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

I just saw a Pawn Stars where a late 1800s revolver (Colt I think?) had a tree grow around it

 

I bet that was neat to see!

 

Bet you can find it on A and E's site but I forget what else it had on

 

I will take a look for it, thank you!

 

I was watching an original Mission Impossible TV show the other night and Jim rumbled up in a 69 Coronet 500 RT Convertible, it was tan or off white color instead of green but sure was cool to see and hear as it was when it was brand new.

 

Following...did you get it off?

 

Not yet, but the chunk of tin foil has actually gotten smaller!

 

Oh, the Oak Harbor house...

I LOVED that house; It was a 4-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom, 3-car garage, 1-story rancher; It was built in 1988 and much of the house had not been updated so it was looking pretty outdated by the turn of the century, but it was in good condition. My parents rented that house from another Navy family instead of buying a house since they'd barely broken even on the last house they actually bought and didn't want to deal with trying to sell a house in barely two years. As stated in the post I quoted, it took mere months for us (mostly me) to trash the butcher block island counter in the kitchen.

The main reason I loved that house was because it was a rancher; For over a decade, I've been obsessed with ranch houses and dream of owning such a house one day. Even if I become a multimillionaire someday, I will still have a modest taste in houses; Why buy a larger house that costs more to insure and maintain when I can just pay off the mortgage on a smaller house and upgrade it? Also, I've heard of "pricing oneself out of the neighborhood"; I don't care if I do! Say this hypothetical rancher that I own someday is worth $250K-$400K; I see no issues with upgrading the kitchen and bathrooms to something more on par with a house costing $500K or more, or even closer to $1 million!

 

We moved out of that house in June or July of 2002 and spent the last couple weeks in a Navy Lodge single-wide (which unlike the house, had central air!)...

During the last month or two we lived in the Kalama Loop rancher, there was a serious miscommunication issue between my parents, the people we were renting the house from, the owners' realtor, and other people hired by the owners to do pre-sale work on the house; The realtor was a bitch. She really got on my mom's bad side when she blatantly disobeyed orders to not open any closet doors; She was doing a walk-through of the house while a coworker/assistant filmed her with a camcorder. While filming inside my bedroom*, the realtor opened the door to my overstuffed closet, which promptly caused a bunch of my stuff* to come tumbling out and knock the sliding door off its track...



My parents may have been renting the house, but from a legal standpoint that was my bedroom, and it would legally remain my bedroom until we moved out of the house; That realtor violated an unwritten rule of being a guest in someone's house. For obvious reasons, my mom made sure the realtor and I did not meet from that point on because I would have shown little restraint in giving her a piece of my mind for violating the sanctity of my bedroom*!

*Don't mess with an autistic teenager's stuff!

 

We had relatives visiting from California during the last couple weeks we lived in that house, and on the same day our relatives showed up, the sketchy roofer showed up unannounced in his equally sketchy 1980s Chevy pickup...

On at least one occasion, the same roofer showed up announced, climbed up on the roof, and started working on the roof without notifying us; We didn't know he was there until he started hammering on the roof! I'm pretty sure there were other people who irritated my family by showing up unannounced, but the realtor and the roofer are the only ones that come to mind at the moment...

The house ended up getting sold to jeweler with a wife and a son about my age, and the guy also bought my dad's Yamaha Virago; According to public records on Zillow, the jeweler paid like $220K for the house in the summer of 2002 and still lives there there. The current value of that house is something like $450K, so if the mortgage isn't already paid off, being almost twenty years into a mortgage with a $230K profit if they decided to sell is not a bad place to be!

 

I just remembered something else that happened in either 2000 or 2001 (sometime after I started 6th grade in September 2000, but likely before I finished 6th grade the following June); The family vehicle at the time was a blue 2000 GMC Safari conversion van (Maybe a year old with probably 10,000 miles on it)...

One evening, I helped my mom bring in the groceries, and I neglected not only to lock up the van but also to shut the door before going inside. This was on either a Saturday or a Sunday, because I did not have school the following day; My dad was away on business. I forget whether it was one of the front doors or the sliding door, but whichever door it was stayed open all night!



I went outside the next morning to get the paper, and this older couple who lived in a different part of the neighborhood happened to be walking by; They looked at me and very politely said "The door to your van is open."

I thanked them and ran inside to get my mom, who was still in bed; My mom promptly freaked out, grabbed her keys, and went outside in her nightgown. Her first and most obvious concern was that the battery was dead, and her secondary concern was that a wild animal could have gotten inside the van...

My mom got behind the wheel and turned the key, and the van started right up without hesitation; A quick search of the van revealed it to be 100% animal-free. I got a lecture about paying better attention to things, and all was good; I have left windows open in my truck for days at a time in the last five years (including the rear slider when we were in California for a week), but I've never left a door open since that incident in Oak Harbor about twenty years ago!

 

@Taco critter

Here's a serious question; I'm still not entirely sure how the brake-actuated "Auto LSD" in my truck works...

I've floored it on slippery surfaces without the LSD engaged, and it feels like both rear wheels are spinning; If I engage the LSD in the snow, I get much better than traction than I do just relying on the traction control. When my truck got rear-ended in 2015 and the body shop ran the VIN to order the right parts, my truck's option list included "Positraction" instead of "automatic limited-slip differential"

 

Do both of your wheels spin, or just the right one?

 

As soon as it recognizes there is slippage it applies the brakes or cuts throttle, either back tire can turn.

 

Yours is a really stripped-down SR5, right? That's back when you could actually get an SR5 AC with manual windows?

 

A week or so ago, my rubberized stubby antenna fell apart while I was unscrewing it to drive through the car wash; The antenna was probably three years old, and I bought it to replace the cumbersome factory antenna that got bent by some drunk asshole in the parking lot of the bar where I used to work...

Not wanting to immediately drop $25 on a new antenna, I superglued it; This solved the problem of securing the antenna and also allowed me to unscrew the little threaded part from the truck, but it made reception of all my favorite stations absolutely horrible!

Prior to the antenna actually breaking, 103.9 FM (KYW News Radio) had particularly bad and unpredictable reception.

 

I ordered a new antenna on Amazon yesterday and got it today...

 

My first stubby antenna...

 

The superglue held on long enough for me to remove the entire antenna, but it fell apart again as soon as I got it out...

 

New antenna...