Strange Day!

 I woke up this morning after being awake until 3:30am last night. I was groggy but my wife wanted me to drive her to pick up our main car which was having new tires put on. I like Michelin tires because they last longer than most other tires and because of this I consider them safer to drive on. I even put Michelin tires on my 4 wheel drive truck. But, I usually want All Weather mud snows so I can literally drive anywhere through almost anything since everything we own is either 4 wheel drive or all wheel drive. So, I asked for my wife to get All weather Mud and snow Michelin tires. However, when we got there I looked at the tread and it looked like it was designed for heavy rain the way the treads were with gaps and the design. I worried that this design might make the tires hum on a freeway like some off road tires do. So, I asked about this and they said this is what Michelin was selling for all weather tires right now so i sort of had to live with it.

Then they told us that one of the aluminum wheels was bent in the inside. Now, in the old days you just took a mallet and bended the steel wheels back into place and then rebalanced the tire. However, now days with Aluminum wheels you cannot do that because the aluminum likely would break if you did that at some point and not hold air in your tubeless tires.

So, this meant that we were going to have to order a new aluminum wheel for our main car and it meant that we couldn't drive it a lot distance soon. But, since we own two other  motor vehicles (three if I count my KLR 650 Motorcycle that I don't ride anymore because of my health) we could take another vehicle instead so that is what we likely will do.

However, then I started remembering my wife running over a big pothole at high speed on Interstate 5 somewhere between the SF Bay area and Portland, Oregon. She remembers it differently that it was me who hit a pothole at some point on the trip. The point is it doesn't really matter who accidentally did this we have to replace the wheel in addition to balancing all for tires, realligning all for wheels because it's an all wheel drive and now we have to buy another wheel because this one is damaged and can't be fixed.

Also, to make this day even more interesting a lady was there who had picked up a nail in one of her tires and because it couldn't be repaired was going to have to buy 4 new tires and looked like she was in shock and going to cry. We also had to do this with one of our all wheel drives in the past. 

So, this is one of the drawbacks of owning an all wheel drive vehicle if one of the tires gets too messed up to continue driving on it.

Anyway, I thought this was a strange day. However, I also got news that my son didn't get sick from his son and so this was good news that he was only exhausted from walking to far and that's all.

Then I sort of felt sick from everything but maybe that's the lucky thing here. Because no one died when the Wheel got destroyed because it is aluminum and not steel where it cannot be malleted back into place because it is aluminum.

I think periodically we all have days like this. Alls Well that ends well I guess.

I'm just glad my wife and I are okay through all of this.

Later: 

This next story I was reminded of by telling today's story. I was young and not getting enough sleep becuase our son was a 2 1/2 year old and I wanted to drive out to get some parts for my VW Window Van so this would have been likely 1976 in San Marcos California.

Well, because I hadn't had enough sleep I changed a wheel on my VW Van and forgot to tighten the lug nuts on a rear wheel because I hadn't slept enough. Well, as a drove along (luckily no one was on the road then) my rear wheel came off and my lug nuts were scarttered all over the highway and into the reeds next to the car. I found only 3 or 4 (usually I think there are 5) so I had to make do with I think 3 lug nuts spaced as good as I could to get home. Then I drove out in my 1968 Camaro that I had bought new when I was 20 to get more lug nuts and other car parts for my VW Van.

I told this story to a friend today and he said did I flip the van? I said, "If this was a front wheel I might have turned over or flipped doing this but luckily it was a rear wheel that came off. The funny thing about this was watching my rear wheel pass me on the left side and rolling down the road while my brake hub sparked along the Asphalt road in my rear view mirror. this all was pretty unexpected as you can imagine.

This would have been 1976 in San marcos California.

Note:

Luckily, we had shoe brake hubs then or this would have been really expensive to fix if I had had disc brakes then instead of shoe brakes with a metal hub.