jeep flat

so one night i was driving home from work on highway 138 aka Blood alley or California deathway (lots of horrendous accidents) keeping up with the flow of traffic (between 60 five and 70) when all of a sudden the back end of the jeep drops about 6 inches and pulls drasticly to the right. i immediately grab the wheel with both hands and let my foot off the gas , avoiding the brake so that i don’t flip the jeep. as soon as i pass over the bridge for the aqueduct, i pull off the road to inspect the damage only to discover that i had completely blown out the side wall of the tire... no good its now starting to get dark, so i go to start grabbing the jack (so that i can hurry up and get back on the road) and remember that i had taken the jack and all the tools out of the jeep when i was washing all of the ash that has been falling like snow from the local fires out of it. and of course a regular scissor jack for a car will not work so i cant just flag down a random motorist for help. so i called my buddy tom, who is usually my partner in crime when we go out to rescue others that get stranded. he had just gotten out of class at the college, which just happens to be only about five miles from my house. i tell him that either Amanda or amber (2 of my room mates) should be home and that the jack is in the front room under the light switch. so he heads over there to get it and then come find me. while i am waiting it gets dark. so i climb up on top of the hood and lay there looking at the stars waiting for tom to arrive. after about 40 min he pulls up. we pull out the jack, put on headlamps and start pulling out tools looking for whichever one will fit the lug nuts. an of course none of them do! so being the preparedness dorks that we are, we pull out our ham radios and try to see if anyone in the area had the appropriate size tire iron for a jeep. i think this is the first time that no one else has been on the repeater ( listening with their radio in the area) so we do the next best thing and call my dad (he lives about 10 miles from where we were) to come and bring us more tools. while we are waiting for him we decide to pull off the spare to get everything ready. the wind has started to blow and it is getting cold. so normally spare tires  should come off easily... not mine! we pull, we push, we pry. after several min of teamwork and one broken pry bar later, the spare tire is off and on the ground, and of course it is flat! so i call my day up and tell him to bring the portable air compressor with him also (since i left mine at home with all my tools). now we have nothing to do but wait. so while we are waiting, we start talking about guns and cars and emergency preparedness stuff (tom is the guy i am suppose to move in with in December) and other random topics. after about 20 min my dad arrives. we grab the tools, find one that will fit and get to work. after we get the jeep jacked up most the way, it becomes extremely difficult to push down the bar that does the jacking up. so much so that i put all my weight on it and all it did was lift me off the ground (and im not exactly a lite person), so my buddy ( who is slightly overweight, but more importantly heavier than i am) puts all his weight on the jack and is able to slowly get it to move, so we both lean on it and are able to jack it up high enough to pull the old tire off and put the spare on. after that we hook up the mini compressor the cigarette lighter and start filling up the spare. my dad was standing there watching and laughing at us the whole time. after several min it is ready, so we unhook everything and get the tire on and put everything away. then we all go our separate ways. upon further inspection after i got home, i found that the steel bar contraption i have on the back of the jeep to hold the spare tire and the gas cans is bent and all jacked up. so i get to spend the next day welding and getting tires, and then roll into work a few hours late. 

"whistling in the dark"

 I come home from one of my soccer games one Saturday morning to find my housemate Chris in the driveway on his cell phone loading up the blazer. His brother mike is supposed to be driving a jeep up for him that he bought recently. The look on his face tells me something is not going right. I put my stuff in the house and change into some regular clothes, then head back outside to see what is going on. Turns out his brother and a friend were almost to st George when the jeep lost all oil pressure and died. Their dad had come up and towed them the rest of the way to mesquite. They did not know what to do from there, hence the call to Chris. Chris told me he was gonna drive the blazer out there and see what was going on, and tow the jeep back if he had to. Since I had nothing else going on for the weekend I offered to go with. After filling the back of the blazer with tools and grabbing some mt dew we headed off. The drive to mesquite was nice and easy, and we made decent time. When we got there we met up with Chris' dad, brother and brothers friend. After some brief introductions we started checking out the jeep. We discovered a pretty bad oil leak near the rear main seal, other than that we couldn’t find anything wrong with it. Since there was nothing more to be done to the about the jeep, we decided it was time to get some food. We all went and ate at one of the hotels that was offering an all you could eat shrimp buffet. After at least an hour of over filling our stomachs, we decided it was time to get back on the road. We hooked the trailer with the jeep up to the blazer. It was well after dark by the time we started on our way back. About 20 min outside of mesquite we started hearing this horrible knocking sound, with a huge loss of power, so we pulled over to investigate. After looking around for a bit, we discovered that the blazer had some bad spark plug wires. We tried taking some of the wires off of the jeep, but found out they were the wrong kind. I made a couple calls, and was able to get a hold of a couple of my cousins (mike and Dan) who were living in St George at the time. Dans wife dawn was nice enough to drive to the nearest store and get some spark plug wires for us that would hopefully work. They they drove out to find us. After waiting about an hour or so on the side of the freeway, a truck pulls up and Dan and mike along with one of their friends climb out. after swapping out the plug wires we fire it up and notice the problem is still there. After some deliberation we decide we are not gonna be able to fix it here on the side of the road in the middle of the night, so I call up my mom that lives about 45 min away and explain the situation and ask if we can crash at her place for the night. She says yes. So we decide to unload the jeep, and have the jeep tow the trailer, while mike and Dan tow the blazer with their truck and a tow rope. Since I am the one who has the most experience driving a vehicle being towed, I get to ride in the blazer and operate the brakes and steering wheel. So there we are caravanning down the highway in the middle of the night, with me being towed in the blazer about 6 ft behind the truck, eyes as open as I can get them so that I can keep an eye on the tension in the tow rope. We pull into my moms neighborhood, and as we are coming around the last turn, the tow rope snaps. We tie it back on and finish pulling all the vehicles to the front of the house. After giving mike and Dan many thanks, they head off back to st George. The rest of us are shown were we can sleep. After about 4 hours of sleep, I awake to find Chris sitting at the table pouring over a tech manual. We head back outside and start trying to figure out what is wrong while the others are still asleep. Not too long after, I notice that one of the spark plugs is broken, so we start checking all the plugs only to find that one of them has completely broken apart on the inside and the pieces have fallen into the cylinder. Now everything is starting to make sense. I call up my buddy Chris v who lives in Vegas, and ask his wife if its ok if we steal him for the day. Soon after Chris v is on his way out to meet us with some new spark plugs from auto zone. When he arrives, we put the plugs in, and fire it up only to find out the problem is not fixed. We decide the next best course of action is to get the blazer back to mesquite to auto zone. We pull the blazer, with Chris V’s blazer. Once we get to auto zone, we notice that the tension pulley is not operating as it should, so we figure that might be the what is causing the problem. After several hours of no luck, Chris calls his dad. New plan is for his dad to come back and we will put the blazer on the trailer and he will tow it back to Utah. Chris and I will take a chance and drive the jeep back. We stock up with several five qt jugs of oil and some coolant, and hit the road with Chris v following us. We leave chris' brother and his friend with the blazer to wait for their dad and ride back with him. On the way to Vegas, I keep a steady eye on the oil pressure gauge. Every time it makes a sudden drop we pull over and add a couple qts of oil. We have to pull over twice on the way to Vegas. We stop by Chris V’s house and his wife Kim is kind enough to make us dinner. I pass out on the couch while she is cooking. After we eat, we decide its time to get back on the road, especially since Chris has to be to work in the morning. As we pull out, we find that the headlights don’t work, so we make another stop at auto zone to pick some up, along with more oil. Then off into the night we go. Now one of the qualities that the jeep has, is a levitating roof, meaning of you are not actively hanging on to it, it wants to fly away, and when it starts to lift of the body is when the doors are free to open on their own. Obviously this caused some interesting moments going down the road. When we got to stateline we stopped and filled up, and of course added more oil. We also bought some bungee cords. Before hitting the road again we took off the snowboard rack from the roof and hooked the bunge cords through the holes and then hooked the other ends to the roll cage. We also found a way to bungee the doors shut. This made the rest of the drive much easier. We then continued down the highway going about fifty miles an hour the rest of the way home taking back roads so as to stay off the highway and out of every ones way, stopping about every hour or so to top off fuel and add oil. After a while we stopped switching off back and forth for driving, and I drove the rest of the way so that chris could get some sleep since he had to work in the morning. It was around sun up when we rolled into the driveway, what a weekend....... we later found out that the blazer had thrown a rod, which I should have guessed right away.