As many of you are aware, who follow this channel regularly,
I try to post a video every Friday afternoon at three o'clock,
and depending on where you are around the world you receive that at different times.
But I have tried to be consistent in that and there have been a time or
two that I have had to skip sometimes,
and I've tried to give you a heads up and a pre warning when that's going to happen.
Well last week I wasn't able to do that and many of you noticed
and I got some comments and emails of, where's your video? We missed your video.
So, to that question, where were you? this is a long answer to a short question
of why there was no video last week.
Well, my mother was an only child for 12 years.
12 years later she had a sister finally come into the picture.
Well this sister, now at 86 years old, died the end of 2021.
This sister never married so she didn't have any family.
We were the only relatives in that family,
so we went back, my brother and myself, went back to help
deal with some of the issues of her household belongings in the middle of March.
Well it was finally decided between my brother and myself
that about the 15th, 16th, 17th of March, in that area,
we decided we needed to take this window of opportunity and
go back to Maryland and deal with some of her household belongings.
So we left Montana, went down through Wyoming, cut across through South Dakota,
and at Sioux Falls we headed south through Iowa,
headed for Kansas City, Missouri where my brother's oldest son also lives, he and his wife.
Well we picked up this nephew and we headed across Missouri, through Illinois, Indiana,
and we come into Ohio and I thought, well we're this close to some of the Amish country that I have dealt with,
different Amish shops through the years, and we would take a little 70 mile detour and go up and pick some parts.
Well we did that, the next day. This is now about 24 hours later, 36 in there somewhere,
and I picked up some parts and we were headed back south, down toward Cambridge Ohio,
when through that hilly country I ended up losing the transmission in my truck.
So there we were on the side of the road, dead on the road.
Well, as I was tinkering with our transmission, I had pulled the upper
boot off, and the gear shifter, I have a five-speed manual in my truck,
and I was playing with it and trying to figure out,
do we call a tow truck or can we get this thing mobile again.
Well it ended up, with a little bit of jiggling and monkeying around,
I did get the first four gears to operate in this transmission.
So we were maybe five miles north of Cambridge and we were able to limp
pick up and trailer into Cambridge.
When we got to looking around on the internet, who is it that deals with truck transmissions,
and we ran across a shop there in Cambridge known as the Auto and Diesel Shop.
I gave Clyde a call, actually talked to his wife Jessica initially,
and told them our predicament, where we were, where we were from, where we're headed,
and is there any way that they could help us out?
Well Jessica passed the phone on to her husband Clyde and I asked him,
is there any way you can help us out? Do you have time?
And he kind of sighed, and with a kind of a
huh, in his voice, he said I really don't have time,
but I understand where you're at. Let me come down and look at your truck.
So he did and we visited briefly about it and I said, you know,
there's really not a big deal if there's another shop, and you're buried,
just point us in the direction and we'll go somewhere else.
Bottom line was, he said there is no other shop.
I am kind of the only game in town when it comes to heavier truck transmissions.
So he jockeyed his schedule around.
He had another truck on the lift. He put them outside and brought
us in and tore out the transmission to our truck to see what was going on.
Well the Clyde quickly figured out that there was something mechanically broken in the transmission
and the transmission had to come out.
So his wife was so kind to take us up, now the three of us,
myself my brother and my nephew,
took us to a local hotel and we spent the night and he said, we'll figure out what's wrong.
Well I got a call about 5, 5:30 that evening and he said, I tore it apart.
you have a broken synchro between your fourth and fifth gears.
My wife took it to another repair shop about 20 miles down the road. We were able to get it fixed.
I'll put it back in your truck in the morning and you'll be back on the road
So we really were more than happy to spend the night, because we hadn't slept for like 36 hours.
And so Clyde went to work 5:30 that morning, and he began reassembling our transmission into the
truck and by about 10 o'clock that morning we were rolling again.
So I just want to give a shout out
to the Auto Diesel Shop in Cambridge Ohio.
Clyde and Jessica Kaiser, they have three children,
who bent over backwards to get a broken down wreck on the road up and going again
and we headed on east across Ohio, Pennsylvania,
and down into Maryland, where we went to the Chesapeake Bay
to deal with some of the issues of my aunt and the remains of her household furnishings.
Well, when we were initially kind of laying out the schedule of all this
I figured I would be back early enough
for the Friday video of last week.
But because of the transmission breakdown we added another day,
and then we ended up having another day added and dealing with all the furnishings.
So I didn't make it back into the shop until Friday morning of last week,
much too late to put together another video.
So the long and short of it all is, I was on the road for the previous two weeks,
dealing with family issues and wasn't able to make a video.
So hopefully that explains where there was no video
i tried to give you a heads up when i'm not going to have a video,
but that's just the way it worked out let week
and that's why there was no video. Hopefully you understand.
Well after I returned, and slept for a couple of days,
I came down and found that there were some wheels that had been parked
behind the shop from Yellowstone Park and the stagecoaches that they run there at Roosevelt Lodge.
So I brought those in, and another wheel happened to show up.
Seems like things don't stop when I'm away. Things still pile up.
So I have some work to do, but I have these wheels for this
chuckwagon undercarriage that we've been working on,
and I want to get these tied up. I need to get the tires set,
go through the process of sizing them,
shrink the tires, do some finish work
and try to get this undercarriage mobile again to where I can move it around and get it off these saw horses.
Well since I largely worked by myself most of the time,
sometimes it's a little puzzle as how to get some of these tasks accomplished.
But I think we'll get this down off the saw horses one way or another.
So it's nice to have this undercarriage back up to where it will roll again. I've got a few
little odds and ends to finish on it. Maybe put some brake blocks on
it, and we're going to put a tongue on this that can be moved around by a four-wheeler.
Well while I was gone, Bobby Tanner and his wife Claudia and son Bo showed up with
eight wheels from the borax wagons. So I have these eight wheels that I need to resize the tires on.
It's been five years since that project and they have adjusted to the the Mojave Desert of Death Valley,
so starting next week I'm going to unload these wheels and start the process of resetting
and resizing these tires.
So we'll also include that in the videos to come along in the future.
So anyway, hope this all makes sense and appreciate you following along.
As always thanks for watching!