Drive It Till The Wheels Fall Off

Our travels

This 12″ x 12″ scrapbook is about to bust apart everywhere.  It is filled with places we’ve been, things we’ve seen on the highways, and reminders of some head scratching events that have transpired in the years we have been doing Drive-Away.

I’m going to introduce you to one such event that happened to Joe while he was out being a solitary Road Warrior in 1999.  Before I began riding with him.

We have traveled past the spot where this event happened several times and he’s pointed it out to me each time we pass.  One day I took pictures of the spot as we went by.  Later when I made a scrapbook page of these photos I MADE him write out the events of this trip.  Down below in the photo, the area on both pages that is white and has type on it.  (Anything I can do to involve my Scrubby in scrapbooking I’ll do it) 🙂  That is what Joe typed out.   I’m going to share that with you now.  This is Joe’s story and these are his written words.

Scrapping the event

————————————————

This is the story of how I came  home with a blown engine in the Red Truck (Old Betsy) and how I put the steer tire from the back truck through a building.

I had been dispatched to go to Miami, Florida to pick up two repo’s and deliver them to Arrow Truck Sales in Kansas City, Missouri.  I drove to Miami on the Florida Turnpike and I-95.  During the trip the engine started using more oil, about a gallon every 100 miles, and sounding really bad.  I finally found the right Freightliner place, it is under the bridge that goes somewhere to the west of I-95 and to get to the Freightliner place you have to know just the correct way or you will just drive by on the upper bridge and see where you want to go and you can’t get there.

The trucks were a runner and non-runner.  I checked them out and hooked them up to the boom that was carried on the pickup.  After using the truck to install the boom and get the back truck off the ground and properly  up in the air, I started to hookup the pickup as the third unit.  That’s how we used to do a two-way.  I got the tow bar hitch hooked to the ball on the front of the back truck and shut off the engine.  I thought I would see how hard it was going to be to restart the engine.  It would not start.  I thought “Oh well, it will after it cools off”.  Little did I know what I was in for.

Now I KNOW to have the lug nuts tightened on the front axle of a truck that  you do not know anything about, but I was just starting out doing this type of work so I just hit the highway and gassed on it for the next stop.  I made good time that day and the next, getting to St. Louis, Missouri before rush hour traffic.  I sailed right through St. Louis traffic and was heading west on I-70 around the 178 mile marker.  I hear an exclamation from the CB radio about “Look at that tire come off that truck”.  It took me about 2 seconds to realize that he was talking about me.  I looked in the left hand mirror and saw the tire bouncing through the median, east bound traffic (I have no idea how the east bound cars missed the tire), across the bar ditch, across the fence, across the east bound service road, another fence and into the farmers field.  I lost sight of the tire and wheel after that.  I had my hands full getting the whole rig off the highway and onto the side of the road without doing more damage to something, me or something else.  The man who said “Look at that tire” was in the truck right behind me.  He stopped and both of us got out to look at the mess.  The axle hub was ground down to the bearings.  I knew that I wasn’t going anywhere like this.  The driver told me that he watched the tire bounce through the field and go into a building on the south side off the highway.

Building the tire went through

I called my dispatcher and told him of the problem.  They had to get hold of somebody to make a decision at Arrow.  About an hour later they told me that Arrow was sending a wrecker for the back truck.  This meant that I had to unhook right on the highway shoulder.  That was going to be fun.  I went to start the pickup and the engine was locked up tight.  It had ran for the last time.  This meant that I had to unhook without the aid of my pickup.  I had unhooked the pickup (see In The  Beginning – Or Shortly After to see what Joe is talking about) so I just pulled the two trucks forward enough for me to have plenty of room to work.  I unhooked the two trucks and went back with the front truck to hook up the pickup to the back of the truck.  I pulled the pickup forward in front of the back truck and backed up to the main boom and loaded it on the pickup.  I now had the two trucks separated and was hooked up to the front truck as a single.  I then waited for about 4 more hours for the wrecker to come.

Before we hooked the wrecker up I told the driver that we had to go to the other side of the highway and get the tire and wheel that came off the truck.  We went over to the other side of the highway, where the driver who saw the whole thing said the building and tire was, and started looking for the right building.  We looked and looked at all the buildings over there and could find no place that was marked by a 175 pound tire and wheel going 50 miles per hour.  No breaking or entering markers anywhere.  The driver had said a building so I assumed  that meant wood construction.  There was the back two thirds of a trailer house but it did not have a mark on it that I could see.  After almost giving up I looked in the window of the trailer and there was the tire, about 10 feet in.  The tire had hit right where two sheets of aluminum siding came together.  The tire had just pushed them aside and went into the trailer house and the siding just came back together like it had never been hit.  I had to climb in through the siding and we held it open while I rolled the tire out.  We loaded it on the wrecker and went to hook up the back truck.

Where "The Wheel Fell Off"

The rest of the trip to Arrow in Kansas City, Missouri was uneventful.  The next morning I delivered my front truck to them.  I had called around to see if there were any singles in Kansas City that I could use to get the red truck home and Dealers had one just 2 blocks from the Arrow lot.  I got it and  hooked up the pickup and headed for Oklahoma City.  It was around the 142 mile marker on I-35 that the Red Truck came loose from the truck and rolled backwards through the median.  I ended up sitting on my butt on the dotted line of the south bound side of I-35.  That’s how I came to build the Mark II trailer, but thats another story for another time.

——————————————————–

In 2002, Joe and I went back to the same Freightliner dealership in Miami, Florida for four trucks.  The back truck I was to tow had been a repo and it was filled with everything the previous driver had left in it.  During the inspection process I have to look under the bottom bunk of the trucks with sleepers to make sure the floor and storage compartment isn’t damaged and that the bed raises and lowers.

I had a real embarrassing surprise waiting for me in that truck.  The storage space was chock full of boxes of “adult toys” and “adult movies”.  Joe was in the shop settling the bill left to be paid when I went in and told him about the contents of the sleeper.  Now, let me tell you, it didn’t take long for the men in the garage part of the dealership to sift through the contents under the bunk and lay claim to whatever they could get.  Within about a minute that space under the bunk was totally empty.

They had no use for a CB radio, a small screen television, clothing in various states of cleanliness, wadded up blankets, shoes, canned food items, and other detritus of the previous driver.

6 days and counting down.