Goodwrenchin’

So for a lot of the weekend, I worked on flushing my radiator and replacing the thermostat. I figured it was time since my truck recently started running at the “A” and “L” of the word “NORMAL” on my dashboard temperature gauge. It started out just fine; I drained the radiator (and most of the block, I think), took off the housing to the thermostat, and I had all my replacement parts and fluids ready to go. But, as many things work out when you’re fixing your car, it all went a little downhill. I was tightening the last bolt to the thermostat housing and twisted the head right off, which only left a little stub of thread to work with. If I had had some vise-grips yesterday, I would have been done yesterday, but instead I spent a couple hours squeezing plier handles in hopes of getting it out. Once I bought some vise-grips this morning however, that bolt was out in about 5 minutes. Reassembled and filled up, my truck now runs at a cool “N” or “O”. It’s always the little things that get ya and take forever when you’re goodwrenchin’, such a stupid bolt that you can only loosen/tighten a 1/16 of a turn at a time (that’s about 30 minutes to get it out/in if you’re wondering). In the end its fun to take your car from operable status, to inoperable driveway clutter, and then revive it back to a better state than before.

To accompany my possibly boring truck fixing story, here is a new bag that I just finished today:

This bag was a little different than my others. I recently bought some Haniabags, which are considered by many to be the freestyle footbag of choice, and aimed to recreate them. The things I did differently were to first run the fabric through a washer and dryer, use a combo of steel shot and glass beads to get a more full bag, and also to use slightly different dimensions of my hexagons. Washing the fabric yielded a bag that is much more “juicy”, and this one feels pretty good! When dropped from the same distance onto a flat surface, this bag plops much like my Haniabags, which is probably a good indicator that it should play just as good!

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