Brakes
I love working on cars. I really do. Something about taking apart and putting together mechanical things and making them work, especially when they didn’t work before is very rewarding to me.
I’ve had to do a number of repairs on cars over the past few weeks. These haven’t been all that enjoyable. I’ve had failures on cars when I’ve had to have them working post haste and ran into troubles with the job being bigger than I first imagined it or just things being harder to get to with the tools that I have at my disposal.
Today I had planned to do a brake job on one car followed by another brake job on another one in a couple of weeks. I ended up needing to do both today. Only one got done. I was figuring on brake pads and rotors but I ended up replacing the calipers also. Nothing came off easy. I ended up having to hose everything down with liquid wrench and then just walk away for half an hour to break loose the caliper bolts. I also took four trips to three different auto parts stores to get all the parts.
The other car will get its brakes replaced tomorrow night. I’m looking right now at what I can do with my garage and tools to make these jobs a little easier in the future. I’m just not having fun working on cars under current circumstances.
About Larry D. Burton
I'm a 55 year old controls engineer who just likes tinkering with stuff.
Finished high school at a local institute of learning. Decided it wasn't a good time to be a healthy, physically fit 18 year old with no college experience. Entered college and started working toward a degree in animal husbandry.
1975-1976
Discoverd that I was not going to be a very good husband of animals so I left school to figure out what I might be good at. A local beverage company took pity on me and paid me to go from place to place making sure their on tap beverages were maintaining their high quality.
1976-1979
Got out of quality control and into vending. Learned about control systems and refrigeration also learned that vending machines are heavy and vending doesn't pay all that well.
In 1977 I found myself married
1979-1981
Dedicated myself to installing and maintaining commercial refrigeration equipment. Found myself on the roof of a local grocery store one night in the middle of an ice storm replacing a compressor and figured it was time to get back into school.
1981-1986
Got my but back into school at night and changed jobs to keep the mechanical and electrical systems of a local coporate hospital in working order. The job expanded to unstopping drains and burning lab samples and amputated body parts.
1986-now
Finished school and took on a job designing, installing and maintaining industrial control systems. Along the way I picked up a bunch of computer skills that became very useful connecting various industrial controllers to one another and moving the data into coporate databases. I now operate Dallas Bay Technologies, a one man shop specializing in technology solutions for industrial problems.
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Ugh. I enjoy projects where I don’t have to break in the middle to go shopping. I hate that moment of “I need one $.79 part to continue”, and I doubly hate when I miss two of those and have to go out multiple times a day.