In the
aftermath of the bursting of the stock market bubble in the early
2000s, I became a devotee in my spare time of reading what people had to
say about investing, on the strength of the idea that a down market might
have wiser lessons, being more dearly earned, than an up market. To
learn from other people's mistakes, after all, is at least as good as
learning from your own, and less expensive. Of all the nuggets of
wisdom ("Buy low and sell high"), the one that sticks in my mind
is, "The stock doesn't know you own it."
This curious phrase was
cautionary advice for gullible people who badly wanted, say, four new Jet
Skis or a second house, and decided they would invest in the stock market
in order to have the money to buy that stuff. I call it curious
because, on one hand, it's plainly obvious that an individual stock
doesn't "know" or "care" that its owner badly wants or
needs its price to go up; and on the other hand, that such a statement
needs to be said at all indicates just how easily emotion can cloud
judgment.
I think of that phrase whenever
I'm troubleshooting in the dirtiest nether regions of a tow truck, because
some similar dynamic is at work in the troubleshooting of dirty or
hard-to-get-at tow truck components. The assembly you're
troubleshooting doesn't know or care how dirty your arms are going to get
when you work on it, or how hard it is to see or get to. The nature
of the disorder and the nature of the cure remain the same, regardless of
how you feel about the accessibility and visibility challenges involved in
troubleshooting the assembly.
The hydraulic filter assembly,
for instance, is usually underneath the wrecker bed and is often the
dirtiest, hardest-to-get-to part. It often bears a thick coat of
grime, so it resembles one seamless piece instead of the manifold part it
actually is. When it leaks, poor troubleshooters tend to mentally
gloss over the details of the assembly and blindly start throwing new
parts at it.
Instead of glossing over the
details of the part, it pays to imagine the part clean and sitting on the
bench, and to think about the several completely separate places where oil
could leak. For example, oil sometimes leaks out of the
gasket-mating surface between the aluminum filter head and spin-on
filter. Or the spin-on filter itself splits and oil leaks from
there. In either of those two cases, fix the problem by installing a
new spin-on filter.
Another common and completely
separate leak location is the connection where the aluminum filter head
threads onto a pipe nipple or fitting. Solve that problem by taking
it apart, putting generous amounts of liquid pipe dope (never Teflon tape)
deep into the valleys of the tapered threads, and tightening the
connections good and tight.
When
tightening the aluminum filter head onto the pipe connections with pipe
wrenches, avoid positioning the two wrenches on opposite sides of the
filter head, as tightening across the soft-metal filter head will distort
it. Instead, position the two wrenches next to each other and
tighten one connection at a time.
Right
way