05-11-13

Best laid plans and all that.

Yesterday didn’t turn out quite like we had planned.

I got the black tank dumped and flushed out. That part worked.

I got out my tools and crawled under the jeep to tighten the doughnut for the exhaust system.

“Hmm. The doughnut isn’t loose. So what is causing the exhaust system to rattle?”
As it turned out the tail pipe had come loose from the muffler. When we were in Quartzsite I had Best Auto Repair go over the exhaust system and fix all the leaks and weld it up. They just put a tack on where the tail pipe connects to the muffler.
“What to do?”
Patti and I drove into town and I asked at the gas station where I could get the tail pipe welded.

The guy at the gas station sent me to the other end of town where there is a shop that does exhaust work.

On the way we stopped at Safeway and picked up some stuff for the chicken casserole I was planning to make for dinner.

Eventually we got to the shop where I enquired if they could weld the tailpipe. The guy at the shop said that he couldn’t get to it until some time next week.

Okay so that’s not going to work. This rattle is driving me crazy.
On the way home I stopped at the local True Value Hardware store. I was looking for some way to fix the problem. I figured that I could modify one of those clamps that plumbers use to stop leaks in the middle of a pipe.
The only one I could find was $20 and it didn’t look like it would do the job. I asked one of the guys working there if they had anything that I could use to fix the problem. He said that they had what I wanted in their automotive department.
I walked up and down the automotive isle but all I could find was bells and whistles, polish and oil.
No real repair parts.

Finally I decided that what I needed was a couple of 2” hose clamps and some kind of metal to wrap around the pipe to muffler connection. What I ended up with was two clamps and some HVAC metal tape.

All this time heavy rain squalls were coming through the area. It was raining when we got back to Plan B so we hung out for a while until the sun came out again.
After about an hour the ground dried out and I went out to see if I could fix the tail pipe.
I put many, many layers of metal tape around the joint and then put the clamps on the muffler output pipe and tail pipe sided of the tape. The repair seems to be pretty strong but we will have to see how long it lasts.

By the time I was done with the repair it was after 1:30 so we went into town for lunch. We went to to Twisters Cafe and had a couple of hamburgers.
Of course, since we had a late lunch we weren’t hungry for dinner.

Patti decided not to cruse the tourist shops.
We are going to Sedona today so she will get a chance to play tourist down there. I’ll bring my book.