Somewhere on the way to Tacoma heaven

You always prepare for the worst, but you never think it's going to happen, right? Well, it did. Only, the worst was worse than I had dreamed. Here's the story:

We woke up Saturday morning and met Patrick (my coworker friend at Martin) before heading way out in the boonies to Dinwiddie to his buddy Kevin's shop. After getting the truck up on the hydraulic lift, we began installing the DJM suspension kit. It called for flipping the ball joints to the tops of both the lower and upper control arms and installing the new upper control arm that was included with the kit. The kit also included new shocks made specifically for lowered vehicles. Everything went pretty smoothly, but it was a slow process because neither Patrick nor myself had ever installed a kit such as this. So, at around 5:30 we finished installing the blocks and shocks in the rear and lowered the truck off of the lift. I decided that it would be best if I took it down the road for a "test drive" before the hour-long trip back home. When I got out on the road, I began hearing a strange squealing sound coming from the front two tires as I drove down the road. I figured that this was just caused by the alignment being off. For those of you who have never lowered a vehicle, when you lower a vehicle, you should always get an alignment soon after because it almost always throws the alignment off. Changing the geometry of a truck's suspension can have ill effects on one's camber, caster, and toe. I hypothesized that it was just an alignment problem and promised myself that I would get it properly aligned Sunday or Monday.

So, we headed for home at around 9:30pm. With the tires squealing all the way up the interstate. After a little while, Olivia and I started smelling some burning rubber and that's when I decided that I should stop and check my tires. So, pulled over and turned my wheels all the way to one side so that I could inspect the tread. It was MUCH worse that I had expected. At this point, we were about 1/3 of the way home, and the tread on the inside of the tires was more than 1/2-gone. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that we weren't going to make it home without rotating the tires to the back (and the back ones to the front). So, we pulled over at Chester (about halfway home) to rotate the tires. By this point, the insides of the front tires were COMPLETELY bald..much further and the threads would start appearing and then BOOM..we would've had a blowout. So, we pulled into a Denny's parking lot (hey, it was the best lit place around) and rotated the tires. Luckily for us, Patrick had torqued the lug nuts to 100ft./lbs with the air gun at the shop, so we only had to slip one disc in our backs to get them loose. With the tires rotated, we pulled out of the parking lot. I couldn't help but feel upset because I knew what was getting ready to happen to those fresh, perfect tires. Yes, I was getting ready to completely ruin not two, but ALL FOUR tires on my truck. But it was the only way that we would get home. So, off the went. The fresh tires sounded like old hound dogs going down the road..that is, until the tread started to wear thin on those, too, and then the squealing turned to a much higher-pitched noise. But we arrived home safely and hit the hay..too tired to think about anything else. It was midnight. It had taken us two and half hours to go about 50 miles.

I woke up at 8:45 this morning, knowing that any alignment shop that was going to be open would open up at 9:00am. At 9:30, I arrived at the Firestone tire center down the road a couple blocks. And yes, the tires howled all the way there, too. They pulled the truck up on the lift, put 4 new tires on, and ran their alignment system to fix my mal-aligned truck. The service technician pulled the truck off the lift about an hour and a half later and said that it was ready. Just to be sure, I took the truck down the road for another "test drive" before I paid for the services rendered. Sure enough, when I hit the brakes, it was still pulling hard to the left. So, back in the shop I went and I told the guy what it was doing. He said that it sounded like something related to the brakes. So, after waiting for the service technician to finish his current job (another hour wait), they finally pulled the truck up on the lift and found that I had a pinched brake line. The technician re-routed my front brake lines and bled them. I took the truck for another test drive, and it was perfect. It felt just like the old truck again.

So, it makes sense now, looking back on it, that I was killing those front tires. Half of the problem was my alignment (causing me to ride ONLY on the insides of both of my front tires) and the other half was the brakes were probably about half locked-up. At least I understand now how I could completely ate through a set of tires in a 50-mile journey.

I've posted a photo gallery from yesterday, so check it out.

Now, it's back to work tomorrow. Whew! What a weekend!