(written on October 1st and 8th from notes taken previously)
Gratefully, I was undisturbed last night. 🙏
Unfortunately, not a single junkyard in the nearby area had a van that would have the bracket that I needed. 😶
It’s incredible to me that they’ve made basically the same van for decades, and mine just so happens to be one where the part I need was only around for a few years.
Could be because of EPA regulations. It is part of the EVAP system-ish, and with all the regulations in recent years, automakers have had to change a heck of a lot on the vehicles to meet the requirements.
🤷
Regardless of the reason for the dearth of available vehicles to pull parts from, it remains a reality for me.
Where on earth am I going to get the bracket that I need?
[sigh]
I spent a good while on Facebook marketplace looking for stuff (mostly tires for Rover), including spending a bit of time just hanging out near an on-ramp just a little bit north of Fort Smith in the hopes that somebody in the Fort Smith area would reply that they had what I needed.
But, alas, no. I struck out again.😕
But hey, once back in town, I got to drown my sorrows yet again with a Sam’s Club combo meal featuring the bottomless drink. 🙃
After my early lunch at Sam’s Club, I headed over to the recycling center in Rogers to drop stuff off, before returning to Haven Hill.
Once back on the hill, I spent most of the afternoon cleaning up leaves and sticks and what not and then battling with my dump trailer to try and bend the doors such that they’ll close.
Cleaning up leaves and sticks is easy. Trying to bend the doors back… Not so much. 😅
Like last year (or was it the year before?), I took the doors off, and this time I found the whole door is tweaked on one side (not just the hinges like it was last time).
Ugh. 😕
Imagine a piece of paper lying flat on the table, and you start to lift up one corner. That’s basically what I was dealing with. Three corners are still flat, but the rest of it is bent out, and so are the sides closest to that corner.
Ugh. 😞
I tried multiple strategies to try and bend the door back. My best idea being taking the door and laying it flat on the ground with part of the door up on blocks, and then driving the tractor over it to try and bend the door back straight.
(A similar approach is used to straighten out bent car doors that aren’t sealing out air properly [where the weather stripping goes]).
But the metal of the door (passenger side, so to speak) is so strong that the weight of the tractor did absolutely nothing. 😶
If I’m remembering correctly, I was about to start or had just started a new strategy, again with the tractor, but still without success (I had put the door back on, and I was using the tractor to pull [bend] the door). It was about that time that Jim showed up, and with his help, we were able to get the door bent sufficiently back in place to have it close at least somewhat decently. 🎉
One of the things that we ended up doing was using shims at at the bottom of the door between the door and the side frame so that as the door swung closed the shim at the bottom forced the door up, keeping it from sagging.
I had been using shims before, but Jim noticed that in order to get the door to be able to close without mass of effort, we were going to need sort of a permanent shim there on the bottom side.
So I manned the tractor, and Jim did the testing after each bend until we got the shimmed door bent back to a point where it could be closed without enormous effort in pushing. 🥳🎉🥳
It still wasn’t exactly where I wanted it, but it was functional, and of course, now it needs to be welded.
With the torn sheet metal where the hinges are, there’s a lot less metal holding the door in place, which allows it to sag. That’s what had happened to neighbor Dan each time he had tried to fix it for me. He’d get it bent to a place where it would open and close somewhat decently, but then it wouldn’t be long before the metal would sag more, and he’d be right back to the same problem.
I don’t quite remember the chronology of the rest of my door bending efforts. Jim headed off to do things he needed to do, and I helped him by cleaning up the leftovers/waste that were outside by his front porch from the ongoing front-room remodeling project.
I think it was by the time I finished with getting that cleaned up that I went back over to check the trailer and had found that the metal had sagged already. 😕
Since it hadn’t been bent as far as I had wanted to bend it before, I decided to give it a go again by myself. So I hopped in the tractor raised the bucket and started pulling again.
Without someone to help me, it was really hard to tell how far to bend it before I should let it go to see how much spring back the metal was going to do after being bent. Because of that, I ended up bending it so far that the springback didn’t spring back enough. 😅
Gratefully, I was able to push what I had just bent, getting it right about where I wanted it, straighter than it was before.
Unfortunately, I think that the door itself being straighter ended up making it harder to close because of the way the whole rear dumping frame was bent?
I don’t remember what all happened from there, I got mad at something, but I don’t remember what. I think maybe at myself? 🙃
Eventually, I got the trailer to a place that I was happy with, and drove it over to called it a night.
Chatted with my sister Heather for a bit. Dropped some stuff off at my shed down in the lower field, dropped off my trailer at neighbor Dan’s place just before 10:30 p.m. 😅, and then headed to the neighborhood market in Pea Ridge to grab some stuff.
Despite the late hour, it was back to my mom’s place helping out with house stuff a bit before veging, journaling a bit, and calling it a night.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
