You made a comment, Tom, about 'car guys coming together to help each other'...
At the moment the van is on a work trip. I'm right in the middle of the country at Alice Springs, but back in South Australia the semi-expected clutch problems were getting bad and I needed somewhere to instal a clutch plate I had brought along with me.
One of the places I'd called at in the course of my work was a former roadhouse at a place called Beltana, about a hundred miles from nowhere in the middle of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. The place, apart from being in a very low rainfall area, was in severe drought.
I mentioned to the former roadhouse proprietor that I had some clutch slip. Two days later, when I called back in for the second step in the job, he asked how the clutch was going. I told him it was no better... of course.
"You can fix that here if you want to," he said. And he pointed to a shed across the other side of the main road, quite a large shed with open panels front and back so you can drive through it. It was, in fact, the bar at a defunct racecourse, and it had the thing I'd told him I really needed to do the job - a good concrete floor.
So the following week when I had to go back that way I set things up to do the clutch change in the old bar:
As can be seen, using some scrap timber and a couple of old railway sleepers (ties?) I could get the van high enough to work under there. I built a small platform to roll my trolley jack on with a cradle I made a few months ago on that to hold the gearbox while I did the clutch replacement.
The generous man had allowed me to use the power in the shed, and we did a universal joint change at the same time using his equipment in his own shed. The big trolley jack under the back of the van was also his, and he topped up the gearbox oil for me from his old stocks as I lost a fair bit of oil when we took out the driveshaft.
I said to him, "What do I owe you?" and got the answer I fully expected. "Nothing!"
So I put a proposal to him. Seeing as he's hundreds of miles from anywhere and probably a thousand miles from a lot of stuff, I offered him my services whenever he needs something found and I'm able to locate it for him.
He was happy with that...
And for those wondering why I was changing a clutch in a van which was built with an automatic transmission... well, I fixed that the first couple of days I had it.
It's all in the story I linked a few posts back.
