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impact of an impact wrench
Sunday, April 18 2021
This morning, Mary Ann, my mother's neighbor to the southwest (one with whom my parents feuded since the late 1980s), sent me a direct message on Facebook telling me about the horse with the injured leg. According to Mary Ann, the horse was in the marsh near her house, neighing in discomfort and not putting her weight on her rear hind foot. She said she couldn't stand the horse being in pain and thought I should get a veterinarian out to see her. So I left messages on the phones of the only two people Hoagie is comfortable having on her property: Joy Tarder and Josh Furr. In the mid-afternoon, though, Mary Ann wrote to tell me that the injured horse had been moved to the riding ring on the floodplain (about a 150 feet southwest of the house I lived in as a child, 38.100000N, 79.130982W). She said that the horse looked like she had a bandage on her leg, which suggested a vet had already seen her. But there was no evidence of water for the horse, which seemed like a bit of an oversight. It seemed the immediate emergency had passed.
I spent most of the afternoon out in the driveway replacing the worn surfaces of the Subaru's two rear brakes, which have been making a loud abrasion sound whenever I used them. I've done this sort of work before, but never (I don't think) on the back brakes of a Subaru. Every car is a little different with respect to the geometry of the parts. Fortunately, though, there are plenty of YouTube videos of this particular procedure on this particular model and make of car. It's a little tricky to remove the caliper bracket with the car not on a lift, since you have to feel your way to where the 14 cm screw heads are and attack them from behind. On any car I work on, there's always a lot of corrosion, but this time I had to a new weapon for that enemy: an air-powered impact wrench I'd originally bought to remove the electrode from the hybrid hot water heater. It hadn't been able to do that job, but when I could get it in place, it made extracting those old rusted bolts fairly easy. It's obvious now why they're what's used in commercial garages. I had a bit more trouble getting the little bleeder screw loose, since for some reason this wasn't covered at all in the video I was watching. It turns out the screw's size is 8 mm and it can easily be removed with a small impact driver and a deep-dish 8 mm socket. Despite the advantage of the big impact wrench, the awkwardness of working "blind" took its toll, and by the time I was re-attaching the caliper bracket, I had serious senoritis, and it's doubtful I tightened the bolts as much as I should've. By that point, Powerful was back from a day's work at the Garden Café, and he'd brought burritos and quesadillas for Gretchen and me.
Gretchen came home shortly before I was done with the car. Then my brother Don called from Virginia, and Gretchen brought a handset out for me so I could talk to him. I was filthy, had various fresh knuckle injuries, and was tired of working on the car, so I had zero patience if Don wanted to Donsplain some arcane biological factoid he'd just learned. Fortunately, he seemed to only be calling to update me about the injured horse. He told me that he had moved the horse to the riding ring, and that Hoagie had seen this as a way to keep the other horses from "picking on her." I asked if a veterinarian had been out to look at the horse, and he said no. This suggested that the bandage Mary Ann had seen was a mirage. Before Don could lapse into talking about something irrelevant, I asked if the horse had water. He said that she did because of the stream. Some might've stopped there, taking Don's assurance that water was available as good enough. But I know how Don's brain works, and I wasn't satisfied. "Can the horse get out of the riding ring?" I asked. "No," Don replied. "Then how can she get to the stream?" At that point Don muttered something about yeah yeah yeah he'd get her some water. Remembering what Don had told me yesterday about the absence of non-leaking buckets, I reminded him of the advice I'd given yesterday, to put duct tape over a leak on the inside of the bucket to make it stop leaking. Chances are Don will attempt this with a wet bucket, since he has even less of a grasp of how the components of the material world interact than others in my life. But he's the only tool I have in my toolkit. I then told Don that I didn't want to talk about anything else until he'd gotten that horse water. That was the signal Don needed to abruptly end the conversation, which is the only way conversations with him ever end.
Late this evening, Josh Furr called me back. He immediately reminded me of all the reasons I dislike talking to him on the phone. For one thing, he doesn't really listen. Instead he produces a swirling monologue that keeps reiterating various points. The main one, the one he kept cycling back to, was that he is extremely busy these days and hasn't had a chance to go out to Stingy Hollow in awhile. He didn't elaborate on this, so I asked what he's been doing lately. He said he'd lost his job in the Staunton Department of Sanitation and now works seemingly freelance in some undefined capacity in "recycling," though now he doesn't have all the benefits that come with a city job. He also has a girlfriend, whom he described several times as "an older woman." At one point he also suggested that she was fairly wealthy and that he wasn't sure why she kept him around. Regarding Hoagie and Don, well, he reiterated that he's super busy and hasn't had a chance to go out there very often, but he has been known to get bananas and lunch meat and other things (perhaps as part of his recycling job) and take them out to Stingy Hollow. Though Hoagie and Don don't always eat the things he brings, and he sees them still in the refrigerator a couple weeks later. Josh has tried to give Don a television so he could watch some of his DVDs, but Don is content just listening to the radio. Josh thought maybe they should unplug the broken teevee at Creekside, but Hoagie and Don were adamant that they leave it plugged in for some reason. Don apparently keeps all his prized possessions in plastic containers or wrapped in bags so that they stay in mint condition. Part of the reason he doesn't have interest in watching his DVDs is that he doesn't want to open the shrink wrap that isolate them from the environment. While he does enjoy reading his books (after first carefully washing his hands), he's collecting DVDs like boxed Beanie Babies.
When I mentioned that Mary Ann had alerted me to the lame horse behind her house, Josh expressed concern that she might call animal control on Hoagie, which could result in authorities seizing one or more horses and then billing Hoagie for their boarding. I assured Josh that Mary Ann was communicating with me out of genuine concern and was not out to settle scores on the still-ongoing feud with Hoagie.
Mercifully, at some point the call ended after once last reiteration of all the important points raised earlier.
A new brake pad is on the left and the worst of the four pads I removed today is on the right. As you can see, it was down to bare metal.
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