PennSilverTaco's "Perfect 5-Lug Regular Cab" Build, Aspergers, and General BS MegaThread!

I put like 18K miles on my truck from January to December 2019; Why did I drive so much in 2019?!?!

A good portion was NO DOUBT the result of my 20 roundtrip commute to the detail shop and all of driving for DoorDash and Uber, and then by May 2018 I was super stressed and downright depressed because my puppy was dying of a rare kidney disorder, and I was stuck in a job that I absolutely hated at that point; On top of that, the strenuous schedule made it hard to spend as much time with my terminally ill dog as I would have liked...

While attending the first car show in York that I attended that year, I went to a local brewery, and purely out of stress and anxiety I downed a flight of beer. Afraid of getting pulled over on the way back to the hotel but not wanting to leave my truck in a bar parking lot two hours from home and risk getting it towed if I took an Uber, I stopped drinking, loaded up on food, and took a long walk before driving back to the hotel.

We ended up putting Mandy to sleep two days after I quit the detail shop, and while I was devastated, I knew that moping around the house and drinking was not the answer!

 

With a shitty job in my rear view mirror and my beloved puppy at the Rainbow Bridge, I looked up just about every car show within two hours of my house and vowed to visit them all if I could, I probably put about 300 miles on my truck JUST GOING TO CAR SHOWS in the last two weeks or so before the Carlisle Truck Nationals! Driving to Carlisle and back was over 250 miles round trip, plus the 10 or 15 miles I drove in Carlisle going to and from the hotel and picking up dinner...

 

Even after Carlisle, I made another trip to York for the Good Guys Nationals, and probably went to a good 250-300 miles worth of shows between August and November.

 

In September 2019, my dad’s boss came up with the idea of hiring me, and DoorDash largely went on the back burner for the last few months of 2019; I did still do DoorDash though, and even picked up one or two Uber Eats jobs...

DoorDash is what got me through my two months of unemployment in 2019 without going completely broke!

 

During the first two months of 2020, before COVID-19 was officially declared a global pandemic, I was averaging a little over 1,000 miles a month...

Carfax shows my truck as having just over 107K miles in January 2020 when the dealer logged my miles during a visit to find the mysterious brake noise that plagued my truck even after the rear axle seal was replaced, and 108K miles in February 2020 when I brought it back again...

 

My 31st birthday fell on a Saturday, so for the first time in I don’t know how long nobody had to work on my birthday and I was thus able to go drinking with my friends on my actual birthday!

The state had not been closed down and masks were not required yet, and my parents wanted me to cancel the party; My argument was that the whole country would be closed down by the next week and I would not be able to have such a gathering with my friends for several months or even over a year!

We had the party without incident, and none of my friends got sick, but go figure by the next day I found out I was furloughed from work, and by Monday everything nonessential was closed! I have met up with friends in limited quantities, but I reckon it’ll be close to 2022 before I can have another alcohol-fueled blowout again

 

I drove my truck to and from work on the Thursday before my 31st birthday, and then it ended up sitting for four days, which was the longest I’d gone without driving it since my vacation to OBX in 2018..

So, on Saint Patrick’s Day I went for a drive just to get out of the house; I did this at least three times a week, sometimes everyday, and ended up putting up to 30 miles on my truck per day.

I would on a loop from Warrington to Doylestown to Montgomeryville, then back to Warrington; Sometimes, I would go to Montgomeryville first and then Doylestown, before driving back to Warrington. In a way, it’s sort of a circle...

Sometimes I’d stay on 309 and drive up to Quakertown, and sometimes I’d drive directly from my house to Quakertown, which by itself is 20 miles one way!

At least once I went to Perkasie, and one time I just followed an unfamiliar road until I ended up on the outskirts of Philly; My parents had been following my route on Find a Friend and were pissed that I’d driven anywhere near Philly during the pandemic, but I never got out of the truck and kept my windows up so I do not understand what the problem is!

 

By mid-April I was still averaging around a thousand miles a month, and in either late March or early April I started driving over 30 miles one way to my grandma’s vacant house in Bethlehem; She had been trying to sell for months, and it had been vacant since she moved to Florida in October. I was doing this at least once a week, so that was about sixty miles I was putting on my truck in a matter of a few hours!

 

Everyone who views this thread regularly will remember the time in late spring 2020 when I showed up for one of my weekly welfare checks and found an HVAC technician working on my grandma’s heat pump (my grandma’s place was a condo and if you don’t know the layout it’s easy to mistake my grandma’s A/C for the neighbor’s); Unbeknownst to any of us, the twatwaffle HVAC tech disconnected the wire for the reversing valve end got it stuck in heat mode. It took two visits from my grandma’s service provider, one of which was closely supervised by me and my dad days before the new owner closed on the house, to get the damn thing working properly again!

 

So even though a lot of car shows were cancelled, a lot were not, and I easily put on over a thousand miles combined driving to car shows; This included two Carlisle shows, which amounted to more than 500 miles combined! I also went to a lot of other non-automotive outdoor events, and by mid-June I was back at work...

 

On another note, I friggin’ HATE my truck’s TPMS light!



Also, note the odometer reading; That adds up to about 13,100 miles since January 2020!

 

Anyway, my employer’s brand new 2020 Chrysler Pacifica minivans have a fancy system that not only tells you which tire has a drop in pressure, but also the PSI in each tire; The 2017 Pacifica that we gave back to the leasing agency earlier this year had this same system!

My dad’s personal 2018 GMC Yukon has a similar system, as does the company president’s 2015 Cadillac Escalade...

My Tacoma has a rudimentary light that satisfies a 2008 NHTSA mandate and nothing more!

 

Fix your tire pressure man, that thing drives me nuts too. Mine just went but I'm pretty sure one of the sending units went..PSI is all good by my manual gauge, plus when I start the truck it flashes for about 30-60 seconds and then stays solid. Fortunately my UltraGauge mostly blocks it

Our trucks don't have any toys really let's face it..come to think of it my friend's 2014 Dodge Avenger has the PSI readout too

 

Now that pisses me off that a Hertzmobile has something my truck doesn’t!

 

Ours are parts delivery trucks though let's face it

 

Most of them ended up as delivery trucks, and I'm finding that a lot were purchased by old people and driven short distances; I'm aware of an '08 RC in Northern California that had only 20K miles on it in October 2017, a 2011 in my area with less than 70K, and a 2009 RC in Lehigh with only 26K miles as of last month! So you got the ones that are beaten to shit as delivery trucks, the ones that are babied and driven sparingly by the elderly, and ones like yours and mine that are used as daily drivers and rack up the miles but are taken care of and tastefully modified...

 

Mine was a lease that was turned in after the 3 years. 6600 miles when I got it in October 2012. Just turned over 114K

 

I've got you beat by over 6,200!

Also, I forget; Is yours stick shift or slushbox?

 

Were it not for the pandemic we would be within 1K or so of each other, between working from home plus no concerts this year.

Same as yours, AT. Pretty sure we have the exact same truck, at least as it was built. Slider in yours too I think?

 

Yup, and as of December 2016 it has intermittent wipers!