Moving In Part 3

So as I said in my last post, I got a call from my parents around 11 pm, only about 45 minutes after they left my apartment.  My mom starts off by saying, “You’ll never believe our bad luck” and she was right, I didn’t.  Apparently, as they were driving down the interstate, they blew a trailer tire.  To make matters worse, they were no where near anything useful and in a not so great area.  I of course asked what I could do to help and they didn’t have a clue (I don’t know how I could have helped anyway, but I thought it was appropriate to ask).  I know you’re thinking, “Why couldn’t they just change the tire?”  Well, here is the issue (or issues): 

1.)  They had spare truck tires, but no spare trailer tires.

2.) It was 11:00 pm at night and no car repair places were open.

3.)  Even though we have AAA, we weren’t sure if trailers were covered and IF they were, we highly doubted they had a spare trailer tire sitting around.

Dad also talked about running to Wal-Mart and just getting a tire, but he would have had to leave the trailer at the gas station (which closed a few minutes after they pulled in) and was sure to get stolen, tire or not.

Anyway, Alex was over here when I got the phone call and him being the car guy that he is, I consulted with him and we, along with the family, decided we’d go by Wal-Mart on the way pick up a tire and meet them so if nothing else, they would have another car to use if needed. 

The trip to Wal-Mart was entertaining enough because here was my Dad’s list:

• A tire in which he gave me the exact model number (which Alex explained to me where they get the model numbers…something about the width, the size of the rim, blah blah…I don’t know :))
• A file
• Sandpaper (I quickly learned that the higher the number, the finer the grit :))
• A crowbar

Now, I grew up helping my Dad a lot in his shop, so I know a great deal about tools.  In fact, I did so well on the “tool-naming” part of the ASVAB that they wanted me in the military…but that’s a whole other story in itself ;).  Anyway, this girl may know wood-working tools, but car stuff…not so much.  Thankfully, Alex was with me and did all the asking of the questions and hunting of the tools (I did handle the sandpaper though!) and after checking all of the items off of the list, we headed to meet the family.

 

Dad was very thankful for all the tools and the tire, but until that tire was on the trailer and the trailer was homeward bound…we weren’t out of the water yet.  First things first…getting the tire on the old rim.

 

As you can tell, they used just about every tool they had as well as graphite and green slime (that is not a description, it is the actual name of it)  Want to know what actually worked?  Josh’s shampoo…yes all of that other stuff was useless compared to the shampoo! :) (It was blue…you can probably see some of it on the tire in the pictures above). 

Once this was finished, I thought that was it and we could go home, but I was informed that getting the tire on the rim was the easy part…”seating it” would be the hard part.  Now, I had no clue what seating meant, but apparently there are two little ridges inside the rim that the tire has to sit in to hold it on to the rim and one usually uses a heavy duty air compressor to pop it out, but since we didn’t have that, we had to get creative.

First they tried airing it up using the air hose at the gas station.

That didn’t work, so they resorted to squeezing it with ropes and straps to see if they could pop it into place…

That didn’t work either, so they were beginning to get creative (maybe it was the heat!) and Alex mentioned that he had seen someone mount a tire with WD-40 and a match so since we didn’t have either, he went down the street to a gas station that was open, got some WD-40 (a half a can borrowed from the owner because he didn’t have any in the store) and a lighter.

He contemplated a while, but everyone decided it was probably not the best idea so we moved on.

Alex then took the crow bar to it to see if he could get one side seated and then try some of the earlier methods to get the other seated.

   

Surprisingly, he did manage to get one side seated so then they took it back to the air compressor and surprisingly it popped back into place!  YAY!!!

We were all very excited and relieved because I’m not sure what we would have done had that not worked!  The boys then got busy putting the tire back on the trailer.

Josh lowered the jack and we all kept our fingers crossed that it was going to work…

Thankfully it worked and they headed on their way!  Whew!

Alex and I made our way back to Tuscaloosa, and thankfully the tire made it all the way home and is holding up fine!

Although my move was quite eventful and dramatic in itself, Josh definitely wins the award for most eventful move in! :)  He’ll be moving the rest of his stuff and himself in next weekend for good!

Now it’s bed time!  I’m exhausted after the stress and craziness of this weekend!  Have a great Monday!

Love,

Maegan