For those of you who have been following the journey from the beginning, you've seen the ups and downs that the team has been dealing with and you have seen the hard work community sponsors have provided since day 1.
This update is by far no exception!
The amazing team over at Terry's Automotive have been working A LOT to get the fire truck running before its date with the Vernon Winter Carnival.
HOWEVER, things have gone from bad to worse.
The push rod issues were talked about in the last blog post, and they finally arrived to be installed.
Terry and Mike got them in no problem and when they tried to test them.....some broke.
Turns out we have valve issues. Serious valve issues.
As most of you already know my personal level of mechanical know-how is summed up as follows: I can almost 100 percent of the time know the difference between the front of the truck and the rear of the truck, I will try to explain.
Some values are seized. I don't think that is the actual scientific terms that mechanics use and I also think there was a lot more profanity thrown in but in a nutshell we have some very serious engine problems.
Remember this?
Yeah, we don't actually know how this was even possible.
Now back to the science-y talk.
What could have caused such damage to the valves? The guys even stated "I've never seen anything like this before" which from them means a lot. Could it have been exposure to the elements? Could it have been the sheer age of the motor? Could it have been the fact that it had two lifetimes in the fire service?
After a lengthy conversation, and based on all available evidence we feel the best possible suspected reason for our current motor issues is.....
As anyone who has lived in the Okanagan can attest to, these buggers (sorry about the pun) have caused many a bad day. It seems highly certain that there was a nest at some point in the wrong part of our fire truck. A very very very wrong part of our fire truck.
So as I sit here looking at the fact that we are one week away from the Vernon Winter Carnival Parade, I want to stress that we're at 50/50 odds at best.
Terry's Automotive has been working miracles and we're going to need a few more to have any chance at all of being there.
So right now we're here:
Hopefully we'll be in a way better place early next week.
Stay tuned.