I need to rant for a few minutes. I own two cars, a sportbike, and I’m borrowing a truck. Now let me explain why I’m borrowing the truck and why I need to borrow another vehicle. The first car is a 1994 Thunderbird LX. Two or three years ago, it broke a crankshaft and I have yet to get it fixed. How does one break a crankshaft? I don’t know. It could only happen to me. Add in the fact that I had already changed it about two years earlier because my oil dipstick tube came loose and dumped out my engine oil and it’s even more odd.
The second car is a 1989 Thunderbird SC. I’ve had nothing but problems from this car. In the first 1,000 miles I drove it, I spent around $2,000 on parts. I expected a few things to go wrong since it had been sitting for 5 years, but that’s ridiculous. I finally got it to where I could go a few thousand miles without something breaking, but then a few months ago it overheated and blew a headgasket. This car is supercharged so changing the headgasket is a hell of a lot of trouble.
Luckily, just before that happened, I bought my 2005 Yamaha YZF600R. It wasn’t so bad because I could still drive the car to the grocery store which is less than 5 minutes away and ride the bike everywhere else. You would think an almost brand-new sportbike wouldn’t give me much trouble. Well… Apparently the threads on the axle nut were fucked up. I couldn’t completely remove the nut. So I ordered a new one, along with a new axle (since those threads were probably messed up too) and the washers for both sides. The local Yamaha shop doesn’t seem to carry anything in stock except a few maintenance parts. Apparently the nut wouldn’t tighten all the way either because while I was accelerating in first gear, the chain loosened and came off the sprocket. How much damage can a loose chain do? I’ll tell you. Since the front sprocket was still turning the chain, it cut through the end of my swingarm. That’s not half of it. The chain must have bunched up in front of the front sprocket. It broke my clutch pushrod, destroyed my water pump, and the two of those busted up my crankcase. So the engine is torn apart and I’m waiting on the crankcase.
Meanwhile, I’m borrowing my grandfather’s 1989 Ford F250 diesel truck. Hey, it’s a diesel; it has to be reliable. Psh… This week, it started leaking diesel fuel. It appears that it’s leaking from two of the injectors. It probably just needs new o-rings. So why can’t I simply replace them? Because nobody even carries them. I checked with ABC, Autozone, and O’Reilly. They can’t even order them. I checked the website for Advance and it looks like they can order them, but they’re $60! For some freakin o-rings! So let’s see, I spent about 75% of my last check on bike parts, I only get paid every two weeks, and right now I don’t have the money to spare on o-rings. I had planned on fixing my bike during the three-day weekend but apparently they had to back-order my crankcase so it’s going to take 2 or 3 weeks to arrive. So I’m stuck driving this truck with fuel dripping over the place. I’m lucky if I’m getting 10 MPG right now and diesel is more expensive than gasoline.
Will it never end? I was saving up to fix the Supercoupe when the bike broke, and I was trying to fix it when this borrowed truck started leaking. I’m dumping large portions of my checks into vehicles, yet I still keep getting behind. And it’s not like I don’t make much money. Right now, things are slow at work, but I still make about $400 a week, and only about half of that goes towards living expenses. That’s a lot of money to fix things, but apparently not enough. Does anyone else have it this bad?