The Death Wobble

At the end of last summer, I think it was August but possibly the end of July, I rolled my truck right outside of Canyonville Oregon. I was cruising along at about 90 mph and decided to try and take a little nap. Bad idea. I woke up to inevitable disaster and stupidly jerked the wheel which sent me rolling. I think I rolled 7 times. Regardless of the number of rolls, I wrecked my truck pretty good, coming to a stop on the roof. Physically it fucked me up pretty good, breaking my nose, my clavicle, my orbital bone, some ribs and bruising the fuck out of every other part of my body. Someone called the cops when they saw me crash and I had just finished trying to gather my shit up when the pigs showed up. At first that asked me if I was driving and trying to avoid jail I told them I wasn’t, telling them that this chick was driving but she had already left. Of course they didn’t believe me asking me numerous times it I was sure it wasn’t me driving. Still trying to avoid jail I assured them that I wasn’t driving even after they told me that they were gonna check the highway cameras to find out the truth. Fuck it. Check the cameras, I wasn’t driving. I had given the pig my real name which he checked for warrants and surprise surprise, guess who had a warrant? When the cop first showed up he asked me if I wanted an ambulance and since I just wanted to get out of there I told him no, that I was fine. Finding out that I had a warrant made me wish I’d taken the ambulance. Instead, broken as fuck, they cuffed me and threw me in the back of the cop car. I was pretty fucked up. I can still remember the pain from wrapping the steering wheel as I started to flip. At jail they realized how fucked up I was and not wanting to have to deal with it they asked me if I promised I would go to court? I told them of course I would and they gave me a PR bond. Released from custody with the clothes on my back and wearing a pair of shower shoes the only other things I had were my wallet and my cellphone. I immediately called the homie James, who I was living with about an hour away from where I crashed and explained what had happened. I told him my truck was totalled and asked him if he could come and swoop me up. Even though he had a working vehicle, wasn’t busy doing anything and was only an hour away, he told me that he couldn’t come get me, giving me some bullshit excuse which I can’t even remember and said he would try and find me a ride. Pretty sure he never even tried. Anyways my homeboy Boston was living outside of Portland and had a whip so I asked him if he could come save me. Portland is 6 hours away from where I crashed but Boston agreed to come and get me. James wouldn’t even drive an hour. It took Boston forever but he finally showed up and we started heading slowly back to where I was staying. The next day we made it to Grant’s Pass and even though it’s only 12 miles from there to where I was staying when Boston got a hotel room in Grants Pass I decided to stay the night there with him. I was feeling a little salty that James wouldn’t come and rescue me and had no desire to go “home” so I stayed with Boston. In the morning Boston told me that he felt like taking his dog for a walk in the redwood forest and I agreed to go with. Before we even got to California but after we’d already passed Gold Hill I got a message from James freaking out telling me that I was kicked out of the house and wasn’t welcome to come back. Apparently his wife was looking for dirty dishes(which is bullshit, that bitch didn’t do the dishes one time the whole time I was there) and deciding to look in my safe(because I stash dirty dishes there) found a bag of dope. Because of this bag of dope, which I might add, I wasn’t even doing, hence it being left behind at the house and not with me, I was in violation of the rules of no drugs in the house which I thought was actually no using drugs in the house but apparently I was wrong because a couple days after wrecking my truck and almost dying I was now kick out of the place I was staying. Plus I worked with James so in a 3 day period I lost my truck, my place, my job and as time would tell, my best friend. With very few options I decided that my best bet was to return to Colorado, heal up, stack some bread, get a new whip and then go back to Oregon. I had originally planned on being in and out. Get a vehicle ASAP and bounce. My plans never work out like I want them to. Months later, after a full cold ass Colorado winter, here I still sit. At first I thought that someone was gonna come with me so I was waiting for her to be ready to go but shit changes fast around here and once again it’s just gonna be me. I had a new whip pretty quickly once I got back, a Ford explorer that my homegirl hooked me up with but that truck got stolen from right in front of the house. That shit fucked me off pretty good. I need wheels with the lifestyle that I live and my truck getting stolen threatened to derail any plans I had wanted to have in place. Fortunately I have been blessed with some super amazing people in my life, one of which is Jesse. Jesse Astuto has been my friend since highschool. We once went to a Grateful Dead concert with my mom and a couple other friends when I was 14. Although there have been stretches of time when we didn’t see each other or hang out we have remained friends the whole time. A couple days after the explorer was stolen I went over to Jesse’s house. As soon as I walked in he handed me a piece of paper along with the title for a 1993 Ford F150. He told me he wanted to give me his truck and the piece of paper he’d given me was a bill of sale. My fucking parents never even gave me a vehicle as a kid but Jesse did. He told me there were a few issues with the truck but that it was mine. Driving away I found out that one of the issues the truck had was a death wobble. The death wobble wasn’t to bad when I first got the truck so I didn’t rush to fix it. But as time went on and death wobble after death wobble occurred, they steadily got worse. I decided to fix the problem but death wobbles are tricky and they are caused by a number of different things so I didn’t even know where to start. I replaced the tie rods, inner and outer because when I did my little inspection the tie rods were movable by hand which they are not supposed to be. The the tie rods were the initial cause but the death wobble was so violent that it was destroying my truck. One death wobble shook the front end so bad that it broke a bracket that was holding one side of my dual I-beam axle to the frame of my truck. That was the motherfucker and it took me quite a while to figure it out. It wasn’t until this dude I knew who works at a mechanic shop offered to let me put my truck on a lift and raise it up so we could inspect it from underneath that we noticed the broken part. I was gonna have the homie weld it, going as far as acquiring a $1,000 welder so he could do it but when he showed up to do the job he informed me that I’d be better off just going to a pick and pull and getting the part I needed off of a junked truck the same as my truck. So the next day we went to Denver to do some business and go to a pick and pull. My time management is trash so I didn’t make it to the pick and pull until 4:00 pm and the closed at 5:00 pm. I had 2 bolts left to get the part and end the death wobbles but even though I had and cordless impact wrench, I left it at home and so with only two bolts left to get the pick and pull closed and I was forced to bounce. The next day after handling some pretty rewarding business I went to Home Depot and bought a beast of an impact wrench with 700 lbs of torque for $400. Best $400 I ever spent cause the next time I went to the pick and pull it took me less the an hour and $30 and I had the answer to my death wobble problem. Replacing the part on my truck took 24 hours of soaking the whole thing in PB blaster and about an hour to actually do the job. And with that the death wobble was no more, at least for now. It’s like I have a new truck. I’ve never driven it in as good of shape as it’s in now. It’s a 1993 Ford F150 with only 150,000 miles on it. It has had basically one owner before me, an old man who did all the maintenance regularly. When I got the truck it had a huge pile of receipts for everything done to it so if I pay attention to fluids and maintain the maintenance, I can easily get another 150,000 miles. I’m currently murdering it out and I replace the stereo and got 2 12 inch subs in a ported box that fit nearly perfectly behind the bench seat. She’s a bad bitch. My new pirate ship. What grand adventures we will have.