10-4 Magazine November 2023

The Veteran’s View: By Dennis Mitchell “The winds of November are upon us.” That’s what the words of a song by Gordon Lightfoot said. He sang about the ships on our Great Lakes, saying, “When the gales of November come calling.” There’s a bite to the air in the morning and the promise of more cold is to come. Along with all that chill we can be sure there’s snow in our futures. There, I said it, now we can get past the surprise when it happens. Some of us have already seen some of those pesky white flakes, and a few of the really crazy ones are hoping for lots more. Those crazy Canadians and a few from Minnesota wait all year for snow deep enough to run their sleds. I’m good if I never see that white stuff again, except maybe on a post card from the North Pole. Santa assures me he needs it to make his rounds next month. I have invited him and Mrs. Clause to Phoenix, AZ for the winter, so Christmas may be canceled this year. Last time we spoke, they were checking their schedules. The two of them were pretty sure they could make it after the first of January. Yea, me too. Guess I better call the folks at PCT (Pickett Custom Trucks) and see if they need some part time help again. Back to November and more truck maintenance, or maybe I should call it emergency rescues. We have all been there – when you least expect some odd calamity to happen, it will. I spend most of my weekends wrenching on my old iron (I still don’t want any part of a new truck). First off, I don’t have the time to teach it to follow a wrecker back to our shop. Second, they are so complicated, the average driver can’t work on his own truck anymore. For those who do know how, they probably don’t have the proper test equipment to diagnose the troubles at home. Well, I know we don’t have that kind of tooling here on the homestead, so I better just keep patching up my old ride so I can go haul big iron next week. A few weeks back, I had the need for one of those emergency rescues at about 4:00 AM. You know the story, you get up early and start your day full of ambition and promise, then... BANG! Your train (or truck in my case) runs off the rails. I was climbing Bundy Hill here in Michigan on US 12. Now, for those of you who run the Rockies, it’s not a mountain, just a quick grade with a gravel pit and an old-time restaurant at the top. I can normally crest the grade without dropping a gear. Note to self: today’s not your day, so deal with it! My first sign that there might be a problem was a shutter in the driveline, then a strange moan (more like a deep growl), and then I lost power. This is a proper time to explain why my driver’s side window is always cracked open a couple inches. It’s so I can hear my truck talk. If I had been tooling through the countryside listening to the tunes on my radio cranked loud, I may have missed that moan and, the few seconds faster reaction time I saved by lifting my right foot, most likely saved the turbo impeller from exploding and sending fragments through the air intake. In case you didn’t know, the turbo pushes a lot of wind, more commonly referred to as compressed air, through the charge air cooler, which is mounted in front of the radiator. It then is cooled by ambient air passing over the veins or fins that make up the cooler. Think of it as a radiator only with air in it instead of antifreeze. The object is to cool the air and thus, it becomes denser when under pressure, and allows us to jam more of it into the cylinders and, along with more fuel, we get more horsepower. Well, I didn’t save the turbo, but I did eliminate a bunch of potential problems because of my actions. Nothing drives me crazy faster than an inattentive driver. They will pass me running wide open with tires flat or tires off the rims, and sometimes even dragging securement straps or chains. I once saw a “special driver” pass me 54 10-4 Magazine / November 2023 ALL IN A DAY’S WORK