Amarillo, TX
Tonight I’m in Amarillo, TX – 430 miles or so from where I started today.
The weather was wonderful all day. A storm paced me around 2 miles to the south of I-40 around Wagon Wheel, NM but didn’t rain on me at all. Not too hot, not too cold – a perfect counter to yesterday.
My good deed for today was to help a driver explain what the problem was with his 18-wheeler to the repair service he called. I pulled into a rest area around 15 miles into Texas for a break, and rolled past the aforementioned 18-wheeler with its hood up and a huge cloud of steam drifting up into the air.
I walked back to it from where I parked and asked if I might have any tools or anything he needed. He said he didn’t know what was wrong, it just overheated all of a sudden.
I looked at it and discovered that the alternator had locked up (probably a bearing failure, as the shaft was out of line) and that it had thrown the main belt (crankshaft, alternator, fan, etc.) somewhere back along the road. He asked me if I had a lot of experience with these, and I replied “Nope, first time I’ve ever seen one”. I told him what to tell the repair people, and he called them back.
Part of the conversation went “Some guy in the strangest little car I’ve ever seen tells me that I need to tell you…”. After making sure that repair service was indeed coming out, I left him to wait for the repair truck and headed on down the road.
Footnote: I’m surprised at the number of people who don’t have any grasp of the fundamentals of engines. Maybe my surprise comes from growing up in a family that always had oddball imported cars – MG, Austin, Alfa, Fiat, etc. and being told I needed to rebuild an engine in a car before my Dad would put me on the family car insurance.
