And nothing is working: Was Keeping the old ones. . .

 

Truth is confirmed by inspect and delay; falsehood by haste and uncertainty.

Tacitus.

So maybe Tacitus would be approving my automotive delay. . . or not.

Recently I posted this item:

Lex Anteinternet: Keeping the old ones. . .: I don't like to trade vehicles. The 97 Dodge. Indeed, I sometimes wish I'd found a truck just like I wanted, a one ton 4x4, ...

In that, I described our struggles with keeping the old ones.

The truck in question, a 1997 Dodge 1500, is now in the shop.  In the end, it needed a new clutch and a new gasket in relation to the air intake manifold, and some new other stuff.  Thankfully, it doesn't appear to need to have a rebuilt engine.

It's not as if I wasn't aware of that it had issues that needed to be addressed.  I just delayed in addressing them.

Saturday we shipped calves.

Television shows and movies like to show ranchers and ranch hands driving really old trucks.  For example, the Robert Redford character in An Unfinished Life drives a mid 1960s 2x4 pickup truck as his only ranch truck.  He's supposed to be a Wyoming rancher.

I've been around ranches my entire life and with one single exception I've never been on a ranch in which relied exclusively on older vehicles, and I've never ever been on one that had one vehicle. The exception is one that I know very well and at that time that reflected the extremely hard working nature of the ranchers and decisions reflecting what they'd spend money on, and what they wouldn't. As times improved, they retired their older vehicles.

Oh, every ranch tends to have some older vehicles, and quite a few of them see some use too.  Old trucks are used as feed trucks and the like.  But by and large ranchers depend on newer vehicles.  Indeed, at the shipping it impressed me that I personally, by far, have the oldest vehicles.  Of course, I don't drive my truck in heavy use every day either.

But maybe I've been foolish.

The 97 is out of commission while its being repaired. The 07 D3500 is in Laramie, but it needs body repairs if I'm keeping it (it has some rust) and I need new tires for it.  As I've never been happy with its clearance, I'm going to put 35" tires on it this time, larger than the standard, which means that I need to probably put a leveling kit on it as well.

Right now I'm down to the 97 Jeep and the 62 Dodge for daily drivers. But the 62 needs new tires in a major way as well.  The 97 Jeep is hanging in there, thank goodness, but the heater is stuck on for some reason and I haven't been able to dig into it to figure it out.  It's not at the controls like I thought it was.  And while I like the Jeep, it snowed in Montana over the weekend which means that we're living on borrowed time here. The Jeep isn't really suitable for highway travel if I have to go anywhere, even for just the day.

Delay is preferable to error.

Thomas Jefferson.

So maybe I've just flat out been approach this incorrectly.

I just hate to spend the money on a new truck, or for that matter a fairly new used truck. They're very expensive and that means that you are usually tied up in payments for them for several years.  At age 56 I don't really want payments for anything and on top of it with two kids in college I'm not keen on getting tied up in loans anyhow.  If I borrow money, it would tend to be for a business purpose, like for cattle, which I can calculate in such a way that it'll pay for itself.

Truck payments, for somebody like me, never pay for themselves.  At best I may be able to partially deduct depreciation on a truck as any truck I get is going to get some agricultural use.  But this is distinctly different from trucks used by farms and ranches which are really a business tool.  Mine is mixed use.

Too add to it, I'm being stubborn, at this point foolishly stubborn, regarding standard transmissions.  I'm now intellectually yielding to the fact that Dodge, Ford and Chevrolet automatics for diesel and gas trucks are every bit as good as the old standards. But I haven't owned an automatic pickup truck for decades and the thought both irritates and worried me.  Automatic transmissions in and of themselves have evolved enormously since the last truck one I had, in a 1974 D150, and when I drive the newer ones its clear to me that I'm not really up to speed on their use.  Added to that, it really aggravates me that standard transmissions, which really are better for a truck, have become passe as so many urban Americans have decided that they must have a full sized pickup for no discernible reason.  I get that automatics are a lot easier to use in urban areas, but most urban pickups are used by folks who really don't need a truck. That market is defining the trucks, however.  Unless, of course, you are a Japanese manufacturer who exports all over the globe, including the rougher regions of the planet. They make standards.

Grant us a brief delay:  impulse in everything is but a worthless servant.

Caecillus Statuius

And in the back of my mind, I'm pretty convinced I'm looking at the final generation of internal combustion engine light vehicles.  My wife says I'm nuts on this, but then it wasn't all that long ago that she insisted that electric vehicles wouldn't gain a foothold.  Most people here thought that as well. But now Ford has an electric F150 its getting ready to introduce.  Harley Davidson has an electric motorcycle.  It's only a matter of time.

And there's something in my world outlook that the thought of constantly looking towards new vehicles offends.  My wife's outlook, inherited from her grandfather from what I can glean from family stories, is the opposite.  We almost never get a newer vehicle for her withotu hearing, immediately thereafter "for my next vehicle. . . ".  It drives me nuts.  I'd gladly have gotten one good pickup when I could first afford it and have kept it running forever, if I could have.

But doing that is tricky and a lot of people who really know cars say you shouldn't try it.  Indeed, a business savvy person I know trades his off every two years, and he's a rancher.  He doesn't intend to keep them any longer than that, which means that they're always being paid off.  He's convinced he comes out ahead in that fashion, and he may well be correct.

Well, at any point, I wonder if I've waited too long.