Monday, June 10, 2013

Accident Analysis



Follow the line to Oggy's broken Body


I've joined a select group of people who have watched a tire pass them at 60 mph and the tire belongs on the vehicle they are driving.

In my case, the day was already a blazing and hellish adventure that had me pouring battery acid in my face to cool down. And this only a day after having another leaf spring component break that took ingenuity beyond belief to fix on a remote well head access road. Using a rock bar to leverage the leaf spring down to fit a bolt plate across. 5 hours in a dry sauna of 110 degrees wrenching on bolts. Awesome! Well, that lasted 1 day as the trailer's axle had been crying for attention and finally threw in the towel. And this is all only 1 day after burning out a $2200 explosion proof flare stack motor (unfortunately not idiot proof) The bearing froze, the spindle nut sheared off and the tire came off. "We lost a tire." I heard and thought he meant a flat tire because I could see smoke and shrapnel accumulating behind us in a cloud...then I saw a strange sight bouncing in the rear view mirror, a brilliant and free tire, finally released from the shackles of the axle. It bounced and bounced, traffic dodged it from the opposite direction and then the tire took a right turn off the shoulder and we three sweaty laborers, dog tired from unrelenting heat and work watched the tire bounce past us and I confess I was rooting for the tire to clear the fence separating the Zebra and Llama hunting ground because it seemed to want to make it. It was aiming for the fence.

Notice that the lug nuts are still on tight


The tire was really moving and it was either going to tear the fence down or else bounce over it. At the last second it hit a big bump and easily soared like Oggy's inflamed ego into the descending sunlight where the last hope of arriving home at a reasonable time collapsed and the Llamas scurried for cover beneath the Zebra's striped indifference.
Ah, it looks like the whole brake drum came off
We laughed and laughed as traffic bombed past us on their way to frack another farm to death, inches from crushing us.
The spindle nut either came off or the whole bearing seized due to lack of grease. The brakes are toast and now the whole axle shaft has to be replaced. Our laughter is the most dangerous part because when death and heat stroke are guaranteed risks every day then having a tire detach from the trailer at high speed becomes a joke. I still think it's funny.
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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.