Ugh!

Headed home from Dartmouth, late at night, in the snow.  I have been taking the Peacham shortcut, from Barnet to West Danville/Joe’s Pond. This bypasses the St. J/Danville elbow, and it’s a very pretty drive.

So they finally plowed the road, and I was almost up to Joe’s Pond, about a half mile from Rt 2.  I saw a snow ball in the road, perfectly white.  Then the car hit it. BANG!!!  It was no snow ball, it has a large rock covered in snow! Immediately the car is unhappy. I pull over to see what happened.  The rock pinched the tire against the rim and there was a 1″ x 2″ hole in the sidewall!  Needless to say the tire was flat…

I didn’t want to change it there, so I drove in the flat to Rt.2 and pulled off in the well lit parking area.  I got out the tools and set to work to change the tire.

It didn’t go well.  I had just gotten these tires, a pair of hardly used Gislaved Nordman 4’s for $17 each…  And I begged the people that put them on to please not use their air-powered hammer-drills to tighten the lug bolts.  But to no avail.  Needless to say, I couldn’t get the damned lug bolts off the car.  I did succeed in loosening one bolt out of five. I was jumping on the end of the cross wrench, and the snow on my shoes was very slippery.  The bones in my feet were starting to hurt! There was no way I was going to get those lug bolts off with my standard cross wrench. I needed power tools or more leverage.

I called home and left a message, Audrey told mom she heard the phone talking and so she got up and called back.  It turns out that I did pay the AAA fee, so she called them for me.  They called me and I got them situated on the map.  “Search GoogleMaps for ‘Joe’s Pond’.  See where Rt 15 meets Rt 2? I am right across the street!”  They said someone would be there in 45 minutes but that they are busy.  I scoffed at this, no one in Vermont was busy, that’s for sure, and how many guys would they have to call before they found someone willing to get out of bed at 11PM when it’s 4˚F out and come change a flat for in irate driver? Not that I was irate, but that is the usual state for most people.

So I waited. I didn’t turn off the motor because it was 4˚F ou and the starter doesn’t work right when the engine is warm. Luckily I had just filled it up before I left Hanover.

And I waited.

And waited.

I turned the car around because the wind was from the back and blowing the exhaust up the side.  The temperature sensor also said it was 36˚, after I turned it around, it took about 5 minutes for it to drop down to the actual reading of 4˚…

And waited.

A semi pulled in to the parking lot and drove to the far end.  I figured he might have something, so I went down there, stood away from the cab and waved and hollered.  He saw me and opened the door.  I told him my predicament and asked if he had a piece on pipe that I could use as a leverage extension.  He thought for a minute and then hopped out and opened a little side door and pulled out a mini-load bar.  This he separated and handed me the outer sleeve, a 3.5 foot long piece of square aluminium stock.  It was perfect. He came back to my car with me and held the end of my cross wrench, to keep it parallel while I slid the extender over the upper crossbar. Boy did I have to lean on it!  I turned it about 1/4 turn and really lean into it before the bolt finally cracked loose! I hit my face on the hood.  We succeeded in getting all of the bolts loose, it never would have happened without that extension.

Next I put the jack on the car.  Volvo might have once been great at engineering the safest cars on the planet, but their jacking system has always been sketchAF. This car is over 3000 pounds, yet they have one jacking point per side.  You are supposed to lift the entire side of the car at once!

I get to work raising the car.  Right when I think I might have it high enough, the welds on the jack point breaks and the car falls to the ground!  Oh, boy.  It isn’t even Friday the 13th yet!

Well, the trucker didn’t have a jack, he said that they aren’t allowed to change tires anymore.  There’s nothing to do but try again. This is when I noticed that the plastic rocker panel was shattered from the car dropping onto the rock when the tire blew. Later I showed Stephanie how the arc of the scrape increases about a foot behind the wheel well.  The distance between the top of that arc from the center of the tire was how far the car travelled until all the air had escaped from the huge hole in the sidewall!  Phun with Physics!

I stuck the jack back onto the broken jack point and started raising it again, this time just barely enough to get the flat off the ground.  It was also just enough to get the donut spare on, swapping tires as quickly as possible before the last weld point broke on the jack point.

I actually succeeded! With the help of a trucker from Maine.  Yay!

Since I am a nice guy I called AAA and told them to cancel the response.  They claimed they had just found someone, at 12:13 AM.

I had thought I was going to get home nice and early, but instead I got home later than ever.