working to get the Jimmy back on the road

Since my dad passed away, I haven't been very motivated to work on any cars, and most of them have been sitting around - I don't have to drive to get to work, and I'd been occasionally renting cars if I really needed something to get around in - if I didn't have one that ran. I had 6 cars and nothing to drive at many points over the last 5 years.

This Jimmy has been sitting in my front yard, unmoving since at least 2014. It ceased to be able to be pushed around sometime probably in 2016, and I feared that it had drum brakes that had ceased (I never bothered to really look to see what they were- and as you can see, these are pretty dense wheels, not easily viewed with a glance), and remembering how hard that was to deal with on the '67 deVille, I always avoided dealing with it.

We live in a suburban neighborhood that is a bit older and has been chopped up and filled in over the decades, the result is portions of the neighborhood with sidewalks, and portions without. Our house does not have them, our neighbor across the street does. I park a couple of my cars off the asphalt in the dirt in front of my house because there is no where else to park once the driveway fills up (and the driveway is always filled up). This fed into my laziness, as technically I don't have to have the car registered to park there as it is on our property and not parked "on a city street" ... so it sat and sat.

Our neighbor came by one day a few weeks ago and let us know they were moving, and that seemed to be the motivation I needed to get the car moving.

Not wanting a car that didn't look very good essentially smack dap in my front yard, that might dis-sued a potential good new neighbor from buying their house - I called up a repair shop and asked them if they could work on it. they said yes, and gave me the name of a tow truck that would come tow it over to them, even though it was not currently registered. (AAA does not do this because they don't want to tow old non-running cars around - I think maybe I might just cancel the AAA membership at this point - I mean, what does it really get me?).

All Area Towing came by very quickly after I called and took it away to the shop. The car creaked out of it's slumber, and thankfully rolled, with the encouragement of a winch, slowly onto the bed of the truck.

Air Conditioning

California has figured out yet another way to squeeze money out of us. They have passed a law that requires air conditioning containers to be refillable and tacked a $10 deposit onto them, which you can only get back within 90 days.

I went through 4 of these containers in the process of trying to get the air in the Jimmy to work.

The first one leaked out pretty much immediately out of one of the fittings after the hoses were disconnected. So I bought a new fitting.

After most of the second can was half in the in the car, we had the car running and air cycling, when I noticed that when the air cycled, some gas was leaking out of the cap over the fitting. Tightening it did not get rid of the leak completely, so we has to let all the gas out to remove the fitting to put teflon tape over the threads.

Third can went in OK, and it needed most of can four as well.

new car

This is the dog car I've been driving around. It's a 2001 GMC Jimmy 2-door five-speed. My dad purchased it in Florida, and since it's 2001, it's already CA smog approved. He is letting me drive it since none of my cars are fully operational. The dog loves it.