I am not a mechanic

That said, lets move on. I spent today working on one of Tim's trucks. Now, I'll state for the record that I have a lot of respect for mechanics. I hate working on cars or trucks. It's just not something I like to do. This was a simple job, or should have been..

The truck, a 1992 ford F350 super cab needed a U-Joint. The drive shaft has 3. One of them was bad but he wasn't sure which one. Not knowing it had 3 Tim went out and bought two, figuring while we had it off we could just replace them both. I pulled the nuts off the rear side easy enough. They spun right off the U-bolt that holds the joint onto the gear box in the back. Then I moved up to the center mount and loosed the bolts there, giving myself some play in the shaft. That is where it all went to hell.

Once I had the center ones lose I went back to remove the U-bolt and pull the back shaft off. But of course the bolts where rusted solid. I tried to pound them out with a hammer. I tried getting a punch on them and hitting them. I even tried pounding on the drive shaft to see if that would work. Nothing I did would even get them to move. So Tim decided he would just torch them off.

Trip 1: In order to torch them off, you have to have a torch. He has the two tanks he needs, and they are both full. He also happens to have a torch head and tips. What he was lacking was hose. So we head up to Lowes. They don't carry them, but the guy at the store tells us about a welding supply place down the road. They have hose, 50ft for $40.00. Back to the house...

Torch the bolts off no problem, pull the drive shaft off. Try like hell the get the U-joints off, they won't budge.

Trip 2: Head over to the local mechanic to ask him what we can do. He says to just bring them in, he'll do it cheap. So we head back to the house, get the shaft and bring it in. It takes him 15 minutes. We go back to the house to put the shaft on. But wait, we wrecked the bolts.

Trip 3: Murray's auto parts is right down the road. Over we go the get the parts we need. We get the bolts and head back home. I use some vice grips to pull the rest of the torched bolts out of the shaft. Then try to put the new ones in. Whoops wrong size!

Trip 4: Back to the auto parts store. Get a bigger size bolt. These ones don't come with nuts. Buy some nuts. The guy in the store checks the bolt size on there sizer and hands us some nuts.

Back at the house I get everything put back together, and I go to run the nuts onto the bolts. It's all set and... The bolts are fine thread, the nuts course. GODDAMN FUCKING PEICE OF FORD SHIT!!!

Trip 5: At the hardware store we had to buy new bolts and nuts, they didn't have fine thread nuts. Once we're back at the house I got it finished.

All in all I spent a little over 7 hours working on it, at 14.40 an hour that comes to 100.87 dollar + parts. The mechanic on the corner could have done the whole job in under an hour and it would only have costed about 50 bucks + parts.

Lesson learned, I hope.

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Edited by: Jennifer Davey