Not Necessarily Interesting News

Yesterday I went to a offroad park about 2 hours from here, Katemcy Rocks. I was goin to meet a couple of people from the San Antonio chapter of the Texas Rovers. My father and son also came along. I showed up about 1/2 hour before the others so I got the truck aired down and ready to head out. I did get to play on the ramp a bit before they showed up as seen in the pic.

Joe and Ed showed up and we got ready to head out. I hopped in the Defender and turned the ignition. The key turned to ‘on’ then just started spinning in circles. The truck wouldn’t turn over. Shit. Ed, who has done a lot of work on Rovers, helped me remove the ignition and we played with it for a bit to no avail. The truck wasn’t gonna start. I sent Joe and Ed on their way, I didn’t want to ruin their day too. My father and I stayed behind and played with it and discovered a way of reassembling the ignition to cause the starter to turn over the engine. The only problem was that after the engine started the starter was still engaged. We solved that by pulling the starter relay. The rest of my day went like this. To start the car, insert the starter relay. Once the truck turns over pull that and it stays running. To stop, leave in gear, step on brakes and relase clutch to stall it. At the end of the day I just had to disconnect the battery.
I also had to put up with the persistant overheating problems. It now looks like a blown head gasket. Oh boy.

When out on the trail we were navigating a particularly hairy section where you have to put your left tires over a rocks while your right tires are inches from a 30′ drop-off. Fun. After negotiating that Joe made the turn away from the edge and when climbing away from the drop-off he put a rear tire into a hole which caused the whole Disco to lean back lifting a wheel 3′ off the ground. He was teetering near going over backwards and off the cliff. My father who was taking pics with my camera jumped to the rescue and in doing so smashed my Sony digicam. Oops. There went $350. He keeps saying he’ll replace it and I insist it’s not a big deal. ‘It’s only a camera, I’m just glad you could throw weight onto Joe’s truck to keep him from falling off a cliff.’ Sadly I only got 6 pics of the day before the camera met its untimely demise. This pic is of Joe’s Disco about 30 seconds before trying to throw himself off that cliff. Ed’s RRC is right behind him and I’m behind Ed.

The damage:

• Blown head gasket
• broken speedo cable from removing dashboard
• trashed ignition
• crushed digicam

I’m going to be spending some quality time in the garage with my truck over the next couple weeks.