Breaking my nuts

I’m restoring an old truck. It’s a ’68 Dodge Power Wagon with a sweet shortbed, a similar truck to the one my father owned when he ran the local Western Auto. He’s been through a few name changes, but now I call him Abaddon, which in various holy texts is the name of an angel of desctruction, and also the name for the bottomless pit of hell where he reigned. I didn’t call my truck ‘Satan’, since that was the name of the truck in the movie ‘The Gods Must Be Crazy’, and I didn’t want to call it ‘Beelzebub’, since that was the nickname of one of my online guildmates. Also, Abaddon is one of the few names for Satan that would fit on an Idaho vanity plate. Sadly, the local DMV wouldn’t let me get custom plates that said ‘Abaddon’, so I got custom plates that say ‘TWUCK’.

So his name is Abaddon. If I’m in a good mood I’ll get a little Fred Flinstone on him and call him ‘Abaddonnadoo’, which pisses him off. If you’re curious, my truck uses the pronouns ‘he’, ‘him’, and ‘fucknut’. Ask me how I know.

One of the parts that needed special work was the rear axle. Truck axles are probably the most untopical thing that a person can write about, but if a writer must “write what [he] knows,” (to quote Mark Twain) then today I’m writing about truck axles.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT ME ~

Now, I just implied that a writer should write about what he knows, but if I’m honest, I don’t know anything about truck axles. I’m not stupid, I do understand how a differential works - I have read the textbooks, I know the concepts. But there are different levels of knowing – even people who never fished know about rods, reels, hooks, and bait, but giving people those tools doesn’t guarantee dinner (or maybe it does, fish are pretty stupid).

I know about differentials, but that’s not the same as ‘knowing’ a truck axle in the intimate, mechanical sense. For instance, I don’t know enough about truck axles to say, “Oh my God, I think the axle is broken, thank goodness I have my tool box with me,” but I do know enough about truck axles to say, “Oh my God, I think the axle is broken, this tool box will be worthless, I hope a tow truck can make it out here.” I know just enough about truck axles to look like a dumbshit when I’m playing good-old-boy while talking to a real mechanic (I hate mechanic-speak; it’s specific, and my knowledge is conceptual. When I was replacing a u-joint a mechanic friend told me to check for some “60’s style paper-backed bushings in case you’re building a lot of shoosh.” Fuck me. What is ‘shoosh’? I still don’t know what ‘shoosh’ is).

I get defensive when people talk about manly things that I don’t understand. I live in a small redneck town, and that kind of talk makes me self-conscious. I feel a little bit of my chest hair dies if I can’t follow a mechanical conversation, I’m sensitive that way. Most of the people in this town work around big junk, whether it’s heavy construction equipment, or large farm implements, or logging machinery, or semis. Those are common jobs in my area, and that type of work makes you conversant with the underbelly of a large machine.

I don’t have that experience. I’m a database programmer. When I left my small town I did a stint in the Army and then made my name piloting a desk on the front lines of a university bureaucracy. I still look like a redneck (really, I do), but my years of wearing dress shirts, Dockers, ugly ties and cap-toe shoes means that my core redneckedness has gone soft. Twenty-plus years of diversity training, team meetings, clarified project objectives and birthday doughnuts ruined my ability to seamlessly return to a small town in rural Idaho.

It’d be fine if I was an insurance agent. Or maybe a realtor, but truthfully I can’t be a realtor because I drive a shitty domestic people carrier. Even in Idaho, real estate agents aren’t allowed to drive twelve-year-old domestic people carriers. And if I was a realtor in this town I’d never sell anything, because I’d be showing a house, and the first thing I’d say would be, “The current owners are listing this property for $350,000.00, but that’s way to much, when I was a kid this house sold for $23,000.”

Did I lose some masculinity working at a university? I dunno, it’s possible. Especially if you consider that earlier I said, “I’m sensitive,” because no one in this small town says that. Not the women. Not the marriage counselors. Not even the realtors.

In situations where someone from the trades is talking over my head, my first instinct is to use raw brain power to try to follow along – enough brain power to match the words they’re saying to the ideas that I understand. But sometimes their words and my ideas don’t merge, and then I’ll start to get behind. Eventually I’ll have to multi-task by buffering what their saying while still working through what they previously said, and for a finale I’ll have a huge fucking brain freeze. And I do mean ‘brain freeze’. Honestly, if I tried to bullshit a mechanic into thinking that I know more than I actually know, and he starts using his best jargon on me, I could wind up using so much vital brain power that I might die. I might even cease to exist. Based on past conversations, I’m certain I could cease to exist so hard my thoughts would collapse into a black hole that sucks the sun into the earth.

I have one advantage, though. Working at a university for 25 years helps you to develop certain skills. Unusual skills, such as the skills you need that help you to cope with stupid people who have never been employed in the real world. If you’ve worked in a serious bureaucracy then you know about the kinds of body-bag employees who wind up at large institutions because they can’t work at a real job. They can’t work at a place where their productivity could be measured; they can’t work at a place where they could be fired. And if you’re in a meeting where you’re trying to plan for a simple goal, such as developing an extra classroom for remote education, and one of these degenerates starts scheduling future meetings to discuss why the university isn’t developing more curriculum to serve the growing population of vegan students, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Early in my university career, when I came across these individuals my original instinct would have been to use my Army training to handle the situation. I would stand up, address the speaker, and say, “Shut up. Shut up! SHUT THE FUCK UP, no one in this meeting is here to FUCKING DISCUSS the development of a 100-level curriculum on the ‘History of Falaful’, so SHUT THE FUCK UP! For fuck's sake!”

I’ll admit now that at a university those original urges were wrong. Satisfying, yes, and appreciated by my better peers, but still wrong. It’s my fault - neither my upbringing in small town, nor my tours in the Army, taught me how to handle this type of heinousness in the gentle atmosphere of higher education, so I had to teach myself. I had to self-improvise. Over time I learned not to confront these gormless fucks, but instead retreat from them until they tired themselves out. I developed a Zen-like corner of my brain where I would detach from the meeting and ignore the tyranny of the tenured. It was a place in my subconscious where I could practice breathing, where I could think about doughnuts, or maybe make plans to walk to the Commons for a latte and a smile from the barista when the meeting was over.

Nowadays I use the reverse of this to save myself when a mechanic starts overjargonating me. This part of my consciousness has become like Lassie – it’s smart, it’s benevolent, and it will bark into my subconscious and prod my wakeful being, telling me to stop trying to power through the jargon and turn back towards the light. It’s an instinctual part of my consciousness that smooths me out when my brain starts to smoke. “Breathe, fuckhead,” it’ll say, “it’s just a truck axle. The mechanic is not going to be angry if you admit you have no idea what the fuck he’s talking about.”

So if I’m really honest, I’m not writing about truck axles at all - I’m writing about my personal experiences with truck axles. It’s like saying, “I’m not writing about women, I’m writing about why I masturbate.” Think about that for a moment, because that’s a good analogy.

BACK TO TRUCK AXLES ~

Let me sum up the practical, real-world things that I know about truck axles:

1. They are fucking heavy.

2. They are unyielding, dirt-encrusted rods of shit (and they are fucking heavy).

3. They do not love you. I know that most things found on the underside of a truck have no reason to love you, but they shouldn’t have a reason to hate you, either. Maybe ‘love’ and ‘hate’ are poor personifications for a truck axle; I understand that truck axles don’t have human qualities, but I will still argue that inanimate objects found on the underside of a truck have apathy. And a truck axle has such a whopping great shit hole of apathy that it adds measurable density to their unyielding, dirt-encrusted shittiness.

4. Truck axles do not move easily. This is counterintuitive, since the purpose of a truck axle is to facilitate the movement of the truck, but if you take away their tires, and then take away the truck, and you don’t have the kind of equipment used to move dirt-crusted shittiness (like a cherry picker, or a pallet jack) a truck axle will lose all association with ‘movement’. You can make an axle move by taking it to the top of a steep hill and releasing it, but the axle is only moving in hopes of finding someone innocent to kill on the way down. Otherwise, they are immobile lumps of ferrous loathing. And they’re heavy. And shitty.

5. Some people who work in the vehicle repair industry will gain the knowledge and fortitude needed to work on truck axles. These people will develop incredible upper-body strength. They will learn a unique set of skills, skills that might also be found in cartoon henchmen or carnival sideshows. Sadly, long-term exposure to truck axles will cause these people to lose their humanity. Most will die alone.

So…

I was going to take my rear axle to a garage to be rebuilt. One gear had a broken tooth and would be replaced. The bearings and seals would be replaced, and I had an upgrade kit to convert the drum brakes to disc brakes. They can’t do the work while the axle is on the truck, so to save some money on labor and give me room to paint the frame, I decided to remove the axle and take it to the shop by itself.

The first step is to remove both rear tires so there’s enough room to drop the back edge of the leaf springs. I had to remove the tires so the springs will drop far enough that I can loosen the damper plates from the perch. Tires are easy. Easy Peasy. Changing a flat is the first bit of vehicle maintenance you learn as a small-town country teenager, because your dad doesn’t want to do it and life is cheap in rural communities. You know you’re in the country when you’re driving through a small town and you see a five-year-old doing an awful job of mowing the lawn.

Removing the tire should have been an easy first step, but that’s where this story starts. And for the future of this project, that’s a bad sign. You see, I couldn’t get the driver’s side lug nuts off (if you already know what is happening, just … shut up, it’s my story). The passenger side wheel came off easily, but I couldn’t make any progress on the driver’s side nuts. I sprayed the driver’s side nuts with toxic chemicals and bent a $20.00 Chinese tire iron on my first attempt. No Go. Then I went to NAPA and spent another $70.00 on an industrial tire iron, a soulless cross of steel that was Made in America and forged from scrap iron. It was primer grey, it wore a sticker of a waving American flag, and it said, “PROUDLY MADE IN WISCONSIN.” That’s a sign of quality right there. And it was a good tire iron - even with my fat ass jumping on it, that tire iron didn’t bend.

But it also didn’t break those lug nuts free. I was a little stumped.

Later at a picnic I was whining to a few of my friends about the lug nuts, and one of those friends, who works for a heavy equipment depot, said he could get me a tool that would knock those nuts off. It was a monstrous specialty impact wrench that he promised would work. So I took him up on his offer, and the next day I drove 50 miles to the equipment shop he worked at, where I borrowed an enormous impact wrench.

Now, I own a few Milwaukee impact wrenches. They’re great. But even my biggest Milwaukee impact wrench was a poor sister to this creature, this impact wrench was unlike anything you could buy in Home Depot. This tool was savage, it looked like something you’d use to give Godzilla a colonoscopy. It was made for working on heavy equipment, especially heavy equipment that had broken down in remote logging locations. That impact wrench had earth-moving specs (pun), it put my puny Milwaukee tools to shame: A 1” anvil, dual batteries, 2,600 ft. lbs. of torque with 1700 max RPM, a caged stainless steel side handle, leather upholstery, and … several other features, features that I can’t remember, but they were cool. You name it, it had it, that thing was the bomb. It was 29” long and with batteries installed it weighed almost 30 lbs. I’m a tool freak, so I popped a small boner (as was given to me by God) while I was loading that wrench into my car.

I was fired up. Time to show some lug nuts who was boss.

Sadly, the manual for the impact wrench, which was about twenty plastic-coated pages kept in a special pouch, wasn’t in the transport case. It was back at the depot in the boss’s office, which was now 50 miles away. I didn’t think it would matter, though – I felt that my intelligence, along with my knowledge of Milwaukee tools, a touch of laziness and my own brand of overconfidence, would be enough to figure out how to operate an overly fancy battery operated drill.

The controls weren’t labeled, though, and the tool had many clicky buttons. It didn’t seem very drill-like while I was holding it. In fact, it felt more like a harpoon gun. It felt like a weapon you’d find in a video game. The trigger was obvious, and I experimentally found the forward and reverse switch. Another small button allowed the anvil to release the socket, which was a good find because I put the wrong size socket on it and I couldn’t get it off (I was going to look for a screwdriver to see if I could pry the socket off, which I now know wouldn’t have worked. That could have been the start of a whole different story, but occasionally God smiles on the idiot). Another switch turned a light on-and-off, which was a nice find. A multi-position switch seemed to regulate the anvil speed, but not very well, and another multi-switch seemed to do the exact same thing.

Odd.

I called my friend, but he was busy and didn’t have time to talk, although he did give me a quick tip: “That thing has a lot of power, so point the side-handle about 45˚ downward and be sure to firmly hold the side handle with your hand. You’re taking the nuts off, so just run it at high speed, but don’t use that thing to put the nuts back on. If you cross-thread the nut the wrench will happily strip the threads all the way to the root without you even noticing.”

Ok. High-speed. High-speed is all the way up, so I set both of the ambiguous switches ‘up’, set the rotation to ‘lefty-loosey’, crouched in front of the wheel, balanced the monster just above my gut, set my left hand on the trigger, gripped the side-handle with my right, and …

>WHAM!<

The wrench jumped out of my hands and spun counter-clockwise on the nut with the force of Hank Aaron. The (solid) steel side-handle cracked into my left kneecap at a ferocious 1700 RPM speed.

I made a sound like a cartoon pig and let go of the impact wrench, farting loudly and falling backwards onto the dirt. There was a pregnant time where ‘reality’ was kind of tenuous, like I was waking up after having surgery. All of my senses were struggling. It was at this moment that the 30 lb. impact wrench, still dangling horizontally by its nose on the lugnut, fell off of the wheel and landed on my shin. I’m not angry it landed on my shin – I had too much going on with my knee to worry about my shin, and I’m mostly happy it didn’t land on my balls.

Time slowed even more. Reasoning seemed to stop-and-start. There was something seriously wrong with my knee.

In moments like these I have a simple mantra that I like to recite. I breath through my teeth, focus my chi, and chant: “Ooooh, fuck me. Ooooh, fuck me hard. Ooooh fuck me. Fuck me! Oooohfuck oooh fuck meee. Fuuuuck fuck-fuck fuck meeeee.”

My scalp is tingling, and I’m aware of another sensation, a sensation that is similar to the stuffy sensation you get in your ears when you’re descending a steep mountain road, except this sensation isn’t in my ears, it’s in my nose. My brain quietly asked if I would like to know what my knee feels like. I didn’t know it at that moment, but I had split my kneecap.

The rest of the evening was as you’d expect. I spent a short time growing into the pain, a shorter time arguing with God, and about thirty hard minutes getting to the hospital. If you knew how close the hospital is to my house you’d think that I used a lot of time to get to the hospital, but my time loosely broke down to eight minutes of sniveling while hiding the impact wrench, four minutes of crawling towards my car, another four minutes of crawling back to lock the shed, eight minutes of vomiting while weeping on the way back to my car, two minutes to search in my glove box for breath mints (there’s a cute nurse at our local emergency room. She’s married, but I still like her, and I’d just vomited), another two minutes of weighing pain vs. vanity against the idea of trying to hail a stranger who might go into the local gas station to buy me a roll of Breathsavers, and then maybe a final two minutes driving to the emergency room.

I would later realize that I spent $700.00 in hospital co-pays trying to save myself $200.00 in mechanics fees. But that would be months later.

---------------------------------------------

It took me a few weeks to rally. When I finally went back to work on the truck I had the instruction manual, which I had read several times in bed. I was now flush with Fresh Instructions.

The two multi-switches that seemed similar were actually very different (Duh). The switch that was closest to the trigger controlled the speed ranges, but the switch closest to the anvil controlled the mode. There were four modes: The bottom mode was soft impact, the next mode up was hard impact, the third mode was variable-speed direct drive, and the top position was full-on, no holds barred, ‘fly-it-apart-Scotty’ full direct-drive. I must tell you, the top position is startling, it’s a lot more power than you’d think. In fact, there was a little key slot on the top of the tool that acted as a safety lockout. When you set the lockout to ‘OFF’ it prevented fools from moving the mode switch to the most powerful position, because it’s that much power and it’s dangerous. However, that key was also tiny and easy to lose, so most organizations left that switch ‘ON’ and warned their employees to be cautious when using that particular impact wrench.

I can’t explain how powerful that ‘max’ setting is. It’s ferocious. But as an example of how much torque the wrench has, I also found out this wrench can be used for turning over the diesel engine in a bulldozer, and to prevent the wrench from spinning out of your hands you have to use a cheater bar on the side handle. They recommended that you brace the cheater bar against either the frame of the bulldozer or the planet Earth, because there’s no way that a human being could hold the kind of rotating torque you need to start a bulldozer, and the wrench is happily capable of providing that level of rotating torque.

Inside the manual there were a bunch of post-it notes and grease pencil marks explaining the things that people at the shop had discovered. These were notes about the things that weren’t explicitly explained by the manufacturer. I had thought about adding my own post-it-note, something along the lines of, “Also useful for breaking kneecaps, hey fuckheads, why don’t you keep the fucking manual in the fucking carrying case,” but I didn’t do that. You see, it wasn’t my manual, and it wasn’t my impact wrench, and it’s not their fault that I’m an idiot, and since I didn’t want to seem ungrateful I restrained myself.

But I thought about it.

Back at the truck it’s the same procedure as before, but now I know what I’m doing. I half-kneel on the ground, set the speed, set the direction and set the mode, put the socket on the lug nut, take it back off and double-check that the ‘mode’ switch is not at the top (so that I don’t hurt myself again,) put the socket back on the lugnut, and give it the beans. Although big, the impact wrench wasn’t unwieldly this time, and it made the correct ‘uka-uka-uka’ hammering noise that an impact wrench makes when it is trying to loosen a tight nut.

But the nut doesn’t come loose. I give it another couple of seconds of ‘uka-uka-uka’, but it still doesn’t come loose.

There is an old Uncle Remus story called ‘Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby’, and that pops into my head. I dismiss it. I am not a rabbit. I am not stuck. In fact, I am making Progress™. And besides, the phrase ‘tar baby’ is racially insensitive in 2023. Still, I had hoped this would be easier.

I finally decide to give it a good, long thrashing. This impact wrench is heavy-duty shit, it’s made to work on big equipment, the only thing the wrench has broken is me, and as stupid as I am I doubt that I’m dumb enough to break it, so I decide to let it rip for ten or twelve seconds.

“Baaah UKA-uka-uka-uka-uka-uka-uka-uka-uka >SNAP< fzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.”

Hmmm. A quick inspection shows that nut is off. Sadly, it didn’t come free from the bolt. Instead, it sheared the bolt at the base. This is Dubious Progress. The idea of the tar baby is gone, to be replaced by thoughts about Schrodinger’s cat. Instead of a live cat and a bowl of poisoned milk in a closed box, in my mind there is now a live cat, a truck axle, and a $6,000 impact wrench in a closed box. Without opening the box you have no idea what is happening inside, but like Schrodinger’s original premise it could be one of many things: A squished cat? It’s possible, since I didn’t put the instruction manual for the impact wrench in my imaginary box. A truck axle with the driver’s side wheel now removed? Doubtful - in my experience, cats aren’t that smart. Or maybe you’d just open the box and find the cat is sleeping, having ignored all of the other things in the box, but later after the cat had left and you’d reconciled yourself to removing the tire the hard way you’d discover that the cat took a shit on both the axle, the wrench, and maybe the shoes under your bed. The cat did this because you closed the cat up in a box with two things that are shittier than that cat is.

I also have a new problem – the lugnut, now free of the axle, has forcefully wedged itself inside my high-tech chrome vanadium impact socket. It’s really wedged in there, and even with two vice grips and a big screwdriver I can’t pound it out. The problem of Schrodinger’s cat leaves my brain, replaced by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and I ponder the nature of time: I think about how much time I originally imagined it would take to restore this old truck, and then I ponder how close to the speed of light I’d have to be traveling in order to finish this restoration in that amount of time.
Thankfully, a ½” pin punch and a mini-sledge knock the busted nut out. The broken bolt is a set back, but only a minor one, and I head back to the tire to tackle the next nut. Kneel, check switches, give it the beans, and …

“Baah UKA-uka-uka-uka-uka-uka-uka-uka-uka >SNAP< fzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.”

A trend. And not a good one. Sure enough, I had acquired another suicide nut, which was also jammed in my high-tech chrome vanadium impact socket – a socket which had been beautiful and shiny and new at the start of the day, but now had scratches and teeth marks on it (I’m a tool slut, so this hurts me). Even though the threads on these bolts didn’t look that corroded, and even though I had dowsed the nuts and bolts several times with some kind of Seafoam Nut-Off, I was confused why the nuts wouldn’t let go of the bolt. I didn’t have this problem with the nuts on the passenger side. I knocked the nut out of the socket and considered my options.

Feeling a little unhappy I decided to try heating the nuts with a torch before trying to remove the next one, but I couldn’t find my propane torch (Dad had borrowed it and left it at my sister’s farm). Most of the time I get anxious when I can’t find my tools, but a generic propane torch isn’t a ‘special’ tool (like a $50.00 Snap-On wrench – and when I say ‘$50.00 Snap-On wrench,’ I mean $50.00 for one wrench, and I have to have the whole set, because I’m a tool slut). The torch was not a tool slut torch, it was an ordinary Harbor Freight propane torch with a squeezy-striker for starting it. No one is impressed when you whip out your Harbor Freight propane torch.

I enjoy buying tools, and when things frustrate or confuse me I gravitate to doing things I enjoy. So I left the truck and drove down to the local NAPA store to buy a new torch, and maybe buy a cold drink from their Coke machine, and maybe bullshit with the guys for a few minutes. It was a slow day at NAPA, and after selecting a very nice TurboTorch kit (with plastic carrying case) I tell the guys my story of breaking my kneecap while trying to get my nuts off (haha, redneck pun, I am der shizzle).

Note: I’m going to stop here for a moment and acknowledge, again, that some of you know why the nuts aren’t coming off. What bothers me is that I knew it too, but I have a very powerful forgetfulness that allows me to forget things that I already know. I forget things that should be common knowledge. I always forget the basic things that a woman thinks a man should know (things like birthdays. Or my girlfriend’s last name). And what I had forgotten (this time) was that the driver’s side of many 60’s Dodge vehicles had left-hand threads - that is, threads that loosen in the opposite direction of normal ‘right hand’ threads.

The car manufacturers had a reason for doing this – their thinking was if you thread the nuts in the opposite direction, the centrifugal force of the wheel rolling down the highway will prevent the nut from loosening, thereby helping to prevent an accident where all the nuts might loosen and the wheel comes off. The idea isn’t novel. It was tried by most car companies at one time or another, but eventually all the automakers came to the conclusion that it didn’t really help, and that it just confused the customer. The practice died out by the 1970’s.

So I finished my story and was finishing the last of my Coke when one of the good-old-boys came out from the parts room and said, “You know those old Dodge’s had left-hand threads, right?”

And I swear to God, he said that as I was swizzling down the final third of that can of Diet Coke. And I choked. I choked during a can-emptying chug of Diet Coke, which I blew all over myself and the NAPA service counter. And also a display of key fobs, the backside of their cash register, and some paperwork that a different counter man was finishing for another customer. And then I said, much too loudly, “FUCK!”

Two of the NAPA counter guys and the other customer are staring at me in incomprehension; the third was kneeling on the floor, laughing his ass off. With Diet Coke dripping off my beard and onto my shirt I look at the man who told me that and say, “I can’t believe you had to remind me of that after I’d already broken two bolts. Fuck me!”

There was a long moment of silence (and some laughter), and then I politely asked for a roll of paper towels and some Windex so I could clean up the mess. After diligently cleaning their counter (and inelegantly using a paper towel to blow Diet Coke out of my nose) I ran down to the local burger joint and bought the NAPA guys some cheeseburgers and fries as a small token of apology. When I returned with the food one of the counter guys tells me that the customer whose paperwork I hurked all over was the pastor of the local Methodist church. Which actually made me feel better, it’s fine, I don’t really care – he’s a Methodist minister, and to a Lutheran like myself that’s almost the same as a Baptist minister, and my feeling was that a little randomness in his life would build character and help him towards enlightenment. Or maybe not, but fuck it, all things are karma, and he just had an enormous idiot hurk Diet Coke on his NAPA receipt. It’s part of the luxury of living in a quiet corner of north Idaho.

I go home, finish removing the axle, use my cherry picker to winch it into the back of my cousin’s truck, and took it down to the garage.

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Two days later a mechanic calls to tell me the carrier tube on the axle is bent.

In the dark, Abaddon is laughing.


Peotr (The Normal Guy, Not A Mechanic)

P.S. Split kneecaps really fucking hurt.