I left the house early Monday morning to go pick up a wide load, a couple of farm tractors heading to MI, at an auction location a couple of hours from my house. The trip  to the place took longer than expected due to heavy fog most of the way, but I did eventually get there.

The place was really busy and it took a while for me to get to a ramp to be loaded. Finally I saw one of the tractors coming to the ramp and saw a problem. The tratcors have dual rear wheels and I was told that the outside duals would be removed so as to make load less wide. The duals were still on this tractor.

I stopped the guy and told him the duals were supposed to be removed. He said he wasn't told anything about that and proceeded to drive the tractor onto the trailer against my orders.  The second tractor was likewise unsuitable. I measured the width of the tractors and as I already knew they were  12 feet wide. This was far too wide to haul them all the way to MI.

I went and found the guy running the book truck and told him that I needed the outside duals removed from these two tractors. He got a bit huffy with me, told me that he wasn't told about it, he didn't have time to do it, and that I should have told the guy doing the loading before they were loaded. I explained that I did in fact tell the guy this and that he loaded them anyway against my orders. I was trying t o remain calm and not blow up on the guy, and told him that I would really appreciate it if he coculd help me out here.

He called over the idiot that loaded me and asked him right in front of me if I had told him that the tractors were going to MI and that the outside duals needed to be removed. As I was looking him dead in the eye he told the truth. The boom truck guy blew up at him telling him that he shouldn't have loaded the damn things if the duals needed to be removed and to go and take them back off again as they were too wide to haul that far.

He boomed over the compressor and tools and they removed the duals from one tractor no problem. When they started on the other one he broke the 1"socket  adaptor on his impact wrench. Great. He had to send a guy to a parts store to get another adaptor. Yet another delay.

Once he had the new adaptor about 2 hours later he discovered that they needed to torch every one of the lug nuts to get them to break loose. This only served  to make the whole thing take even longer but they did eventually manage to get them removed.

Now when I measured the tractors sans outside duals they came out at 10 feet. Much better. I seccured the tractors and the now removed wheels, put on all of my oversize load signs and flags, and drove to the little fuel stop at the edge of town to get a fax number for the permits.

At this point it was too late in the day for me to make the truckstop up in Haines City, it would get dark on me before I got there, so I resigned myself to spending the night at this little fuel stop. I would proceed in the morning once I at least had my FL oversize permit.

The permits came early Tuesday morning but there was some problem with the fuel stop's fax machine and I only got 2 of 6 permits. Luckily FL was one of them so I could move on. I proceeded up the road, stopping at the truckstop in Haines City for a much needed hot breakfast.

Once I left there I was making pretty good time up US27. As is my habit I checked my mirrors often to keep track of traffic and other objects on either side of me, the condition of the load, and the position of the rig on the roadway. At one point just South of Ocala I checked my left mirror and saw smoke pouring out of one of my drive wheels. That's never a good thing and I immediately started scanning the side of the road for a reasonably good place to pull off.

It was just at that moment that the low coolant warnning went off the truck started into it's shutdown sequencce. Once that shutdown starts you only have a couple of minutes to get the truck pulled over and stopped before the engine shuts itself down. Shit!

I found a spot of grass on the side of the road wide enough to get me off the road and pulled off. At this point the smoke was really rolling out of that wheel. I got out and checcked it. No flames, just a lot of smoke and it smelled like brakes to me. The brakes on that wheel must have frozen up.

I called in to haave them dispatch road service to me. The guy showed up about an hour later. That's pretty good time ass most road service calls can take hours to show. He back off that brake, determined that the S cam on the slack adjuster had gone bad and would need to be replaced,  He topped off my coolant for me, couldn't find any sourcce of a  leak, and determined what I already knew, that it would have to go into an engine shop. Again.

I just spent a week in Oklahoma City having a new head put on the damn thing for this exact same problem. Yet here I am, in a hotel in Ocala, FL waiting for the engine shop to test the engine and determine why it's still loosing coolant. One thing the guy said that bothers me a bit is that the new hed they put on in Oklahoma City doesn't look like the right type of head for that engine. Wonderful.

I really should have just stayed home.