Fixing the truck with minimal effort

For a few weeks, the truck has been acting up on me. It started when I was in Fort Smith. A car stopped short in front of me, and I narowly avoided hitting them by mere inches. Anyway, since then, whenever I get past 45 MPH, the steering column would shake uncontrolably. But, if I got past 65 MPH, it would be fine again.

I described the problem to a guy at work, and he thought it was a problem with the wheel being unbalanced. That made sense because I have been riding around on the spare tire since the last ice storm. It's a full-size spare, but it probably hadn't been used since the car was made...back in '96. The tread was cracked and the wheel itself was in pretty bad shape.

Today, I noticed the tire was a little low, so I stopped at QuikTrip to fill it up. After the compressor timed out, I heard hissing from the tire, and found that not only did it have an audible leak, but part of the tread was peeling away...so much so that I figured out that was the cause of the shaking. Once I got up enough speed, the tread would pop out and throw the whole wheel off-balance.

I got back to work with only a little air left in the tire. I got the original tire fixed and swapped them out before heading for home. Now, the truck handles great! If only the other problems on the truck were that easy to fix. The A/C needs to be fixed, but with the forecast calling for frost this weekend, I may have bought some extra time to get it fixed.

What if everything else was as easy as the tire? I'd find a CD changer behind the tape deck! A flip of a switch to change it to a hybrid! Plush leather heated seats under the torn pleather upholstery! Equal trade-in for a car I'd actually want to drive!

A man can dream.