Pit(s) (s)Crew(ed)

Ok look, it's not like I enjoy making posts about how dense I am, but this is just too inept to not share. Yesterday one of the jobs on my list was to remove the winter tires on the old truck and put on the all seasons. No problem, I've changed plenty of tires before, mostly on the side of the road, or in much more treacherous places than in my own driveway. Now that I think about it though, it's been years since I did it, and I suppose some of the process must have escaped me, as the stupid truck fell off the jack 3 TIMES.

Here's a note about those crappy scissor jacks they give you with vehicles. The higher you get your vehicle, the easier it is to turn the crank. When your vehicle is tireless and leaning right over on the ground, and you have to start your jack from a closed position, it's quite difficult. It was all I could do to get that truck up to a point where it was level again. It was stupid hard. Trucks are really heavy. Like, really heavy.

In any case, it all started off fine. I jacked up the truck, removed the first wheel, but then, as I was positioning the new wheel, the truck slowly started to lower as the jack slipped over on it's side. It's descent was slow and leisurely, so I had lots of time to remove my hands, and wonder what was going on. I reset and repositioned the jack. Since the truck was now leaning on the unattached wheel, it wasn't too low, so I cranked it back up again. Sure enough, as I was trying again to put on the wheel, over it goes again. This time it was low. After cranking and cranking on the jack, I finally got it up level again, and decided to get some advice.

I was pretty frutrated and pissed, and not thinking too clearly, so I called my level headed father, who of course suggested I might want to put a couple of blocks around the wheels to stop the truck from rolling off the jack. Duh. He also suggested placing some blocks in a spot under the frame so that if it did go down again, it wouldn't fall down so far. He gave this advice easily, almost off hand, without making me feel any stupider than I did already. I guess when you're on the side of the road you normally don't have these options, so pile that up with the long gap since my last tire change, and my wanting to just jump in there and do the job without thinking about it first, and you've got a recipe for risking losing your hands under a truck.

After these precautions were taken, the truck actually went down a third time, but rested on the stack of blocks I had, so it wasn't hard to get it back up. It was becoming part of the routine now. I honestly don't know what I did differently the fourth time I put the jack under there, but this time it was solid. I cranked on the nuts to get them on solid, with enough force to have the teetering truck woggle back and forth a bit, but stay up. Brimming with this success I lowered the truck and went on to the other side. The second tire came off and the new one went on in very little time, with no mishaps. Kind of like the way it's supposed to in the first place.

I then decided I needed a mental break from this stupidness, and thankfully I had just finished preparing my bike before moving on to the truck, so I went for a nice relaxing ride. Cruising around is way better than working.