How is this tire gauge worth $475?

to them this was a survival situation to me i'm just trying to save 475 [Music] have you ever had some small cheap object that somehow becomes valuable and in this case it was a cheap little 99-cent tire gauge that ended up being worth 475 dollars i had a previous dodge pickup to the big black one i've got now i had a silver one and i had built it up in a similar way you know big tires and a winch i had a camper on the back it was my first overlander and i was very excited to have taken it down to st george island in florida just south apalachicola it's beautiful part of the state great part of the country kind of old florida no big condos and many golf just old beaches that sort of thing and i was very excited because there is a state park there and in that state park you can get a four-wheel drive permit and drive out on roads that other people don't normally get to drive on and you know it's always exciting to do anything kind of coloring out of the lines so uh the rule was you'd have a four-wheel drive vehicle and of course i did and i was very proud of that very excited about that the condition however was that once you went past this certain point there was a state park there was a line there used to be a road where you could drive out to this point but one of the hurricanes come through and destroyed it and rather than repairing the road they just put up a gate and said if you got a four-wheel drive you can go the next i don't know three four miles so i was very excited um had my fishing poles had some stuff had a couple friends with me wife so we go out there i get the permit um sign the thing and the rule was though you had to be out by ten o'clock they had a like a tow service in town that had some sort of off-road tow truck and if you were not back to the gate by 10 o'clock then they would send him out to get you and it was 475 did not matter if you were asleep or stuck or broken down or whatever if you're not at this gate you're going to pay the 475. i'm like hey no problem it's five in the afternoon i got plenty of time like no problem i don't ever get stuck you know get through the gate and immediately it's just big washed out sand roads and a little bit of sand dunes and it's fun i've never really got to drive in sand a whole lot before so i'm excited i'm bouncing over sand dunes and swinging the truck around having a great time there's a few places where some kind of dunes had formed and you know i did not have extraordinarily large tires on the trucks you had to kind of keep your speed up to stay on top of it and i'm you know cresting a few these get a little bit of air but the soft sands all squishy so i'm having a great time so bounce and jump the truck you know a few times got a little too high came down a little hard no problem this truck i had the time i used it to travel all over the united states i did off-roading with it i went camping with i took in the snow i driven on the highways it went to just about every state in the lower 48. to me tires are perhaps the most important modification on a car because everything you do no matter how good your brakes are how good your suspension may be how powerful your engine it all has to be translated to the ground through that one little tire that little contact patch on the tire so rather than having different vehicles for everything i just had different sets of tires for this truck that i swapped on just like you know a lady might have different sets of shoes so i had mud tires i had road tires i had off-road tires and in this particular case knowing i was going to drive in the sand i had just some all-terrain tires some bfg all-terrains i believe i can't remember but you know the thing about an all-terrain tire is it doesn't have a big thick tread block it's not a big aggressive tire and as extreme as an environment off-road you think sander snow might be a really aggressive knobby tire tends to dig and thus displace the sand the truck starts to sink you want a tire that's going to float on top of the sand not to disrupt that surface too much so i went with some all-terrain tires which you know in the photos don't look like the most ideal tires to take off road in the sand they actually worked brilliantly and i had a lot of confidence taken out there and i've done a little bit of sand driving before but this is that north florida panhandle just that sugary powdered sugar kind of sand that you're going to sink in no matter what but they were doing really really well and the truck was just sailing along the sand and i was having a little bit too much fun hitting ruts bouncing a couple of dunes and you got a little air under the tires a few times and of course landing in that sand kind of cushions the blow so i was having a great time living out all of my iron man stuart baja fantasies as i went i get out to a point uh you know to the end of the point there parked the truck went fishing had a good time my friends hiked around just had a big time starts getting dark okay time to go home turn the truck around and the first sand dune i got to the truck just immediately just sunk to the frame i was like that's weird i did pretty good coming in here so i got out the the shovel and the the sand ladders which if you run the black truck the big perforated panels you stick those under the tires kind of get the trucks up get up on top of them so put the sand ladders under the tires and drive out of the sand and get a truck length and it gets stuck again there's no such thing as directional sand how did i drive over it this way and can't get out of it their other direction so uh the second stuck i'm i'm getting out the shelves when i look and i notice that only my rear tires are spinning in the sand the front tires are not doing anything and i was in four drive and you know i'm a truck guy i worked on trucks for years i did not hear a ring gear brake i did not hear a u-joint go i didn't break a hub nothing loud happened when four-wheel drive parts break especially under use you tend to know it nothing happened so i was like man it must not be engaging in four-wheel drive so i get in the truck and sure enough it's in four-wheel drive and i try four high four low i just cannot get those front tires to spin using my powers of deductive reasoning it must be the vacuum coupler which those that acts on that particular truck has this little vacuum coupler at sides of sleeve you got four wheel drive so the truck is of course stuck to the frame i can't get to this necessarily so i break out the shovel and like the guys in the great escape i start tunneling under this trunk thankfully it's florida sand so it's really easy so i'm tunneling under and i get under there of course the exhaust is hot and i'm kind of scared about it so i finally i get to the transfer case and nothing's broken nothing's leaking i started following the vacuum line and it had sort of a rubber line to the frame and there was a hard line that went down the frame rail and eventually went to another rubber line to the axle i discovered that at some point i had hit i guess one of these jumps i had hit the sand dune so hard that the catalytic converter on that truck which has like the there's like a press weld around the edge kind of a little seam must have like took in a hit and then shifted and it just karate chopped that hard vacuum line on the frame rail just right in half so i've got no vacuum on the front axle no four wheel drive the you know when you're in sand or snow or something like that the you know the tires have to be turning under their own power to stay on top of the surface at any point they're not powered they start to just push sand they cause resistance back wheels start to dig and you become stuck so definitely have to have four-wheel drive here i had already aired the tires down significantly you know people you know suggest do that and i had done that i'd aired them down to you know probably 15 psi i didn't want to go any lower because i would risk popping a tire off the bead so couldn't go any more in the air pressure so i've got to fix this four-wheel drive time-wise it's probably nine o'clock at this point ten o'clock is coming up quickly my wife's reminded me that you know this is going to cost you 475 dollars big shot because you wanted to drive back here so i'm starting on the truck now my two friends that were with me they weren't outdoorsmen they were not used to being out in the wilderness in their mind anyway we are two miles from town there's a campground three miles up the beach so they're getting a little nervous and you know they start thinking what are we gonna do you know we're gonna get stuck out here all night and what's gonna happen and you know this is august in florida it's not cold it's not all that hot at night we've got a truck with a camper on the back i've got gallons of water we've got food we've got cell service you know we're okay we're gonna be all right they were actually so worried they suggested maybe walking out and and i was like well okay sure you know that but we're worried about getting lost and and if you know st george island so just like most barrier islands just a very narrow strip of land there's a little intercoastal there to get to the shore the gulf's on the other side but it's only about two footballs wide and we are at the end of it and the gate is full width of the island at the other end a few miles ahead and they're like what if we get lost and i was like okay look you guys just start walking west if you don't get wet you're gonna get to the gate you're either going to pass me get in the water or get to the gate so just you'll be fine so they i gave them some granola bars and some water and then they literally to them this was a survival situation to me i'm just trying to save 475 so they start walking and i start looking at this vacuum line like what am i gonna do so you know tape's not really gonna hold up um it's not gonna work well but then that little proverbial light bulb pops up i go on my console and i get that tiny little tire gauge and i get out my hacksaw out of my tool kit and i cut the ends off the tire gauge and sure enough it's just about exactly the same diameter as that quarter inch vacuum line so i dig back under the truck and you get up underneath there and you know kind of hacksaw out the crimp bits and sleeve that little you know slide it on one end slide it back tape it up on the ends and crank it up sure enough i've got vacuum drives the truck back on top of the sand drive it all the way out and again have a great time bounce i'm racing the clock at this point though it is 15 minutes to 10 o'clock i am so close so i'm just bouncing and bashing just racing the clock racing the clock you know trying to get there trying to get there um i get to the gate right as my friends are and maybe with two minutes to spare they are tired they're covering sand they got in some bushes at some point trying to make a shortcut they're all cut up they've already drank their water eat their granola bars they thought they were going to die as my wife at the time you know i i knew better than to say i told you so but i did i couldn't resist just saying you know see we made it the tire gauge worked and she looked over and she said that was a creative solution for a problem that should have never existed in the first place [Music] [Music] you

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 480,701

Keywords: Christopher Michaels, Dodge, Truck, Overlanding, Off Roading, St Georges Island, barrier island, tire gauge, survival, sand, tires, sand rails, stuck, repair, 4wd, vacuum line, towing, fines, vinwiki, car stories

Id: XcrzaOHU3gk

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2020