Sunday evening, after watching Crank (Jason Statham), we stopped at Hannaford's in Tewksbury to buy some fruit. When we came out, I went to start the ignition and what do I hear instead of the roar of the engine? Nothing... It was dead. I tried the inside lights. Nothing. Ah, the battery must be dead. I knew I had jumper cables in my toolbox in the back, so I wasn't too concerned. I just had to find someone to jump it for me. I popped the hood and took a look at the battery. The wire connected to the positive (hot) side of the battery looked a bit funny, so I poked at it. Suddenly the battery contact nut fell right off the battery! The battery had leaked acid causing the contact to erode (see picture below). So now I knew it wasn't going to be as simple as a jump start.
I called Thea and Meera, and they came by to give us a ride to buy a new battery (thanks guys!). While waiting for them, I decided to get a head start and disconnect the wire from the negative side of the battery. Thats when I noticed something. The positive wire that had fallen off with the contact nut fused to the wire lead. Usually you just unscrew the contact nut from the battery, remove the wire, and attach it to the new battery with a new contact nut. Well, since acid had leaked out of the battery, it caused the contact nut and the wire to fuse together. It was one big chunk of rust and metal. So I used a hammer (thanks Thea) and a screw driver to bang it apart. After about 30 minutes, I finally had most of the fused metal off the contact nut, but the nut was still on the wire and it wasn't coming off. We decided to go to WalMart, buy a new battery, and pick up a metal saw to cut the contact nut.
Once I had the metal saw, I was able to cut the nut in half and free the wire. I installed the new battery, connected the wire leads, started the engine, and voila! The truck was working again. Since installing the new battery, I've noticed it starts much stronger than it used to. That was probably the original battery, and since the truck has over 146k miles on it, its no surprise it needed to be replaced.
The weekend was otherwise rather uneventful. Relaxed, worked on programming projects, and spent some time at my parents house. Thea took a very cool underwater picture using their Olympus Stylus 720 SW at the lake (dpreview.com has a pretty good review of the camera here). That camera seems like the perfect everyday camera for me to carry around. I currently own a Nikon Coolpix P1, which has nice wireless capabilities that allow you to transfer the pictures to the computer over a wireless network. But for me, the ruggedness of the Olympus camera outweighs any cool features the Nikon has. I'll probably eBay the Coolpix and pick up a Olympus Stylus 720SW.
Almost a “life of djt……….” post.