The Dark Decade: 2007 through 2017
The period between 2007 and 2017 are what I call the ‘dark ages’. It was the period of time where I was losing interest in Project Responder. I was losing interest in fighting all of the small gremlins that had taken all of the fun out of the truck. Virtually nothing happened with the truck after 2009. It wasn’t driven. It wasn’t worked on. It just sat in storage. This dark time was primarily due to an oil leak which had developed at the back of the block somewhere along the oil pan to rear main. However, there were other issues plaguing the truck. It was definitely learning at the school of hard knocks. The oil leak was enough that every time the truck was taken out, the entire underbody would end up coated in a thin layer of motor oil. The air flowing under the truck just carried the oil as very tiny droplets which then ended up depositing on all of the surfaces aft of the motor. I had tried once before in 2009 to replace the oil pan gasket without removing the engine. There simply wasn’t enough room to work and the motor could only be raised about 1½ inches. That ended up being a fruitless full day’s work.
The posts in this section all occurred in 07 and 08. My passion was dwindling at this point. Some of the work was to correct mistakes I made during the original building of the truck. The Q-siren was one of those mistakes. It was blocking the radiator on the highway and the truck was having constant overheating issues. Replacing the radiator was a solution I had hoped would fix the overheating problem. It helped, but it did not eliminate the issue. It took a while to figure out the Q was the cause. After these adjustments / upgrades which I had hoped would make it fun to drive again failed to achieve that goal. By this time my desire to work on the truck had waned and with my business growing, my focus was elsewhere and so it sat.