not good wood

i hate when a monday actually feels like a monday…

…but i love when it ends feeling like a friday.

see, for me monday (on the calendar) actually IS my friday since i’m off tuesday and wednesday. and typically it feels like one. but sunday night on the ride home we changed all that – and since it’s rumored bad things always come in threes, well, we ended up keeping that tradition alive as well.

lemme explain…

on my way home sunday night i ran into some furniture. that’s not a typo – i didn’t mean i “ran into a place to grab some furniture”. i mean somebody’s dresser fell the fuck out of the back of their truck or whatever into the center of the 183 toll road in austin texas which has no posted speed limit so we all decided to just always go eighty plus all the time on it. as a result, when i a big ass hunka hunka dead tree made to store shit drops off it gets hit my others quickly at a “no fucking way i coulda avoided it” kinda pace.

now, i got lucky. i was fifth or sixth in the line of folks to run into the wreckage, so i swerved lane to lane around 90% of it, and straddled another 9% of it…but if you don’t suck at math, you can see there’s 1% i hit. and while cars one thru four were on the side of the road with busted grills or lights or fluid spurting out or tires and wheels fucked up beyond repair, i just heard a loud “WHAP!” from the right front tire and thought to myself, “if i make it to ABIA without the tire pressure light coming on, i’ll chalk this up in the ‘W’ column”, and i did, so i did…

…until about five miles later.

when i was coming up to the light at the US130 (the fastest highway in the western hemisphere) i noticed a weird grinding vibration noise coming from the right side. now, when i swapped a tire recently i noticed that the rear brakes were on the way out, so i chalked it up to that. but as i drove on i noticed whenever i hit a dip in the road the noise would sound off, without me touching the brake pedal, indicating that it wasn’t the brakes. it seemed louder when i got to town and went to HEB. at this point i reconciled that it was from the one percent of furniture i rolled over and thought maybe it was a bend brake heat shield, so i bent it out a bit in the parking lot, but the noise persisted on the way home. at home in the dark i realized there was nothing i could do, so i decided to go chill and i’d wait until morning.

(to interject the “bad things in threes” part, in the middle of the night i had shooting leg pain from a lifting injury that was blinding and woke me up, then budnik had an episode the next morning, but we both appear to be mending okay from out mutual ailments)

monday morning i drove the car around the block with zero noise. i then rolled down all the windows and repeated (which kinda sucked since it was in the 40’s) and no noise. so i went into town, stopping at the gym first, and the noise was back with a vengance when i rolled into their parking lot. i spoke to my buddy that runs german auto center and he said it sounded like a bearing as they get noisier as they get warmed up from driving. that made sense as the noise had kicked on on the ride home, but after it cooled overnight there was nothiing. likewise, after the long ride to the gym it was back, and sure as you’re born in was gone after i left the gym as it had set for an hour in the morning chill.

i started pricing out a set of bearings – around $300 and it appeared i could change em myself.

no noise after that until i went up a weird incline going into the 183 Atomic parking lot and then a fairly significant noise. it was a pretty day so i decided to eat lunch outside, and while sitting on our bench a good bit away from my car i spotted something odd under it, so i went over grabbed it, and pulled out this…

the one percent of furniture had wedged itself just so between the splash guard and the wheel well that when i went over a bump (like going into the driveway or the speedbump in the gym parking lot) it would push up enough to be invisible when i looked under the car, but then as i’d drive a distance it would wiggle its way down until it made contact with the road dragging and causing the vibration. once i pulled it out, BAM – no more noise.

so, thankfully, it was an easy fix. i had a spare couple hundred from this weekend i was gonna throw at that shit and instead used it for xmas gifts. much happier way to spend it!