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

I had a couple of other kinds but mostly BMX. I have a mountain bike and a beach cruiser too..and a 70s bike with the ape hangers.

Crank backwards, yup the coaster brake. I prefer that to a freewheel on my BMX. More brakes is better for doing tricks.

 

When my step-Grandpa was still alive, he would regularly make trips to the town dump near my grandparents' summer home up in Maine; This was a municipal facility and not a for-profit private operation, so taking items from the dump was not considered to be theft...

One time, I found an old (1960s or 1970s) bicycle, pale yellow with a white banana seat if I remember correctly. It was worn out but not ready for the dump; This was in the summer of 2001 I believe, and my grandpa was driving a 1993 Lincoln Continental. He told me that if I could fit the bike in the backseat (May have been the trunk; Don't remember) of the Lincoln, I could keep it; Challenge accepted! I got the bike into the back of the Lincoln, we got it home, and it was my bike for probably three years when I went to visit; Almost twenty years later, I do believe it is still sitting in the garage at my grandma's lake house, but I won't fit on it anymore. My grandma is selling the house now my grandpa is dead and nobody really goes up there anymore, so I'm probably gonna take the bike home with me and give it to this guy I know with special needs who collects bikes!

 

I am 99% sure the "dump bike" is a Schwinn; The pale yellow color is NOT the original paint and you can tell it's not a professional job. The brakes (old school, crank-the-pedals-backward-to-stop) didn't work too good but they were worked well enough for cruising around the backwoods of Mousam Lake, and the tires would actually hold air for several weeks so I never bothered to replace them...

 

I also found a complete but obviously nonfunctional ceiling fan at that same dump that summer (2001)...

My grandpa, ever the super-nice guy who was always more than willing to indulge my interests (which included tearing apart broken household appliances, from clothes irons to VCRs and microwave ovens, and everything in between, to see how they worked), gave me the "if it fits in the back of the Lincoln you can take it home" stipulation; I managed to shove a complete 52" five-blade ceiling fan (with the blades and light kit still attached) into the backseat of my grandpa's Lincoln, so I got to keep it. My grandparents' lake house did not have A/C (it was RARELY needed), but it had a ceiling fan in just about every room including all four bedrooms, so we were set in that department; Obviously, I kne the ceiling fan was in the dump for a reason and not worth fixing, so my sole purpose for cramming it into the Lincoln was to tear it apart piece by piece and see how it worked (I'd never autopsied a ceiling fan at that point in my life). I did take it apart, and then we ended up taking it back to the same dump I'd appropriated it from if I remember correctly!

 

I must see pics of this bike. That's similar to one I have with the ape hangers and slick rear tire. You'd be surprised man, I still can ride that size bike comfortably.

Now I'm really interested, I collect old Schwinns. Depending on how the paint was done it might be possible to salvage the original underneath.

Look in my album here, I did a complete restoration on a BMX model Schwinn recently

 

As soon as I get up to Maine...

 

COLD! I’m thinking we might actually have a real winter this year, like with a decent amount of snow!

 

Not gonna be needing these guys for a while!

 

If you look closely, you can see the exhaust from the downstairs furnace...

 

Even the front yard still has frost on it!

 

You're in Massachusetts, right? Maybe you can buy it and I can drop it off on the way back down from Maine?

 

All of this reminiscing about the time I lived on Whidbey Island has put me in the mood for...

MORE reminiscing about the time I lived on Whidbey Island!

The Master Chief in my dad's squadron (VP-69 Totems) was a reservist; I know how to pronounce his name but I don't know how to spell it...

Anyway, the Master Chief LOVED Swedish cars, especially Volvos (but he did have a couple of Saabs); He lived in a large house in a neighborhood that way out in the middle of nowhere. In actuality, it was probably smaller than the house my parents own now, but it seemed bigger then; It was built in the 1970s or 1980s, and typical of construction in the far Northwest. It was two stories, painted blue, and it had a HUGE detached garage in the back; There was no HOA, so my dad's friend didn't get bitched at for having enough cars on his property to start a small used car lot...

He had, in his fleet...

At least half a dozen Volvos, ranging in age from the 1960s to about 1992
A Saab 900
A 1989 or 1990 Dodge conversion van
Two late 1980s Dodge Dakotas (one of which had a seized engine and ended up in the junkyard before the end of 2001)
An MGB GT V8 coupe

I know he had at least one newer vehicle that he drove around, but I forget what it was; His wife had died fairly recently (I'm guessing sometime in 1999-2000), and he had a girlfriend by at least 2002. He had an older Bassett Hound named Fred, who was not the least bit vicious but rather grumpy at times; Fred once bit me on the face in 2002, when I got in his personal space while petting him. The bite did not break the skin, and Fred had all of his shots, so the matter was pretty much dropped immediately.

 

The Master Chief loved tropical fish; He had a large tank at his house, and another one in his office at the VP-69 hangar. He had fish called Black Convicts (some sort of Cichlid?) in the home tank, and Tiger Oscars in the tank at work; He kept a large bowl next to the tank at work, which he stocked with feeder goldfish. He also kept a change jar next to the tank. The office door was always kept unlocked, and other guys in the squadron would drop their change in a jar next to the fish tank and dump a goldfish or three in the tank at their leisure; This was obviously quite entertaining! One day after school in 2001, my dad picked me up from school and revealed a bag containing probably fifty bucks worth of feeder goldfish in the backseat of his Pathfinder, that he'd picked up at the local pet shop; These fish were only like ten cents apiece, so fifty bucks could buy a lot of them!

We immediately drove back to the Navy base, and spent a good half hour dumping goldfish into the tank and watching the feeding frenzy! It has been my dream for almost twenty years to own Tiger Oscars, but they require at least a forty gallon tank and if I want to live with my parents rent free until I come up with enough money for a downpayment on a house then I will have to make due with the Black Lab they do allow me to have!

P.S. You know I love you, Porter!

 

On a side note; Since December 1993, I have had the following pets...

So many tropical fish I've lost count (Mollies, Platys, Tetras, Rainbow Sharks, Danios, a pleco; The list goes on)
A fiddler crab (kept in the 3-gallon Eclipse aquarium with the tropical fish in 2001)
Two bettas (Siamese Fighting Fish)
Two Goldfish
Two African Dwarf Frogs
One Pacman Frog
Two Hermit Crabs
Three Dogs

The African Dwarf Frogs were by far the easiest to care for, and the last of the two died six or seven years after I'd received them as a 17th birthday present! After the frogs, all of three of my dogs combined were less work than the fish!

Yes, fish are easy to take care of in theory, but if one lousy thing gets knocked out of whack in an aquarium, everything gets messed up and all the fish die! As long as the aquarium is "balanced", all you've gotta do is feed the fish, but the longest I've ever kept a fish alive is a year and a half (a Zebra Danio, and I ended up giving it and probably four other fish to the local pet store when we moved back to Virginia in 2002 because I wasn't about to transport live fish across the country)!

 

The fiddler crab was an impulse purchase in 2001, and I will never have one again. He (or she; I have no idea how to sex a crab; I named the crab "Mr. Krabs" after the SpongeBob character, so I just assumed he was a boy) was easy enough to care for, but the damn crab loved to climb up the filtration system and hang out in the filter area of the tank; Daily, I would open the top of the tank and find the sneaky bastard hiding up there. As soon as the light hit the crab, he'd scurry into the filter box and out of sight like some sort of cockroach...

One day, after I'd owned the crab for maybe six months (if that), he/she disappeared without a trace; I initially freaked out and thought that the crab had escaped the tank and was hiding in my room somewhere. I searched every inch of my bedroom and found nothing, and more importantly I didn't ever whiff the inevitable stench that a dead crab (even a small one) would have filled my room with.

I was utterly perplexed, until one morning a week or two after Mr. Krabs disappeared, I woke up and saw a claw and some tiny intestines floating around in the tank. The filtration system also appeared to be nonfunctional; I put two and two together, and it did not take me more than a few seconds to realize that Mr. Krabs had taken a wrong turn while navigating the filtration system and gotten chopped up by the filtration impeller...



So, I cleaned the crab guts out of the tank and ended up having to get the filter assembly professionally cleaned (the local pet shop offered this service) before the damn thing worked properly again!

No more fiddler crabs!

 

There's a public auto auction in Sedro-Wooley, Washington called Whitey's Auto Auction. The Master Chief took me and my dad one time in the fall of 2001, and I was obviously in heaven. He bought a Volvo 240, and my dad tried to buy a Triumph TR6 but got outbid; The most memorably part of the auction was this red 1980s Nissan hatchback that stalled no less than three times as it was driven across the auction block, and someone bought it for $25!

Back then, at twelve years old, my thoughts were "what a piece of crap"; Looking back on it, I believe that the buyer of that little red Nissan made out like a bandit regardless of the outcome! Oftentimes, what seems like a major problem to the layperson ends up being a simple fix, and mechanically inclined people end up getting the deal of the century (this is how my uncle got a 1987 Mustang GT 5-speed convertible for a song at an impound lot in the early 1990s; More on that later). So, there's a good chance the $25 Nissan only needed something incredibly minor and was easily turned into an ultimately reliable shitbox by the new owner; If the problem ended up being serious, car ended up not being worth fixing, then the new owner had two options...

1. Part it out (the car was far from mint but the body seemed solid).
2. Sell it to a salvage yard; In 2001, I can guarantee you that scrap value on a complete car (even a subcompact) was way more than twenty-five bucks!

 

@shakerhood

I believe I’ve told this story before...

My Uncle Kenny worked as a mechanic for many years and he does pretty much all of his vehicle maintenance himself to this day at nearly 62 years old!

In the early nineties, he bought a 1987 Mustang GT 5-speed convertible from an impound lot/tow yard. The car had no keys and the people at the lot believed the rear axle was locked up; However, nobody ever claimed the car and they were able to get a title for it and sell it (this was in South Florida). My uncle quickly figured out that the rear axle was fine, but did not let the people know this. He paid the ridiculously low asking price for the Mustang, brought it home, and got it running with no issue; He drove this car until 1996 or 1997, when he sold it and leased a new Ford Explorer. The reason he got rid of the Mustang was because he’d just started a handyman business and an SUV was far more practical for this endeavor than a Mustang.

 

Another time in the late summer or early fall of 2001, my dad and I accompanied the Master Chief whose name I can’t pronounce to a huge swap meet somewhere on the mainland (like I said, we lived on Whidbey Island you generally had to drive about 40 minutes inland to find anything fun); I forget whether we went with my dad’s friend in one of his cars or we all went in one of my parents’ cars...

Anyway, my dad’s friend bought a crapload of parts for his Volvos, and my dad bought me a T-shirt with classic Chevy trucks on it; One of the vendors was selling Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars for pennies on the dollar, and let’s just say that when I see boxes of toy cars for sale it’s like dumping fish guts into shark-infested waters!

My dad gave me a twenty and I went nuts; My favorite score from that purchase was a little blue Peugeot station wagon...

 

My overall opinion of that particular region of Washington state is that it was just like Maine, without the brutal winters; As my dad put it, “like Maine, but without the snow”...

We did get snow, but not a lot of it; I can remember only two or three significant snowfalls in the two years we lived there, and only one in February 2001 caused school to be cancelled. Summers rarely got above 75-80 degrees during the day, and at night it got down into the 50s; On the 4th of July in 2001, I can remember wearing long pants and a jacket when we went to see the fireworks! We actually arrived on Whidbey Island on the 4th of July in 2000, and it was far warmer that day (at least I seem to remember wearing shorts). We had a brand new GMC conversion van, and my dad pulled his Harley and a bunch of other stuff in an enclosed UHAUL trailer. We watched the fireworks from a shopping center parking lot that year, and my dad lifted me up onto the UHAUL trailer so I could get a better view.

 

I was just up in Oak Harbor last weekend. Love going up there to hang out for the day when I’m in Seattle visiting my cousin.