hose clamps, a screw driver and manicure scissors. And a few empty cans of red bull. How fucking incredible is that, eh?
Mt. Tremblant was pretty cool, good cottage, great weather, good skiing, crowds on the slopes, met my boss on the lift - that's not what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about how cool and utterly badass I am.
I left at 9 pm. The way there is supposed to take 7 hours, 6 hours if you speed. 5 hours if you are fucking stupid. I'm not stupid, but I _was_ planning to speed. And I did, for about 3 hours. Then, at midnight, as I was passing Quebec border, there came great big BWAHSHH! from somewhere under the seat, and the car started making the Vroom-Vroom engine sounds much louder then before. Oh, and a persistent metal-on-asphalt scraping sound appeared, almost as if a chunk of the car came loose and was scraping the road, raising sparks that were visible to everyone but me. Plus, some nice people on the road honked at me, that also clued me in.
Naturally, I panic, pull in to the nearest gas station and look under the car. A big piece of it is hanging down. I don't actualyl know what it is. The pipe from the engine to the muffler broke in the middle, and the half that's attached to the engine is hanging down. The muffler and the other half are hanging on tight. So I come up with a preliminary plan. The plan was to *not* get a motel room, tow the car home and cancel my vacation, but to fix it somehow, and go through with the vacation pretending that this is business as usual.
I come into a gas station/quickstop and take stock of the potential inventory. There is a lot of useless crap there, but also a few cool things. I buy a bunch of semi-random crap. Some of it never got used, but a few things were crucial to the plan of getting me to a warm place with alcohol.
Then I get the front wheels of the car onto the curb and that gives me enough vertical space to crawl under the car. It's a middle of the night, -10 degrees outside, wind is howling, and I'm lying on a piece of cardboard under my car, attaching loose parts back on with rigid, bleeding fingers. Oh, and pieces of rust keep breaking off and falling in my face. Doesn't get more extreme.
It took me about an hour of duckquackery under the car and two more trips to the gas station to figure out what attaches to what and which bits need to be secured how, but in the end I made an awesome contraption from thick bungee cords that held the loose piece of exhaust pipe up, and an equally awesome contraption from hose-clamps and baby bungee cords that fixed the two pieces of tube together. Feeling immensely proud of myself, I continue my interrupted trip.
Unfortunately, my first trip to the gas station took long enough for the exhaust pipe to cool down, so I never got a sense of how hot it gets. 10 minutes after I left the gas station, a painfully familiar "BWAHSHH!"-"VROOM" sequence happens, and the fucking pipe starts scraping the asphalt again. Bravely diving under the car, I retrieve a bunch of half-cords. The bastard got so hot it ate through finger-thick bungee cords in two Splin tracks. So I come up with a better plan. I connect the hooks from teh burned cords together to form a chain and 30 minutes and a few more cut fingers later I rest the pipe on a bed of hook-chain and suspend the hook-chain on both sides with spare cords. This way, the pipe is only touching metal and won't transfer any heat to the meltable parts, while bungee suspension provides enough flexibility fopr the whole contraption to not break on the first bump.
Then I cut tops and bottoms off a few Red Bull cans, cut them through to make sheet-aluminum, roll it up to match the width of the exhaust pipe and feed it into both broken ends of the pipe. Now the detached pipe doesn't swing from side to side, and the chain-cord widget doesn't let it fall.
And this sick unwanted child of engineering held all the way to Mt Tremblant. AND BACK. I am so incredibly proud of myself. Really-really proud.
Oh, and that red-bull didn't go to waste - I got to the cottage at 5 am, completely exhausted and drained of life-force.
This beats the shit out of that time we fixed our hookah using a beer can, a condom, some candle wax and a pile of rocks. Complexity wise and extreme wise.
I fixed a car. From underneath. Using equipment I harvested in a convenience store. While fighting harsh elements. I fixed a car. With my own hands. And bungee cords, hose clamps, a screw driver and manicure scissors. And a few empty cans of red bull. How fucking incredible is that, eh?