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

If my truck burned through an entire 5-quart jug of oil in a month, it would still be cheaper than monthly payments for a new truck or a new engine for my current truck!

 

I guess towards the end of the engine's life, I should start using 10W-40?

 

I put 10-40 in the Land cruiser and truck in the summer. Well I kind of put it in the truck year round cuz I don't drive it in the winter. I put European blend 0w40 in the BMW.

 

We put 10w40 in or 1996 with a 2.7 engine at 240k miles. It was burning about 1qt per 3,000 miles.
While the 3rz and 2TR are not "the same", the aren't far apart.
I won't recommend it, because it's not "my truck".

I also live in the south. And we don't typically have really hot or cold weather.
Maybe once every 10 years or so.

 

So, the jug of LiquiMolly 5W30 that I keep in the garage for topping off my truck has a handy meter for reading how much oil you’re putting in (like all brands of oil). If the meter on the side of the jug is to be believed, then my truck has gone through maybe a quart in just under 3,000 miles; I can deal with that, especially since this new job has putting 7,200 miles a year on the truck (and that includes driving to Chalfont to pick up Amanda)!

 

Hot 95+
Cold 20 or below.

 

That's not bad at all.
But does that account for all the car show trips?

I bet you still get 10k on it a year.

 

@6 gearT444E
@ABA180
@Bishop84
@ColoradoTJ
@GarlicFarts
@Just_A_Guy
@Lt. Dangle
@shakerhood
@Speedytech7
@steelcity2
@TnShooter

I've talked about certain unpleasant people I've had in my life in this thread before, but here I go again. Has anybody ever had a person (or two, or three) in their life at some point who didn't necessarily hate you, but seemingly went out of their way to make things difficult for you? I am not counting kids who bullied me in grade school...

I am talking about schoolteachers I've had from 6th grade through 12th grade, and other school staff like principals, assistant principals, and teacher aids; I am also talking about a couple of girls from the Coffeehouse...

For those of you just tuning in, the Coffeehouse Center of Bucks County was a club of sorts for young adults with Aspergers Syndrome and PDD-NOS (aged 17 to 28 if I remember correctly). What made that club pure genius was that it catered exclusively to people with Aspergers and PDD-NOS (Pervasive Development Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified), and members had to be thoroughly vetted before being approved; I met my best friend John (whose mom founded the Coffeehouse) through this program. People with lower-functioning forms of autism were not allowed to join, at least while John's mom still had control...

The Coffeehouse is a story for another post...

Anyway, there were these two girls (One six years older than me and one my age) who generally treated me like shit; I will not name names, but the one who was older than me was just a bully. There's no other way to describe it. She almost got suspended from the Coffeehouse by John's mom because she was so nasty to me once. She was incredibly insecure about numerous things, and if I'm remembering correctly she had an overbearing mother and not the greatest family life. She also had not been formally diagnosed as being on the spectrum until she was 18; I have a friend who was not diagnosed until she was 47! By comparison, I was diagnosed when I was 9 and some of my friends were diagnosed when they were even younger.

The other girl, who was my age, could be nice to me at times but was largely a bitch. She was adopted, unlike the older girl, but she had a similarly strict upbringing. She would never admit it, but I think she was jealous of me because among other things my parents helped me out a lot financially and hers didn't.

My parents paid for my college while she had to pay for her college on her own. My parents bought me a brand new Tacoma while she was driving a 1997 Chevy Lumina that she bought entirely on her own for like $1,500. My parents bought me a Nikon camera for Christmas in 2009, and she a Canon camera that she bought herself. In the case of the camera, she specifically said that I had impulsively bought the first SLR camera that I saw instead of doing my research and buying a Canon, which she saw as far superior.

Just for the record, I wasn't the only one these two girls were mean to over the years; I not talked to either of them since probably 2011 or 2012. The last I heard, the younger one had gotten married; I hope both are doing well.

 

10K a year is still below average; I had my learner's permit when my dad bought the truck in September 2009, but I didn't get my driver's license until 2011. In Pennsylvania, the mileage of a vehicle is logged whenever it goes through a yearly emissions test, and that info is submitted to Carfax. My truck has never failed an emissions test, by the way! Here is a very accurate log of mileage since the truck was purchased new...

September 30th 2009: 20 miles (Date of purchase)
October 7th, 2010: 7,414 miles (First emissions test under my family's ownership)
August 31st, 2011: 13,130 miles
October 26th, 2012: 21,934 miles
October 31st, 2013: 32,243 miles
September 10th, 2014: 40,150 miles
October 20th, 2015: 53,812 miles
October 11th, 2016: 67,038 miles
October 17th, 2017: 77,719 miles
October 2nd, 2018: 88,351 miles
September 6th, 2019: 104,235 miles
August 17th, 2020: 116,279 miles
August 16th, 2021: 136,834 miles
August 28th, 2022: 156,915 miles
August 7th, 2023: 175,883 miles

 

I had long hair in high school.
I live in the bible belt.

That should be enough information to answer your question.

 

@TnShooter

Those were all mileage readings at every emissions test since my parents bought the truck. I have absolutely no entries on the Carfax report between October 2010 and May 2011 (when I got my license). The truck had just over 13K on the clock in October 2010, so I'm guessing that it had somewhere around 10K when I took the driver's test in it. Prior to 2016, I was only driving to community college and to car shows an hour or less away from my house, so I was always putting less than 10K per year on the truck; I went to Carlisle by myself for the first time in August 2016, and you will notice an accrual of more than 13K miles between October 2015 and October 2016. I started working at Puck in late 2014, so you will notice that from September 2014 to October 2015 I put almost 14K on the truck. We moved from Furlong to Warrington in 2016, and I was about five miles further from Puck. From 2016 to 2018, I was pretty consistently putting about 10K miles a year on my truck. From late 2018 onward is when I really started racking up the miles, because I was driving 20 miles roundtrip to and from my car detailing job; I was also doing Uber Eats in late 2018-early 2019, and I was going to A LOT of cars shows.

From October 2018 to September 2019, I put almost 16K miles on my truck, which was a record; COVID didn't slow me down, because I still managed to put about 12K miles on the truck from September 2019 to August 2020. From August 2020 through August 2023, I consistently managed to put 20K per year on my truck.

The head gasket job was done in October 2022 at 157K miles, I started dating Amanda in January 2023, and I had the radiator replaced at the end of March 2023 with like 166K miles. Just to give you an idea, I was past 185K by the beginning of December 2023, so that was 20K miles in less than 10 months; I had 188K miles before the end of December, so that's 3,000 miles in less than a month! By my 35th birthday (March 14th, 2024), I had almost 194K, so that is literally 28K miles in a year!

Now that my girlfriend and I work at the same place and I'm not doing driving-intensive gig work anymore, I'm hoping to put no more than 12K miles per year on my truck. My ultimate goal is to save up money for something newer, let Amanda drive the Tacoma and contribute to the insurance, and keep the title to the Tacoma in my name; Amanda absolutely loves my truck, so it'll be a good fit!

 

@ABA180
@ColoradoTJ
@GarlicFarts
@Just_A_Guy
@Lt. Dangle
@shakerhood
@Speedytech7
@steelcity2
@TnShooter

One of my biggest obstacles in my later teenage years was that I was a high-functioning autistic guy who was borderline normal, in programs meant for individuals who were much lower-functioning. As a result, I would frequently get into disagreements with job coaches, who would label me as a troublemaker for lashing out and rebelling against their micromanagement.

From about April 2009 to June 2009, I was in maintenance at a retirement community in Doylestown called Pine Run. I liked a lot of the jobs I did there, which included painting, and programming remotes for residents in the nursing home part.

Pardon my language here, but the job coach was this cunty middle-aged woman whose name I will not mention, and we just rarely got along. On a sort of unrelated note, she drove a 4th Gen T4R...

Anyway, for a couple days in a row, this job coach had me painting a table in the kitchen; I enjoyed this. One day, I showed up for work excited to be painting, only to be told by this bitch of a job coach that I was going to be vacuuming the very large activities room. I was PISSED, which resulted in me rushing through the vacuuming in hope that I would get to paint again. The job coach did not like way I was vacuuming, and attempted to show me her way, which took longer. The results were predictable. The painting job mysteriously vanished after that, and I was on vacuuming duty for what seemed like an eternity...

There was this amazing behavioral therapist named Kathleen from my high school years who I recently reconnected with in 2023, and she came to visit me at Pine Run. The job coach, who had absolutely no understanding of me or my personality, took Kathleen aside and in no uncertain terms expressed concern that I was going to become violent and/or harm her...

Kathleen set her straight and talked to me in that amazing Kathleen way; Kathleen had worked with me extensively in 2006 and 2007, and checked up on me from time to time in 2008-2009. I opened up to Kathleen and told her everything. Likely as a result of influence by Kathleen and @Gwyns04 (who some of you may not know was my special ed teacher from October 2008 through June 2010), I was given the much more desirable job of sealcoating a deck overlooking a pond. On my last day there in June 2009, all the bitchy job coach could say was "Charlie, it's been interesting"...

Same to you, bitch...

 

When you work for someone else, all you can do is make suggestions.
If the suggestion isn't taken, keep on doing it their way.

If her way took longer. So be it.
She'd have to find someone else to do the other stuff needing to be done.
Because my ass is over here doing it the "slow" way. But hey, At least it's being done their (her) way.

 

I technically graduated from high school in 2007, and that's what my diploma says; I have an associates degree in Journalism from Bucks County Community College, which I received in 2015. Because I have Aspergers, I was able to remain a student until I was 21. Hence, why I "graduated" in 2010 despite having a high school diploma that says 2007.

Largely due to the way I was treated by the special ed system, it took more than four years after "graduating" in June 2010 for me to finally muster up the courage to find a real job (that wasn't provided to me through a special ed program). I got a job at Dunkin Donuts in October 2013 and lasted three weeks because...

• The pay and hours both sucked
• I had to drop out of math class at college and retake it the following semester because the shitty hours were causing me to fail
• My boss ended up being an asshole

In November 2013, within days of quitting Dunkin Donuts without two weeks' notice, the owner of the deli two doors down from Dunkin where I'd also applied the previous month told me to come in so he could "try me out"...

I lasted three hours because the owner was such a prick!

I decided to focus exclusively on college and graduate before I got another job. In either November or December of 2014 (I graduated from college in 2015), the general manager of my favorite hangout (Puck) offered me a job and I was there for four years.

 

I was hired at a Chinese Restaurant when I was a teenager, lasted 4 hours, the Owner said time for lunch-break and don't come back.

 

@6 gearT444E
@ABA180
@Bishop84
@Empty_Lord
@Just_A_Guy
@Lt. Dangle
@Speedytech7
@steelcity2
@Steves104x4
@TnShooter

I talked with @ColoradoTJ and @shakerhood on the phone about this, so they know what's up...

Well, I'm 99% sure that my A/C compressor is about to shit the bed in a spectacular way after nearly 15 years and more than 200K miles. Right before I had the fan belt and tensioner pulleys replaced, my mechanic used this stethoscope thing to listen to everything under the hood that is belt-driven. He noted that the compressor seemed unusually noisy.

I had the fan belt and pulley replaced and this temporarily alleviated the whining sound, but it came back with a vengeance; I was in the Starbucks drive-thru the other day and noticed that the truck was vibrating excessively. I turned off the A/C, and the shaking/vibrating stopped. Turning the A/C back on made it shake and vibrate again.

Also, I realized the other day that the A/C compressor clutch was not spinning. The compressor engages and the A/C blows ice cold, but when the A/C is off, the clutch does not spin; I am 99% sure that the outer part of the clutch used to spin. Why the truck only does this when in gear, I do not know, but I think it has something to do with the extra load being put on the engine when the transmission is shifted out of park. In addition to what I have just stated above, the noise clearly seems to be coming from the general area of the serpentine belt, and the confusion about where the sound is coming from is just an echo.

My mechanic quoted $733.20 for parts and labor to replace the A/C compressor, I can actually afford that thanks to my new job, and I plan on getting the A/C compressor replaced within the next two weeks for peace of mind when Amanda and I drive out to Carlisle in a month.

 

Why were you told not to come back?

 

I think the guy could tell I hated it.

 

Yeah, the head honcho's wife is a special education teacher so he knows how people with autism tick, and they're happy that I show up on time so they're willing to work with me on my shortcomings...