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Mar. 11th, 2008 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogI love good-news/bad-news kinds of situations. I mean, they're a lot better than bad news/worse news, right?
The good news is that my truck is safe to drive and isn't in any immediate danger of blowing up, disintegrating, or rendering itself unusable in any other swift and spectacular way. It should be okay to drive for at least a while. So I plan to continue to do so.
The bad news is that I have some transmission problems. Two of them. First, it's starting in the wrong gear. My acceleration seems to be kind of slow sometimes because I'm trying to accelerate from a stop in 2nd gear. Second, third gear is not really working so well. In fact, what I thought was a delayed shift to third gear is actually the transmission deciding to just give third a miss and head straight on to overdrive once it's going fast enough.
To the best of my knowledge, it's the original transmission (the previous owners mentioned an engine replacement but didn't say anything about the transmission) so I have to say, that's pretty good for 394,000 miles. ("Sure have a lot of miles on that truck!" was the first thing the person who called me back said.)
So I guess I'll keep driving it. I'm sure the transmission functionality will continue to deteriorate, but I'm crossing my fingers that the process will be a slow and gradual one. I'm certainly not in a great position to spend the $1700 that a transmission rebuild would cost me (but really, are you ever in a great position to spend $1700?), and I wouldn't do so even if I was. It's not quite worth it. As an alternative, I'm hoping that it will last me until the weather is at least in the 60s so I can, if I really need to, buy a transmission from a junkyard and replace it myself. I've done it once, mostly, and I'm pretty sure I could do it again, especially with a little help from a friend and a little modification of my floor jack. It's actually not that hard; it's connected to the drive shaft, the engine, maybe the radiator for cooling, and the speedometer and tachometer (which doesn't work anyway). That's it. It's just big, heavy, bulky, and in a confined space that would probably involve me sitting underneath it while I loosen the bolts holding it above me. What could go wrong? *laughs*
In the meantime, I guess I'm going to use it to drive to Hartland to pick up my drums. It does have a certain space advantage over![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moiracoon's KIA....
Oh, and by the way; Pfieffer Transmission, right on the Illinois/Wisconsin border on Sheridan Road is pretty cool. They aren't charging me a thing to have looked at it.
The good news is that my truck is safe to drive and isn't in any immediate danger of blowing up, disintegrating, or rendering itself unusable in any other swift and spectacular way. It should be okay to drive for at least a while. So I plan to continue to do so.
The bad news is that I have some transmission problems. Two of them. First, it's starting in the wrong gear. My acceleration seems to be kind of slow sometimes because I'm trying to accelerate from a stop in 2nd gear. Second, third gear is not really working so well. In fact, what I thought was a delayed shift to third gear is actually the transmission deciding to just give third a miss and head straight on to overdrive once it's going fast enough.
To the best of my knowledge, it's the original transmission (the previous owners mentioned an engine replacement but didn't say anything about the transmission) so I have to say, that's pretty good for 394,000 miles. ("Sure have a lot of miles on that truck!" was the first thing the person who called me back said.)
So I guess I'll keep driving it. I'm sure the transmission functionality will continue to deteriorate, but I'm crossing my fingers that the process will be a slow and gradual one. I'm certainly not in a great position to spend the $1700 that a transmission rebuild would cost me (but really, are you ever in a great position to spend $1700?), and I wouldn't do so even if I was. It's not quite worth it. As an alternative, I'm hoping that it will last me until the weather is at least in the 60s so I can, if I really need to, buy a transmission from a junkyard and replace it myself. I've done it once, mostly, and I'm pretty sure I could do it again, especially with a little help from a friend and a little modification of my floor jack. It's actually not that hard; it's connected to the drive shaft, the engine, maybe the radiator for cooling, and the speedometer and tachometer (which doesn't work anyway). That's it. It's just big, heavy, bulky, and in a confined space that would probably involve me sitting underneath it while I loosen the bolts holding it above me. What could go wrong? *laughs*
In the meantime, I guess I'm going to use it to drive to Hartland to pick up my drums. It does have a certain space advantage over
moiracoon's KIA....Oh, and by the way; Pfieffer Transmission, right on the Illinois/Wisconsin border on Sheridan Road is pretty cool. They aren't charging me a thing to have looked at it.
