Tonight I’m in Amarillo, TX – 430 miles or so from where I started today.<\/p>\n
The weather was wonderful all day. A storm paced me around 2 miles to the south of I-40 around Wagon Wheel, NM but didn’t rain on me at all. Not too hot, not too cold – a perfect counter to yesterday.<\/p>\n
My good deed for today was to help a driver explain what the problem was with his 18-wheeler to the repair service he called. I pulled into a rest area around 15 miles into Texas for a break, and rolled past the aforementioned 18-wheeler with its hood up and a huge cloud of steam drifting up into the air.<\/p>\n
I walked back to it from where I parked and asked if I might have any tools or anything he needed. He said he didn’t know what was wrong, it just overheated all of a sudden.<\/p>\n
I looked at it and discovered that the alternator had locked up (probably a bearing failure, as the shaft was out of line) and that it had thrown the main belt (crankshaft, alternator, fan, etc.) somewhere back along the road. He asked me if I had a lot of experience with these, and I replied “Nope, first time I’ve ever seen one”. I told him what to tell the repair people, and he called them back.<\/p>\n
Part of the conversation went “Some guy in the strangest little car I’ve ever seen tells me that I need to tell you…”. After making sure that repair service was indeed coming out, I left him to wait for the repair truck and headed on down the road.<\/p>\n
Footnote: I’m surprised at the number of people who don’t have any grasp of the fundamentals of engines. Maybe my surprise comes from growing up in a family that always had oddball imported cars – MG, Austin, Alfa, Fiat, etc. and being told I needed to rebuild an engine in a car before my Dad would put me on the family car insurance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tonight I’m in Amarillo, TX – 430 miles or so from where I started today. The weather was wonderful all day. A storm paced me around 2 miles to the south of I-40 around Wagon Wheel, NM but didn’t rain on me at all. Not too hot, not too cold – a perfect counter to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":264,"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions\/264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}