Today, I had a big day (for me). My pain levels were moderate, so I got down to do several things I wanted to get done before our big trip.
First thing I did was mow my grass. I mowed it yesterday, but because the grass was very high from our 10 days in BC, the first mow left big lines of grass clippings and some strips where the grass bent down and popped up after. So this time I did it 90 degrees to the first mow, so it got most of the clippings and most of the places where the grass sprung back up. I didn’t used to be this concerned about my lawn, but I got kind of shamed into it – my next door neighbor on one side is a lawn fanatic, who mows his lawn about every other day, and when he does he does 3 passes to get exactly the right diamond pattern. I don’t want to emulate him, but I also don’t want to get him mad at me because he’s an excellent neighbor. One thing that has changed is that he always used to mow the grass that technically belongs to us but that is on his side of our driveway – about a 3 foot strip – but this year he hasn’t. I suspect that’s a reaction to the fact that I’ve driven the trailer on that piece of lawn, and when we’re loading/unloading it we leave the trailer’s steps down on that grass. Oh, and when we assembled our Blackstone we ended up doing it on that stretch of grass and left it a bit muddy although it’s 100% recovered (although we never did find some screws we dropped). The neighbor on the other side mows his grass at a much more sane interval and doesn’t try to make baseball diamond style patterns – he’s who I try to emulate with my lawn care. Which reminds me, I’m going to need to hire somebody to mow the lawn while we’re away on our big trip. One of the neighbor kids was offering a service last year, hopefully he’s still doing it.
The other two things I did were at the trailer.
I first wanted to turn my hitch jack 90 degrees. This is a common modification, because when you’re hitched up, you can’t quite open your tailgate because it hits the switches on the hitch jack. Turning it gives you just enough room to open it. It’s a relatively simple procedure, although it involves two things I’ve never done before – drilling a hole through steel, and tapping a screw thread in that hole. But when I looked at the size of the existing holes, I realized I’d ordered the wrong size tap – I had a 5/8th instead of a 5/16th tap. I blame my Canadian education not equipping me with the experience in fractional inches to realize how wrong 5/8ths would be.
So with the wrong tap, I decided that first I needed to do the second thing – assembling and installing the hitch mount cargo carrier. I had a few small problems like misplacing (and later finding) two of the bolts I needed, but mostly it went together well. The biggest problem was that the carrier interfered with the spare tire. I see an under frame spare holder in our future. As I said it’s a hitch mount, but it is pretty amazingly solidly connected. It came with a hitch clamp tightener, which helped, but when it came time to attach it, I was wondering how I was going to be able to reach it to clamp it down, and then I realize the carrier was rated for 500 pounds, so I sat on the carrier to tighten it up. Pretty happy with how it turned out. But I’m definitely going to hit a CAT scale to make sure that having the Blackstone back there doesn’t take too much weight off the truck’s hitch, because too little tongue weight can lead to sway.
With that done, I ran out to the hardware store to buy the proper sized tap. I also bought a Diet Coke because I was dying of thirst working in the hot sun. Previously I had taken some ice out of the freezer and melted it into a cup, but I knocked it over before I could drink it.
So with the correct tap, I was ready to rotate my hitch jack head. Anyway, the video I’d watched for how to do this told me I’d need a 7/64th inch drill, and a 5/16th inch tap. Well, that turned out to be a lie – I drilled the two 7/64th holes, but there was no way to get the tap into the hole. So I tried the next biggest drill. And then I tried the next biggest after that. I think I eventually ended up with 9/32nds. Again, I blame the fact that the Canadian education system taught me the far superior SI system that doesn’t use weird-ass fractions. Drilling the holes was surprisingly easy, especially since I took one of the video’s suggestions to get a punch to make it easier to start drilling on a curved surface. However, driving that tap in was a real pain in the … wrists. But eventually it started going in correctly, and I got it all put back together and tested. Again, I’m pretty happy with the results.
Next up: repacking the pass through space because I think we’re accumulating cruft.