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

Unless I can make $700+. I'm not scrapping shit.
Tires are expensive. The scrap yards here are awful at maintaining the driving lanes in the yard.

At some point, I'll likely have to make a few (a lot) of runs to the scrap yard.
Not looking forward to it at all.

 

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I didn't think I'd ever (A) find a dead body, or (B) get an injury that put me on crutches, but both of those things happened in the same month...

It has been just over four months since Amanda and I found our friend Emily dead in her condo. Just like my therapist said, I have gotten over the initial trauma of finding a dead body. Amanda has gotten better too, but at this point in the grieving process, it still seems very surreal to both of us. In the span of maybe two hours, we went from driving to do a welfare check on a friend to seeing that friend wheeled out of her residence in a body bag, and then making a snap decision to adopt her orphaned dog. I was able to talk about the experience of finding Emily's body just days after it happened, and that is still the case now for both of us, though whether or not Amanda wants to discuss it depends on how she's feeling. We discuss our feelings in private every so often just to compare notes, which is how I know the feeling is mutual that it still doesn't seem real.

I still have vivid flashbacks to that night, from the moment we jumped out of my truck in the pouring rain and ran up to her front door, to the moment the lights came on inside the condo and shattered the allusion that she was still alive. I still have vivid images of Emily's body stuck in my head, and as I've mentioned before, simply going into my dark bedroom and turning on the light triggers flashbacks.

I'm more than halfway through my 30s, and I'd say it's pretty good that the most traumatic thing I've ever experienced is finding my friend's dead body about 12 hours after she died; Amanda isn't so lucky, because of her PTSD from prior experiences, which is why she didn't do so good in the aftermath. This whole thing is a mixed bag...

My relationship with Emily was very tumultuous for the last two years of her life, as was Amanda's. We cut off contact with Emily for roughly a year (October 2023 to October 2024) when Amanda finally got a place, because Emily's behavior was unpredictable and she could become downright mean without warning. We were fed up with her shit, for lack of a better term.

We found some of her belongings in the storage unit of Amanda's ex, and decided to bring those items back to her. We started talking to Emily quite regularly in the last six months of her life, and then she got really sick in February. She seemed like she was getting better, but she would just keep getting sick, and the symptoms presented as a respiratory infection. As stated before, it was a pulmonary embolism that took her life, though the enlarged heart and hypertension combined with obesity didn't help things. After watching an episode of Dr. G: Medical examiner with a case eerily similar to Emily's, we believe that Emily's lungs were under attack from a barrage of blood clots for several days before her death, before the one that ultimately killed her struck in the early hours of May 3rd (We think). The paramedic believes, based on prior cases he's personally seen, that Emily died roughly six to twelve hours before Amanda and I found her; Amanda and I believe that she could have been gone for up to 14 hours, and that the condo's central A/C helped to preserve her body and hold off rigor mortis. I am so glad that we found her when we did, and also that we ultimately decided to call 911 instead of breaking into the condo to render aid ourselves. That would have probably been more traumatic.

Anyway, once again I would like to thank the entire TW community for supporting us following this tragedy!

 

Tires have been the least of my problems, actually; I've had to get tires patched a few times since the end of 2023, but I've never had to replace one. A patch/plug is less than $25, and I was having $300+ weeks at the scrapyard. The worst thing that's ever happened to my truck at the scrapyard is infamous pipe incident on Valentine's Day in 2022. The scrapyard's insurance company paid for everything, including a rental car, and I got the truck back looking better than new! Loading the truck up with scrap on numerous occasions and pulling UHAUL trailers twice was likely not directly responsible for nuking the transmission in June 2024 at 203K miles, but it certainly didn't help. My current tires have over 30K miles on them, and I was going to replace them next spring anyway, so I am not particularly upset. Central A/C units are about the only thing worth scrapping these days, as I've gotten anywhere from $65 for a single Bryant 2.5-ton A/C, to more than $200 for a complete heat pump system with indoor unit!

 

You churn through tires? My OEM’s still look great at 40k miles (knock on wood).

 

My brother in law is the same now, he was doing it about 10 yrs ago as a side hustle actually out running around while his day job was slowed. Went from that to just here and there if he saw something laying outside in his travels, presently he's not really into it unless someone he knows hits him up to take something. I remember a while back busting our humps getting an old radiator from a house..funsies.

With the damage issues plus the general nonsense/mess stuff I think it makes sense to approach it as you have decided to..and good excuse to go the OEM camera route too

 

Rear tire tread is lower than front because I have a bit of a lead foot. Tires looks great other than that, and my mechanic thinks the split in the tread is from running over a small but sharp piece of metal.

 

That plus driving whilst loaded. My friend had a Ranger he worked out of and you wouldn't believe the disparity from the front/rear wear