A tale of Two Cities or "For the want of a washer..."

It's rapidly becoming apparent that Jaimie picked an excellent time not to be in Colorado. Denver has been stricken with one of the longest continuous periods of snowy weather in history. It snowed again last night, and we haven't seen the ground since before Christmas.

You decide; this 100 F in the pool on Hamilton Island...........................or this (a high of 15 F in a Denver snow bank)









To add insult to the already chilly situation my truck decided it was time to quite working. With a high temperature today scheduled to be somewhere between 6 F and 18 F (-14 to -7 C) and blowing snow I was forced to crawl under for a look see. I was already convinced that the starter motor was the root cause but since the vehicle is only 3 years old it seem hard to believe it was already broken. Well it turned out to be a good news, bad news situation. Fortunately, the only thing wrong was that the power cable had come loose on the mounting stud of the starter solenoid (everyone knows what that is ...right?). The problem is getting to it. That required jacking up the truck, and removing the wheel, and wheel well liner. A lot of cursing, and two hours later the nut has been retightened and the vehicle is starting again. Now this could have all been prevented if General Motors had seen fit to put a lockwasher under the nut in the first place, then it never would have come loose to begin with. I guess omitting this 2 cent item is how GM is cutting costs on their $30,000 vehicles, and recruits new customers. No wonder they are a junk bond company, and no one wants to buy American cars!

Oh yeah....... there is a lockwasher under the nut now!