On the road again...

A couple of weeks ago Old Blue started making a scraping noise whenever I drove it. I traced the noise to the front driver side brakes, put it up on stands and tore it apart. Lo and behold, one of the springs in the brakes had broken and was dangling scraping against the drum. Yeesh, scary stuff. So I went out in search of a new spring, just to find nobody had them in stock. Well, unless I bought the entire spring set. Well, since the entire set only cost $10, I bought it. That was about a week ago, and things came up. Until today. It wasn't simply putting the spring in and reassembling, since I had to take apart the whole wheel assembly to get the drum off. That meant repacking the bearings before putting it back together. For those of you who have never packed bearings, that means getting a big gob of thick, smelly grease on the palm of your hand and smooshing the grease into the wheel bearings with the other hand. You've got to go around the whole thing, which means you get both hands completely covered with the grease. Ahhh, fun stuff. Until you have to go inside to clean off your hands and get the grease all over the door handles, soap bottle and faucet. Ah well, they all clean up. At least the brakes are as good as new, got rid of the scraping sound and even a rattling that had been previously unidentified.