99% of the time I love our new home. It's unbelievably gorgeous on the Big Island, amazing weather/sunsets all the time, so many things to see and explore, a job where I'm getting to do some pretty neat work... Kinda a fairy tale as evidenced by the crazy rainbows we seem to get several times a week.
That being said, real-life smacked me in the face the other day and ended up in a bit of a fabrication saga.
A while back I mentioned something about Hawaii's safety check program, and guys running garden trim to get fender tire "coverage," right? Unfortunately, when I setup my jeep that way I don't have enough clearance for proper tire flex and I end up ripping the flares right off.
It seems like everybody else around here runs tire poke, so I figured when in Rome, and pulled all that stuff back off. I prefer my rig without fender flares anyways.
Turns out the Waimea police department does not agree with my preferences... :-(
Yep, it seems the locals can do whatever they want, but if you happen to be wearing a mainlander dress shirt on your way to work in a Jeep with some tire poke, that'll get you pulled over even if you are obeying the rest of the traffic laws.
The officer pulled me over as I was turning into the parking lot of my work as well, so naturally I'm sitting there getting a ticket the cop is parked right behind me lights flashing away. Several of my coworkers are walking in for the morning and waving at me. The heckling game was strong that morning. ;-)
4x traffic infractions, one per corner, $72 per tire for $288 fine. Ouchie...
So I break out my metal supplies and a tube bender I bought from a friend before leaving and figured what the heck, I'll try bending some flat fenders.
Testing out the machine I started by bending up a stack of FD trans mounts bars (aka, development efforts in work). I know I need a bigger garage, but it is expensive over here so when the time you have to work on it happens to be raining, you do your best.
That worked fine so it was time to try some multi plane bends. Hmmm.... This is going to be harder than I thought. Multiple bends end up being a tolerance nightmare. If you are a degree off on a bend and a degree off on rotation, the end result 5 feet later is damn hard to get exactly what you intended (much less replicated in a mirror image for the other side.)
It kind of looks okay but I'm not really that happy with it either, particularly as I compare side to side.
More to come (a lot more).
-Joel