With the help of Traci, I bled the brakes on the Taurus today (in the rain), and replaced a good deal of the brake fluid with Valvoline SynPower synthetic fluid. When I replaced the brake pads a couple weeks ago, I opened the bleeder valve on one side to let some fluid out while I compressed the piston. It apparently didn't do any good because fluid leaked out of the reservior anyway, but I also must have let some air into the system when I did it. Even though the grinding was gone with the new pads, the pedal wasn't as responsive, and sometimes would go all the way to the floor when braking hard. Now that the system is bled, everything seems to be just fine.




We're going to Grand Junction sometime next week, just for the hell of it, and I wanted to car to be in good shape. I've still got to check all the fluids, but the hard part is over. I'm glad that I won't have to disarm like I did during my trip to Vegas earlier this year. Anyhow, we'll probably just do some xmas shopping and geocaching--I've got a few travel bugs that I got from another cacher that've been in Utah for too long, and only one of them's been to Colorado, so it'll be good to put some mileage on them.




P.S. Mike, I thought you'd like this [375K JPEG]. Save it to your hard drive, 'cause I'll probably delete it after you get it.

My comments got spammed last night. Not too bad, really, but it took me quite awhile to clean up. I've got comments disabled for now, 'cause I'm not sure banning the spammer's IP addresses will be enough. I put together a list of the IPs (mostly just open proxies) and other info, just in case anyone else wants to add this cock-knocker to their banned IP list.




Update: Ok, comments are enabled for now. We'll see how this goes--I may have to add some other security measures in the future to stop shit like this.

This rain. It's driving me crazy. For some reason, I can't sleep when it's raining--I've probably had too many problems with water entering my house one way or another. It's supposed to clear up a bit tomorrow and Saturday, then start back up again Sunday. I hope I have time to get a few things done outside before it does start raining again. Well, at least it's not windy. I hate that just as much.

Mike Doughty's blog. Good shit.

Traci's heading to the scrapbook expo this weekend, so I'm staying home to be Mr. Mom. I suppose I owe her for all the times I disappear alone into the mountains to hike or four-wheel, but I'm still not really looking forward to being stuck in the house all weekend--and I'm even taking Friday off so she can leave Thursday evening. If the weather forecast can be believed, however, it wouldn't have been worth getting outdoors anyway.




My garage is so cluttered that I'm going to have to spend some serious time cleaning it out just to make room for my Subaru. I hope to get started on it this Sunday, and with my previous experience, it shouldn't take me too long. The '88 was fuel-injected though, and the '87 is carbureted, so that'll be the only learning curve for me. When all is said and done, I should have about $300 invested in this car (not including my precious time :), so it'll be the perfect beater. Something that, if it breaks down in the middle of nowhere, it won't be worth towing back home. =)

I can't believe I'm still awake this late. I got to bed around 1:30 last night, and woke up at 4:30 am to go hiking/geocaching with Mike (log entries and pictures are here and here). We hiked 8.5 miles through Saddle Horse Canyon in the San Rafael Swell, and it totally kicked my ass. I carried my new backpack with a little over 25 pounds in it the entire way, and it surprisingly wasn't too bad. My balance was way off when climbing some of the steeper hills and ledges, but my back and shoulders were able to handle the extra weight. Also, we weren't able to get to the $100 just waiting for somebody to grab. The amount of time and energy we've already expended trying to get to it isn't nearly worth the money, but I just want to be the one who gets it first--plus, the scenery isn't too bad. =)

Since Traci and I are nearing completion on the kids' playset, I think I'm going to resurrect my white Subaru this weekend. It needs basically the same work done that I did to my '88 a couple years ago--head gaskets, oil seals, etc. Once I get that complete and I'm satisfied that the car will last me awhile (since I've never driven it, I'll just have to wait and see), I'm going to give it a new paint job. I'm thinking I'll roll on some bed liner, then hit it with a camouflage paint scheme.

I'm just getting to the point where, since my Taurus is no off-roader and my truck is only 4x2 and unreliable, I need something to take off-road and beat on. I used to take my '88 Subaru out every weekend and just wander around in the mountains or the desert, but I haven't done anything like that in over a year. I miss it.

Anyone want to split a quick $100 with me? I hate hiking that far alone.

Oh, this weekend went by too quickly. Traci and I spent all day yesterday working on the kids' playset, and got it 90% complete. The kids actually played on it until it was too dark, then we finally headed into the house and ate a very late dinner.

I spent all of today driving around and hiking. I moved my geocache up in Kenilworth to a different location, still pretty close to where it was. That took quite a long time, because I wanted to find the perfect location, but I had to settle on something not quite as good as I was hoping for. I damned-near hiked up the old railroad grade to the mine, but it probably would have killed me, not to mention anyone who went after the cache.

After that, I headed home and traded my truck for the Taurus, then drove up to the end of Consumers Road. While I was scouting a location for a new cache, a nasty thunderstorm rolled in quickly, so I decided to book it the hell out of there. I drove from there straight to East Carbon, then up Whitmore Canyon. I wanted to go to Grassy Trail Reservoir (which I'd seen on a map), but the road is blocked by a gate and I couldn't get past. Instead, I turned up Water Canyon and found a very interesting aerial tramway that is still in good shape (after nearly 80 years). All the wooden towers are still standing, and the tram cables are still suspended and there are still a lot of tram cars hanging from them (I'd sure like to have one or two of those--maybe a midnight run up the canyon in my truck is in order).

While I was up on the hillside placing the cache near one of the tram supports, some guy drove up the canyon (dirt road in the middle of nowhere, mind you) in a Grand Cherokee (older body style). I was about 600 feet away from the road, and more than 100 feet above it, so I had a good vantage point. My Taurus was parked well off to the side of the road, but he drove really close to it and slowed way down as he passed. I kept a sharp eye on him for a few seconds, but he picked his speed back up and continued on up the road. Then, after about 10 or 15 minutes, I heard him coming back down the canyon. This time, he actually stopped right next to my car, and even backed just a bit. I just kept thinking, Oh great, I'm gonna have to fire a warning shot at this guy to keep him from breaking into my car. Elk season (rifle) started this weekend, so there was a fair amount of traffic on this road (which leads to Bruin Point), so I just couldn't understand why he was showin so much interest in my car. Luckily (for him, and probably me as well), he only looked for a few more seconds before pushing on.

Here's an interesting article about the town I grew up in. I love the picture of the old railroad grade going up to the mine.

I don't get it. I've been trying to sell my Mazda Navajo for about 6 weeks now, but nobody's interested. I ran a classified ad in the Sun Advocate for four weeks, and all that time I had it parked in front of my house with a "for sale" sign in the window. One woman called after reading the ad, but it didn't have enough seat belts to hold her family. One other guy came over after seeing it in front of the house and actually test drove it, but I never heard back from him.

I started thinking that maybe I was asking way too much, but I checked Auto Trader for every '92 Navajo in the country, and the average asking price is $3,283. I'm only asking $3,000 or best offer, and, so far, the best offer is zilch. I hope I don't have this much trouble selling my truck, which I plan on trying to do in the next week or so.

I am utterly amazed at how simple it was to replace the front brake pads on my Taurus--it was the easiest brake job I've ever done. It took me longer to get all my tools gathered up than it did to replace the driver's side pads. First I removed the lower bolt on the caliper, then swung the caliper upwards and tied it out of the way with some rope. The brake pads were held in place by the caliper, so with it swung out of the way, they simply fell right out. Then I used a c-clamp to push the piston back into the caliper, then untied it and let it slide down over the new brake pads and reinstalled the bolt. Piece-o-cake!

It took me less than five minutes to do the passenger side from when I removed the wheel to when I lifted it back into place. The longest part of the process is pushing the piston back in. I really should have opened the bleeder valve while I was pushing the piston in, and some brake fluid leaked out of the reservoir under the hood. It was no big deal, and it wasn't really worth risking air getting in the system and having to bleed the brakes anyway.

The one surprising thing is that the pads cost me over $45. I don't think I've ever spent much more than $20 on a set of brake pads or shoes for any of the vehicles I've owned. I should have checked on the price of rear brake shoes while I was at it--I certainly set aside enough time to do both, but only because I was expecting just the fronts to be a pain.

This once-weekly updating is getting old--it seems like only my weekends are worth posting about lately. We spent this weekend at Mike and Ali's house in West Valley, and did some xmas shopping while we were up there (though not nearly enough xmas buying). We're still not finished buying gifts for anybody, but we have partial gifts for a few. Most of the weekend was spent driving around the Salt Lake valley looking for ideas. Today was really fun--I did only a little shopping, and then we all drove up Big Cottonwood Canyon to Silver Lake. The drive was beautiful, with bright blazes of orange and yellow quakies, and many areas of rust-colored scrub oak. I've come to really appreciate my Taurus, since during last year's trip up there, we had to stop several times to let the Subaru's engine cool down. Speaking of Subarus, I must have seen literally hundreds of them up the canyon--it seems like about 1/10th of all vehicles up there were Subarus.

And speaking of my Taurus, it's in desperate need of a brake job. The front brakes are getting really bad, and it's much more noticeable when driving in Salt Lake rush-hour traffic. I haven't actually looked at the brake pads to see how far they're worn down, but I suspect that they're worn down completely (the grinding noise is a dead giveaway). I'm going to try replacing them tomorrow, but you know how new cars are--the manufacturers purposely make them difficult to service, and they undoubtedly make a fortune servicing their newfangled pieces of shit.