Braking Down

At the beginning of this house-building project, we invested in an old truck and trailer, knowing we’d need to do a lot of hauling. A few weeks ago, John was driving the truck down the incredibly steep driveway of our rental home, when the brakes completely failed (bearing in mind that the emergency brake was already out of commission). In that fearful moment, he made a snap decision that he’d rather run into the garage door than his beloved Honda Insight. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that, and the truck came to a stop just short of the house.

We had just replaced the brake fluid, so we assumed there must be a leak somewhere and set out to find it. As I pumped the brakes, the answer came immediately, as fluid literally poured out onto John’s shirt. Unfortunately, we soon realized that a single leak wasn’t the issue, but rather a shoddy replacement job on the brake lines.

The previous owner had swapped in thin copper lines that weren’t meant to be used as brake lines. To put it in perspective, the original steel lines are rated for 7000psi, while the copper lines were rated for only 1000. It was no surprise that the pressure applied when pumping had quickly resulted in a burst line… especially considering that once we removed them, we could crumble the lines with our bare hands.

The old, copper brake lines

The process of fixing the lines spanned multiple weeks because we needed to move the truck somewhere serviceable and order a number of different parts and tools. It finally culminated in the achievement of the most white-trash scenario possible: our truck, up on blocks in our partially constructed garage, with the truck bed detached and hanging from the ceiling.

White-trash objective achieved!

Making matters worse, there was an awful stench coming from the cab of the truck. We eventually found a dead, rotting, baby mouse inside of the block of nitrile gloves we were using. It was starting to liquefy and the juices were all over the entire collection of gloves… many of which John has just been wearing.

Dead, oozy, baby mouse. Yum!

Needless to say, we finally have the truck fixed, and it’s back to hauling wood like a champ.