Well, that kinda sucked

Made it out today,,,

Simple run for the store, mostly to check my heat issues,,,, Good news (for me) : thats FIXED!!!  I has heat again   I did some backflushing on the heater core, using a 12vdc pump, my old 1 gallon stew pot, a campstove to keep said water near boiling, and I cycled the water through the heater core until the amperage on the pump went to half an amp.  No resistence.   Took about an hour.  May be some gunk down there still, but the vents were blowing warm air out, and thats what counts.   Anything down there still may work loose over time and things will improve even more.     Or it won’t,,,   With the miles on this truck,,, I’m good with what I have now.

AH, but what sucked,,,,   Getting BACK up my hill on the return trip.    4×4 is working,,  Just fine actually,,, with a slight exception,,,   I changed that rear differential back in the summer.  I knew then that it was a different ratio gear box,,, 

and what that means is my front wheels don’t turn at the same rate as my rear wheels so the back is spinning wildly while the front is trying to pull the whole load,

It works,, But don’t slow down or your spinning on packed ice.

And there ain’t a danged thing to do about it right now.   I need to rebuild the old Diff    

OR

Replace the front differential with the one from the donor-truck to match the current rear,,,,

As for ease of swap, the rear is MUCH easier to access, but there are some VERY expensive parts that need to be replaced before I can do that, and right now, my take is;

LIVE WITH IT.

So I came home, swapped out the tires with the older ones that have actual offroad treads (narrower than the street stuff, but don’t give a damn right now) and am sitting put waiting on word as to if we are going to work tomorrow or not.   Main roads are clear,

so far.

Not a single side road was scraped, NOT. ONE.   That included downtown, which is a county seat,  NOTHING was scraped but the main highway.  And that was in process while I was out and there were still lanes not touched (nearer the county line, like where I live,,, Scrape what?   thats ‘their ‘ job,,,,  )   There is about a half mile of unscraped highway because there has been dispute as to ‘Who’ has jurisdiction over it.   So neither claim it,,,,   LOL    Has a feeling that area will continue to get wider as time goes by and budgets continue to shrink,,,,

sure do hope we have some hours coming tomorrow,,, two dead days kills a paycheck,,,,Three would make me quite uncomfortable.   I can only imagine the other boys are feeling VERY pinched right now,,,,((UPDATED: No go! lovely,,, won’t be hurtin’ but not comfortable either… will dip into savings if need be, but I ain’ta goin’ nowhere blowin’ money either, so there is that,,,,,))