As a bike racer, I’ve always had to fix things.  Back in the day, we used to completely disassemble, clean, and reassemble our bikes before each race.  It was like having a little pre-race party every Friday night before the race.  I remember having chain issues at a junior State Championships and realized, right before the race, that I put my rear derailleur cage, on my Campy derailleur, back together wrong.

Anyway, then it progressed to automobiles.  My first car was a Volkswagen pickup truck.  The engine blew soon after I got it.  My brother and I took the engine down the basement and completely rebuilt it.   The engine is really simple, but it took the idiots manual to get it back together again.  We bought a simple set of tools at Sears and a torque wrench.  Soon, my favorite tools were metric open ends, 10 and 13.

After that, it was home repair.  Changing the electrical sockets for grounding to roofing my house.  The first time you do something, it is sort of intimidating, but after, it usually seems pretty simple.

The Internet is a wonderful resource for fix-it-yourself types.  You can nearly always find someone that has had you exact problem and most of the time has posted something about it.  It is great when there is a video, especially in auto repair, but forums etc., usually have something about nearly any issue you might have.

Now I fix things usually because of either convenience or because of incompetence.  Not my incompetence, but because of other peoples.  Plus, you can fix something yourself for a fraction of the cost of paying someone else.  Sometimes it costs nothing to fix something that someone might charge you 100’s, if not 1000’s of dollars to repair yourself.

I will very, very rarely let someone else work on my car.  Over history, my experience with auto repair is that most auto mechanics are incompetent.  I usually get my car back worse than when I dropped it off.  But there are somethings on a car I can’t do myself.  Front end alignment and stuff like that I have to have someone else do.  But nearly everything else, I do myself.

A few days ago, at the 100 mile Gravelluers Raid race, the drivers side automatic window quit working.  Actually, it just broke.  I’m not big on automatic doors, windows, etc. on cars.  Just more stuff to go wrong.  Anyway, Trudi said she heard a snap and then the window wouldn’t go up.

I took some Gorilla tape and taped the window up and drove home.  I started the project last week.  I realize that there are lots of different ways an automatic window works.  In a Town and Country, or Caravan, it is with a weird window regulator, that looks like it shouldn’t fit in the door.  I went to Youtube and watched a video about replacing it.

I ordered a new regulator from Amazon.  It was $95 at O’reilleys and $50 at Amazon, plus $3.99 next day shipping.  I’m sort of ying/yang about this on-line vs. local shopping.  There really isn’t a local autoparts store.  It’s all national chains.  I really can’t understand why I can buy something at Amazon for pretty much half the price of a National chain store.  Guess it must be overhead, employees etc.

Anyway, I wouldn’t say the replacement of the window regulator is for a weekend repair person.  It is probably one level above that.  Snapping the trim on and off newer automobiles always is a challenge.  Not breaking those plastic snaps is nearly impossible.  You needed torx bits and some other tools a normal person might not have.  The project went fine and worked out great.

There is a certain amount of self satisfaction you get from repairing something yourself.  Plus, it usually doesn’t take any more effort that arranging to get it repaired by someone else.  The hassle of dropping you car off and picking it up takes an hour on both ends.  By that time, I had the window repaired.

But, I do have way too many projects queue up.  So many that it is a little overwhelming.  Sometimes it is a little hard to prioritize.  But, that is just life.  We prioritize things in our lives lots of ways.  Sometimes consciously, and many time unconsciously.  We just cope as best we can.

 

 

 

 

Yesterday’s ride turned into a crazy adventure.  I was up for an adventure.  I like riding with Vincent and haven’t seen him for a while.  He suggested we do a ride that I did last year, down to Midturn, the Red Cliff, up a gravel road to Shrine Pass, Vail Pass and then coast back down to Vail.

I said what chance to you think we’ll be able to ride that.  He said 90%.  I was thinking more like 40%, but I was okay with just seeing how it went.

It was pretty good for a while.  The ride to Red Cliff was nice.  Then you start climbing on a narrow gravel road beside a stream.  We were just talking and everything was good.  Like I said above, I’ve done this ride a couple times before on my road bike and it gets a little loose and steep towards the top.

We started running into some patches of snow on the road after a few miles.  Just short 20 meter sections, then we could ride again.  Then the sections got longer and eventually we had to walk.  The problem was that a bunch of snow mobiles had packed down the snow and it was melted everywhere but on the road.

It looked like it was going to clear up, maybe, then we got up to a sign that said Vail Pass 4 miles.  That was not good.  Walking in our road shoes on snow for 4 miles didn’t sound too fun.  And we’d already walked a lot through snow and trying to descend back through that was going to be very difficult.

So, we talked and decided to take a “short cut” and head over the ridge towards the interstate and the Vail bike path.  We started up towards the ridge, in mid-calf deep icy snow.  And it only got worse from there.  Eventually we were sinking into our crotches every once in a while.

This was serious and I mean serious bushwacking.  At the top, we could see the highway below and knew it was going to be steep in places going back down.  We were sort of walking, sliding down these deep snow ravines with our bikes.  You wouldn’t think it, but having our bikes with us really helped.  You could apply some pressure to the bike and many times that would stop you from your whole leg punching through and having to dig yourself out.

We came to a couple sheer cliffs and sort of just winged it, going in another direction to where it was the lowest.  We had to climb down one 30 foot section, using a pine tree to hold our bikes as we lowered ourselves.  Vincent sort of tossed his bike at this time.  I refused to hand him down my bike until he promised me he wasn’t going to throw it down into the snow.

I have to admit, but there were a few times that I was out of my comfort range.  That isn’t something I experience very often nowadays.  I was sort of relishing that feeling for some strange reason.  There was a real chance that it wasn’t going to turn out that great.

We finally got to the bottom and had to go across a small stream that was snow runoff.  Vincent went first and said the water wasn’t that cold.  I followed and realized that the water didn’t seem that cold because our legs were completely frozen.  I refused to put my bikes in the water, didn’t want my bearing wet, but it was iffy with the lack of foot feeling.

We then went back up a steep pitch and voilà, bike path.  We stripped down and stood on the hot asphalt and I couldn’t feel my lower legs and feet.  We stayed there for probably 20 minutes, laying on the hot asphalt and trying to warm up.  Our shins were toast, scraped raw from the icy snow.

The people riding by on the bike path always asked if we were good, which was nice.  We looked like we’d gone through a war.

Riding back down to Vail was amazingly good.  I didn’t put my socks back on and we pretty toasty warm the whole way.  It felt so good pedalling.  Whenever it flatted out, my legs were toast.

We only had 37 miles riding and walking, but we were out 5 1/2 hours.  I think we were doing the backcountry thing for about 2 hours.  It seemed much longer, but that was just the time not on the road.  We’d walked a bunch by then already.

I’m not that bad today.  And I sort of enjoyed yesterday, is a weird way.  I think the walking in the deep snow was exactly what my hip needed.  It has been babied enough and it is about time I start doing some other exercises other than pedalling around in circles.  This was pretty low impact and really strenuous.

Today we’re just going to do a normal road ride.  Maybe the Copper triangle or over to Frisco, around Lake Dillion and back to Vail.