Responder – Part II

Coming out of the dark years, in September of 2008 I had launched an ecommerce business selling police lights. The website was number one for this phrase for many years and was able to capitalize on that success. The store was launched as a sub-domain under this website and it took in five orders the first week of being online. The store grew at a phenomenal pace and quickly was consuming all of my time. Project Responder was now a business rather than a truck. Fast forward a few years. In 2012 I had purchased a large commercial building and set up a “brick & mortar” store and installation facility. Project Responder was parked back in the corner and was just something cool to look at.

In 2017 I sold the building to one of the tenants who was leasing space at the time. The sale of the building required that the space in which my business was working be vacated in one year. This was the motivation to start working on the truck again so it could be driven out and on to its new home.

The first thing that needed to be done was replacing the oil pan seals. There were only two ways to make that happen. It was a choice between pulling the engine out or removing the driveshafts, transfer case and transmission so the motor could be raised up enough to facilitate the repair. I chose the second option thinking this would be the easiest way to do this. It turns out I should have chosen option number one if I had wanted the job to be done quickly and have the truck back on the road. Taking the other path, I ended up going down the proverbial rabbit hole. Once these components were removed, their condition was a little depressing. Having built the project on a shoestring budget, there were a lot of things I could not do back then. Now I had the funds and the a couple of employees who were interested in helping. So down the hole I went. However, now that the truck is finally finished and back on the road, it was all worth it.