2012 Taco slow build - The Escape Pod.

[Finlay]

Ladies and gentlemen,

This is why I can't have nice things :



I have to drive to Duluth tomorrow - and I have no spare - so rather than swap a bunch of tires around between mine and my wife's T4R, I'm gonna just take her car up there.

Sucks.

On the plus side, my tires should be here next week. And Woot.com was running a sale on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.2 so we picked one up for my truck. It should do much better than the phone while being less obtrusive than the 10" Xoom I was running. Plus the wife can keep her Xoom free from my filthy fingerprints.

Also, it occurs to me that my hood has too many scratches on it. And now I have a nice and very sturdily attached roof rack, I think I might build some limb risers. Lame and too "dressy" or functional and a nice accessory ?

 

[womacje]

If you are goin on a Tony route with the MOS then you NEED them. I have some that I throw on and off depending on the trip or terrain. Brackets thru the hood fender parting line and away you go.

 

[Finlay]

So, that bolt came out today during my commute to work. Dammit. The tires are scheduled to be here tomorrow (although, realistically they prolly wont be here till Friday).

I stole the spare from my wife's truck for the time being. I'll see about getting this one fixed when it comes time to swap tires and wheels around.

On the plus side, I found out that my wife has 5 alloy rims. I've been scouring CL and Ebay looking for a cheap one and here theres been one in my garage the whole time. She can have a steel spare, her truck never sees anything more challenging than the ditch to a cornfield.

The other thing I found was how much nicer her spare kit was than mine. Better paint, better machining. It's way better in every way. Don't tell her, but I'm stealing that, too.

hehe.

Don't look at me like that - if she gets a flat, you and I both know I'm going to be changing it anyway. She could do it, sure, but she'd rather bat her eyelashes and make me change it.

 

[Finlay]

The new shoes arrived today. And they weren't off the truck an hour before I had them installed.



Sahweet.

However, the new tires did reveal a new rattle in my dashboard... Frustrating, that.

 

[Finlay]

I did some trail mods to the truck on my last trip out.



Thats gonna be spendy to fix.

Sucks, but thats what being out there can get you.

On the plus side, the fairing held up amazingly well.



And worked great, too. Look, no bugs on the tent!




I also bent the hell out of my new 2m antenna. It was only 10 bucks, though, so I'm not that peeved about it. I'll get a spring mounted one in the next couple days.

So, my christmas list : Sliders, skids and a lift. Maybe a bumper or two, but I might put that off another year in favor of actually driving the truck somewhere.

Have a movie of my dog playing in Lake Superior. He's a nut.

 

[Finlay]

Been a while since I bumped this. I've been busy at work adding another 60TB and 5 servers to our storage and processing array. Plus, a host of other problems too esoteric to go into here. So, I haven't done much with the truck. Plus, with winter coming, we got all the gear cleaned and stored away until next year.

I did pop by the dealership a couple weeks ago to pick up some stuff, and the sales droid was amazed at my pinstripe collection. So, I spoke with the dude in the detailing department, and he promised he could make it look good as new.

He wasn't kidding.

Before :
View attachment 122377

After :









This is how the truck looks today :



I'm really amazed at how well that turned out and how (relatively) inexpensive it was. I still need to get quotes on the dents to see if I even want to bother getting them fixed, but that will wait a bit.

I've got big plans for the truck in the next few months - it'll be getting a lift, and some armor. Maaayyyybbeee a front bumper. I'm taking it to its very first Overland Expo next year, and I want it to look nice. But I also gotta have beer. It's a struggle.

 

[womacje]

Whoa! thats an amazing difference! You had alot of pinstripes. Now it looks good enough to drive to the mall.

 

[Finlay]

It's a little crazy how well that turned out. I owe the guys at the shop some beer, because they did a hell of a job and they did it fast - they didn't even need it overnight. Which sucked because I had lined up 5th gen 4runner to use as a loaner. But whatevs, I can't afford a new car for the wife yet anyway. Best to just not look.

The boys got some new jackets at the Duluth Trading Company outlet store near here. I guess we'll have to see how well they hold up to the dogs rolling cow pies.



One thing I do need to do is get heated mirrors installed.



I'll do that after I finish building my chuck box.

 

[Jada the Rottweiler]

I like your profess so far

How deep were your pin stripes? Do you know exactly what your dealership detailed did?

I gotmpin strips both sides I thought I was hopeless...

 

[womacje]

The kids look good! The cow pies will win every time, at least it wasn't their own mess... Chuck box is coming along. Get ready for the winter wheeling trip. See how the AT's do out there.

Jeremy

 

[Finlay]

I like your profess so far

How deep were your pin stripes? Do you know exactly what your dealership detailed did?

I gotmpin strips both sides I thought I was hopeless...

Some of them were pretty deep - you could feel them with your fingernail. I don't know exactly what they did, but I have to imagine they buffed the hell out of it. They put a some clear coating and thick layer of wax on it, too. They have a guy there that's been doing this for 30 years and is semi-retired and they had him come in to do my truck. He said it was one of the worst he'd ever seen.

Hehe, wait till next year, Mr. Bufferman...

There are some scratches that didn't come out. Not many, though, and you gotta look really close. I bet if you shop around a bit you can find a good experienced detailer that can fix yours up.

 

[Finlay]

It's been pretty quiet around here. The wife and I were sort of planning a trip up to the Gunflint Trail for a long weekend, but we were unable to find any place that took dogs, had space, and didn't cost 1000 dollars. So, we'll get some beer and have a stay-cation instead.

We had some nice weather - unseasonably warm here lately, so I took the opportunity to crawl around the truck a bit.

One of the things I found was this little nook at the bottom of the front fender. The rubber gasket pulls out and allows you access in there.



I should have taken a before picture, but that whole thing was basically packed with leaves and crap. That's no good - it's basically asking it to rust away from the inside.

So, I vacuumed it out pretty good. But the question was, where did all that crap come from ?



You can see the remains of the pile of leaves I cleaned out from up there. That space where the antenna runs up is open all the way to the bottom of the fender well. Leaves check in, but they don't check out.

It's sort of a poor design - I'll have to find some window screen around here somewhere and fit that in place. But the truck rides better now that I got that 586 lbs of compost out from in there.

 

[Finlay]

I got a nice un-birthday present in the mail today...



If you're curious what it means :

Suddenly I saw Hagbard's eyes burning into me and heard his voice: ``Your heart will remain calm. Your adrenalin gland will remain calm. Calm, all-over calm. You will not panic. you will look at the fnord and see the it. You will not evade it or black it out. you will stay calm and face it.'' And further back, way back: my first-grade teacher writing FNORD on the blackboard, while a wheel with a spiral design turned and turned on his desk, turned and turned, and his voice droned on, IF YOU DON'T SEE THE FNORD IT CAN'T EAT YOU, DON'T SEE THE FNORD, DON'T SEE THE FNORD . . .

I looked back at the paper and still saw the fnords. This was one step beyond Pavlov, I realized. The first conditioned reflex was to experience the panic reaction (the activation syndrome, it's technically called) whenever encountering the word ``fnord.'' The second conditioned reflex was to black out what happened, including the word itself, and just to feel a general low-grade emergency without knowing why. And the third step, of course, was to attribute this anxiety to the news stories, which were bad enough in themselves anyway. Of course, the essence of control is fear. The fnords produced a whole population walking around in chronic low-grade emergency, tormented by ulcers, dizzy spells, nightmares, heart palpitations and all the other symptoms of too much adrenalin. All my left-wing arrogance and contempt for my countrymen melted, and I felt a genuine pity. No wonder the poor bastards believe anything they're told, walk through pollution and overcrowding without complaining, watch their son hauled off to endless wars and butchered, never protest, never fight back, never show much happiness or eroticism or curiosity or normal human emotion, live with perpetual tunnel vision, walk past a slum without seeing either the human misery it contains or the potential threat it poses to their security . . .

Then I got a hunch, and turned quickly to the advertisements. it was as I expected: no fnords. That was part of the gimmick, too: only in consumption, endless consumption, could they escape the amorphous threat of the invisible fnords.

Way back when I graduated from high school, one of the guys I played D&D with on base gave me this book called "High Weirdness by Mail".. That led to me reading the Illuminatus Trilogy, where the concept of Fnord! was something that really got me going on the various ways that our culture, government, religions and families really screw with our minds.

Good times. Now, I need to find a stencil of J.R. Dobbs to paint on my mudflaps...

 

[armed_leftist]

Nice truck! Love the license plate! Have you thought about a dual-battery set-up? That's my next step and I'm waiting to add electrical goodies to my Tacoma until I get that done. I am super paranoid about draining my battery in a remote location after doing that a couple times in my lady's 4Runner and having to hike out of the trailhead to find help.

 

[wingysataday]

The scratches hurt at first but then you realize why you purchased the truck...Cause it's a freakin truck! Great work!