Repairs abound

Well, I’ve had the van for a year now, so I was due for some repairs and issues, so of course they all came in a bundle. First off, my sink drain, which I’d fixed once before a month or two ago, came off the sink basin. Perhaps the heat and and all the bumpy roads in Colorado and New Mexico just were a great combo, but in any case it fell off, so I cleaned the old epoxy off, rescored both sides, and re-expoxied it back together. An extra set of hands was a big help holding everything together for the first few minutes. So far all is holding well, so maybe it’ll work out for as long as it did before all this which was more than 8 months so not bad.

All was well until I took the dumpy dirt road north of the Tetons heading to West Yellowstone, which brought out a slow leak in one of my tires, and jiggled everything around enough to do in a few attachments of one of my pegboards, a panel with hooks above my door, and loosened a bolt helping secure my tall shelf unit. So I spent an evening, between swatting bugs, replacing some anchors, screws, etc. Again, so far so good on all the fixing aside from the bolt, which never got quite back to as solid as it once was and I might just need to replace on a larger scale.

Remember that slow tire leak? Well I had hit the air fill at the gas station and all was well for a week before the telltale low pressure light came on again, and the pressure was low enough that I decided to pull the trigger and just change the tire. Now I know how to change a tire in theory but have not had to do so in 15-20 years. So doing so at a campsite that, while pretty level, was on dirt and gravel, did not make for the best surface. I must have placed the jack a little off center or on a rock I didn’t notice because as I got it up and took the tire off, it slowly slid by increments off the support beam (or whatever it’s really called) and it ended up more on the metal under the door, which once it slid far enough that way started to crumple the edge. Luckily just cosmetic and not enough to impact the door, but blegh.

This was not the end of the world, but the tire was off and in the sliding it lowered the corner just enough that I couldn’t get the spare on, and didn’t want to risk jacking it back up more, or lowering it to replace because it might hurt the wheel rotor, so I was stuck, and of course didn’t have service and knew I wouldn’t for at least a few miles so couldn’t call AAA or roadside assistance. Perfect. But happily I was able to flag down a car with a kind older couple taking their doggies out for a pandemic drive, so I borrowed their jack to get it back up and get my own jack back where it needed to be, and get the spare on. As I lowered it back down I found, to my dismay, that the spare was… also flat. Flatter than the original in fact. Which wasn’t evident until weight was on it. So back up went the jack, back on went the half-flat tire, and off to the tire repair shop I went like I probably just should have in the first place. They patched both tires and got me back up and running and laughed with me at the mess and dent.

Last bit of fun comes from the sorry state of my bumper area… You may recall my adventure sliding into a ditch in Maine last fall and having to get towed out, which left my bumper corner (again, no clue what the real term is here) and the plastic thing topping the bumper a loose mess sort of just shoved on to hold together. Duct tape and occasional popping back into place has worked fine until recently, when I had to bust out the super classy high tech zip tie fix. A few days later on the other corner thingy joined the sad state of affairs when I bumped it a little turning around against a dirt pile, so my subtle goal of making the van look unattractive to thieves is complete. Ha!

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Maybe I’ll find a shop to make it a little more presentable, but… Hopefully this is the end of my little streak of repairs, though if not all the ridiculous exploits will be coming your way soon.