Re: Hey David Sherman


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Posted by David Sherman [24.32.202.83] on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 19:11:46 :

In Reply to: Hey David Sherman posted by Tom Petroff (IL) [64.12.116.76] on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 18:24:56 :

The chain question was kind of a moot point on the M35 since it turned out I had chains for all tires, although one in the second set of dually chains that I bought at a yard sale marked "9.00-20" was too short and I had to add about a foot of side chain and several cross-chains to it. The snow was heavy and slippery and made for some dicey spots on the corners and whenever I hit a bump where the road sloped too much to the side. A foot of dry snow would have been no problem, but this was anything but dry.

I did make it over the hill and hooked up the M37 using the tow bar to hold it horizontally and the bomb hoist to lift the front end up. I then chained the front end to the bomb hoist beam with a binder chain and let up on the chain hoist a bit. Unfortunately I didn't have the pintle dogged down right, even though the pin was through the latch, and the tow bar popped off, dug into the ground, got jammed under the M37 and got pretty wanged up. I managed to get it in place, in its bent condition, though, and from now on will triple-check the latch on all pintle hitches. With that setup, I managed to get over the hill, although it took a whole lot of zig-zagging, and a fair bit of digging, to get around corners that I could have done without any zig-zagging in the summer. The trouble is that with 8 tires chained up and pointing forward, and only two trying to turn, the majority rules and the front tires just get pushed sideways. I think some longitudinal links on the front tire chains would help with that situation.

I got all that done last Wednesday, but then I was gone for the weekend, and haven't tried to retrieve the wrecker yet. That would involve making up a full set of chains for it, taking them over in the M37, along with a torch to cut them off shorter if need be, hitching the M37 to the back of the wrecker with its mangled tow bar, and repeating the previous exercise except with a truck that's a few feet long and probably even harder to get around the corners.

The good news is it looks like there's still only about a foot of snow on the mountain. The bad news is that the earliest I could take off to do this, even if I get the chains built this week, is Sunday, by which time there will probably be more snow. At this point, whether I get the wrecker back in town for the winter, where I need it to unload some machinery, depends mainly on the weather and secondarily on my success in making up the chains. I have a big pile of heavy chains but the j-hooks that hold the cross-links to the side chains are all loose and tend to fall apart unless I hammer them down, which is tricky because they're hardened steel which means it takes a good many solid hits with a single-jack to bend them enough, and if I bend them too much, they break. Since I have the chains already, though, I want to use them.

At least I got the M37 back in town so I can add luxuries like a heater and a rear window to it this winter, and use it to drive around town if the snow gets deep.

The pictures are from once I got to the top of the hill where it was flat enough that I could get off the road and take a picture.




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