Removing the Tire from the Rim and the Taste of Failure.

Let me start, dear readers, by saying that today, was extremely, really, a whole lot, magnificently, ball shitingly cold. Let me put it this way. The high for the day was 21 degrees with a 40 mile an hour wind with a wind chill factor of 16 degrees. Oh and it was snowing.

Sideways.

Out adventure to remove the tire the other day had only resulted in cursing and swearing and accusing each other of doing it wrong. If I had thought that removing the tire from the backhoe was the hard part, I had no idea what was in store for me now.

This is what failure looks like.

Now, when ever I had seen someone pry the tire off the rim, they were using something called a tire spoon. Which I do not own. Also, as I mentioned before, tire spoons for backhoe tires cost around 200$. Which means I am never going to own one.

Which meant that we were trying to pry the tire off the rim using, two huge pry bars meant for digging, a large but weird squarish pry bar meant for who knows what, a crow bar, two smaller pry bars, a mallet and a sledgehammer.

We coated the tire rim with hot soapy water like the videos had showed, shoved the pry bars under the tire rim, lifted one small section of the tire up, and proceeded to make no progress whatsoever at all ever.

So today we awoke, the taste of failure still lingering in our mouths, and we came up with a plan. And by we I mean Scott. And by plan I mean that he walked into the living room where I was cleaning up something, and told me we needed to build a forge.

His plan in a nutshell, was to take the weird ass square pry bar that we have never used for anything, and make a goddamned tire spoon. I said okay we can do that. Because if there is one thing I've learned it's when life gives you land, you put a forge on it. Except of course that it was 16 degrees outside and snowing sideways. Scott suggesting using the wood stove, I suggested not making the house smell like ass. So we came up with a new plan, a better plan.

We would just grind the pry bar down, into the shape of a tire spoon.

There was no way this could go wrong!*

So we put on our war outfits. We needed not only to be wearing safety glasses, and dust masks, but also needed to be as warm as possible without wearing anything that we couldn't clean right away because metal flakes.

I am not proud. I am ninja.

You know what, this is one of those pictures that really defines my life. I look like a hobo from the poor planet in outer space, wearing a hat that looks like it belongs to a blind 12 year girl, preparing to go outside in the middle of a shit balls cold winter to make a tool I can't afford to do a job that I don't fully understand so I can fix a piece of machinery I can't even drive.

You know, I have lived this life and even I have trouble understanding how I got here.

So anyway we get ready and pumped up and stagger to the shed against the wind and prop the door open and fit new disks into the grinders and I hold the bar while Scott works. All in all it went pretty well, even though the wind was the coldest thing ever in the history of ever and the shed doesn't have windows so we have to keep the door open both because the lights inside the shed are kinda shitty and also because our old school safety glasses fogged up to the point it looked like we were trying to work in Silent Hill.**

I also became intimately aware that when your hands stop that burning feeling and go kinda numb, you can't really use them for things anymore. Which you would think would be a no brainier, except that I kept trying to use them for things because my brain refuse to believe in the cold. Also if you are wondering why I wasn't wearing good gloves, I was wearing good gloves. Carhart super insulated outdoor work gloves. And they still let me down. Even if I refused to acknowledge it.

Which is also how I dropped four eggs on the floor this afternoon.

Anyway.

We got it done and sanded it down and it...actually looks like a tire spoon. Which is kinda amazing if you think about it.

Also dust masks? Itchy. As. Hell.

Now if you excuse me I have to go drink hooch because the past two days I have been the coldest in the history of ever and I think I need alcohol to fix it. It's like remember all those failed invasions of Russia in the wintertime? New appreciation for that.

*This is a lie.

** This was a horror game that took place in a town that was always foggy. It was also a movie but I pretend it wasn't because the movie was pretty goddamned bad.

Backhoe Lug Nuts are the Devil.

Well, we lucked out because yesterday it warmed up to a balmy 28 degrees instead of a frigid 27! The first thing that happened was us snapping one of the extensions my uncle had lent us with his pneumatic tool.

Which meant that the day was already off to a great start. He had also lent us a ¾ breaker bar and ratchet. However, we made the decision to go get our own breaker bar and ratchet, because I was afraid if we broke too many of his things my uncle would never talk to us again which can never happen because my aunt makes, like, really really good desserts.

Now the thing is, many, many places sell 1/2 breaker bars and ratchets, or 1/4 breaker bars and ratchets, but not many sell 3/4 breaker bars and ratchets. And by not many I mean two. Only two places sold them within driving distance. So we hopped in the car and sped off to the store that's like, too damn far away and I almost feel asleep twice during the drive because breaking other peoples things is hard work.

Well we get to the store in question and we go in and lo and behold they have what we need. So we sped back to the house, slapped our brand new breaker bar and extension and socket onto the lug, grabbed our 6 foot long pipe (the persuader) and began. We heaved and grunted and cursed at the cold uncaring universe.

And then we bent the head of the breaker bar. 

This, this is what trying looks like. Also, failure.*

We went back inside. Did I mention that it was 27 28 motherfucking degrees outside? We called my uncle. He said to heat the bolts up with a torch.

Okay.

So after some digging around in the shed we found a rinky dink little propane torch. We lit it off, and the wind put it out. We lit it up again and the wind really put it out. We lit it again, sheltered it with our bodies like it was our own infant, and got it into the tire well and we were in business.

Imagine standing outside, wearing two sets of thermals, fleece, insulated gloves, a hat and wool socks, hunched over holding a propane touch up against a lug nut in 28 degree weather with wind gusts of up to thirty miles an hour and you will not even come close to imagining how much this sucked.

It really, really sucked.

After a while the oil we had placed on the lugs began to bubble up and then we placed on the whole breaker bar/extension/socket/persuader combo again. Using a stump, some boards and a jack we were able to support the whole rig to allow me to keep the torch focused like a fucking laser beam on that lug. 

If you ever wondered what sadness looks like, this is it.

So with me holding steady Scott put his entire weight down onto the persuader. And there was an almighty sound. At first we thought something had broken. I was looking right at my uncles breaker bar, thinking that he was going to kill us, because my eyes refused to believe what they were seeing. Everything was intact. The lug had finally loosed.

Quickly Scott pulled the pipe off and cranked it loose and then I moved the torch to the next one and then we repeated the process until the second to last one when the propane torch started to die. Then we freaked out and did arcane things to it and lit it again and again and then I had to hold the can at some bizarre angle to keep it going and freaking out that it would fail on the last lug because of course we didn't have any refills for it because that would be the smart thing to have.

Yet, somehow, somehow the torch lasted until we were able to loosed the last bolt and then pull the tire off and set it on the ground to wild applause.

Pictured: wild applause.

And then we went and became flushed with our own success and then we tried to take the tire off the rim and failed magnificently and said aw fuck it and I went inside and drank the rest of that bottle of wine.

*Scott took all of these pictures. I was gripped too

deep in the throws of holy shit balls it's cold.