Another oil pressure thread

[Chamberpains]

This guys story from his posts in this thread and his other thread http://rawze.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=3731 is just chalked full of bad decisions. This is not to say that he's dumb or not smart. I'm saying just bad decisions. His story shows just how tough trucking is right now and always will be.

It started with trusting anyone to overhaul his engine and expecting it to be done 100% right. This is the saddest part for all of us. It's a very bad gamble and in the end, took this guys business to the toilet. I'm also gonna guess that the original fools also didn't back any of their half assed work and this guys got stuck with the repair bill. This is a very bad decision to go to ANY place that won't back their work 100%.

They screwed up and put the wrong rod/main bearings in because they didn't follow proper procedures and just threw in what was common instead of looking to see what came out and verifying what needed to go back in.

Then he began to hasten his bad situation by throwing very expensive parts at the truck instead of finding the actual problem 1st. He threw a head and all the jewelry attached to it at it. He spent days stabbing at possible problems. That's a lot of down time and a pile of $$ at this point.

He appears to have wanted to make sure he didn't have to deal with these problems again but made another very bad error and decided to "save" the crank and have it polished and cleaned up and thrown back in. Probably hoping to save a few thousand on a new crank. Where in reality, he should've bailed on that million mile plus crank. He already had it out of the truck. Why stick it back in? Its seen a pile of use and abuse in a million miles. Plus the down time to ship it out and wait on a shop to inspect and clean it up. That's days if not a week or more. A decision that locked him in to the ride that he's on now.

Then the nature of trucking kicked in. A good thing will NEVER last forever ESPECIALLY in trucking. So his steady income washed up. He claims he traveled 100,000 plus miles on this engine in a year and sold off his other trucks So he didn't turn low miles. There is obviously a problem with the freight hauled in those miles and the pay it produced, his decisions on what was done with that money or possibly both that didn't leave enough money to build a proper engine. Either way, its poor decisions in running of a business that lands a person here.

Now out of frustration, he's making yet another critical error with buying a VERY big unknown and putting a CLAIMED low mileage USED engine in his truck. This has very little chance of being a long term good decision. Let's just suppose he's not being lied to about the engines life and it's a true 14+ year old 400k cm870 salvage engine. If true its either an abused local truck or 1 that has been sitting in a salvage yard for a looong time. Lot rot will be a problem and will need to be addressed at whatever cost. This could be a full inframe from rot alone.... he won't know until he tears into it or sticks it in the truck and runs it. Then its problems will be exposed and be very costly and probably crippling to every goal he has in his current life. He's hoping blindly that this engine is gonna carry him through these hard times. This is no way to run a trucking company.

Then finally one more tid bit he threw in was that he may have a questionable ECM program (possible bad delete) that could have started all the problems to begin with. Instead of eating his pride and sticking it out and ensuring a better future by insisting he has someone trusted look at it, he's sayin F'it and is just gonna run his questionable used engine with what could be a destructive ECM program....

He says he's been in and around the business for 30 years. So his problems don't come from a lack of experience and knowledge. He seems very bright in a lot of areas. Instead his problems seem to be coming from what Rawze calls "jumping over a dollar to save a dime " and blindly throwing very expensive unknowns into his business and having to, at a very high cost, redo these decisions. From the overhaul, then the head and crank to now this used engine and unknown ECM programming.

Rawze already stated how this guy can greatly increase his chances of long term survival in trucking and take himself off this train wreck he's been on. That would be build an engine that you can rest your life on with programming you can always trust and don't look back. If it takes begging or borrowing to get it done then do it. If it takes going back to company driving to save money, do it. If it takes eating a bit of shi#t to get out of a bad spot. Swallow your pride. Humble yourself, take your lumps and make the right choices. There is a much longer, more predictable profitable future in the business of trucking by choosing this route.

At some point all that experience puts blinders on people and they can't clearly see what the long term future is gonna look like. I wrote this, not to bash on this guy, but to simplify for people reading that you need to always make the BEST decisions. Not the cheaper or easier ones. Take the hit to your pride and do what's best long term for your business.

Water and electricity ALWAYS take the path of least resistance and in turn gets used and abused by anyone and everyone. Human beings that want to survive should not follow that example.