[AT] 430V was the hero

[Spencer Yost]

So last night, as the tropical storm is passing overhead and dumping rain on us, a neighbor came home with his humongous camper,  a four-wheel-drive Ford where the four wheel drive wasn’t working, three cranky kids; the whole carload of which just dying to get home after driving hours in the rain.

So he takes a shortcut and tries to back that monstrous camper into the driveway at an angle not advantageous.  Usually he comes down to the bottom of the road where there’s a wide spot and he can turn around, come back,  and then back into his driveway at an angle that works much better.  Long story short the truck ends up in the clay soup beside the road and he is down nearly to the axle on one side. He calls me and says “do you have any thing to pull my truck out?”.  I opted for the 430 V because the Ford’s tires are so crappy and the Pacer I didn’t think quite had the gear ratio and power.

Quick digression: he is at the top of the road and we have two families at the bottom of the road with lots of severe medical issues. Between the two of them there have been three ambulance visits and five additional private car trips to the ER in the last month and a half. All he and I were thinking was “Great! The ambulance/car shows up and he has the road blocked”.  So waiting two hours for AAA or a tow truck was not gonna hack it.

By the time I got up there with the 430V in the pouring rain he had the truck uncoupled. Rigged up my long tow straps to the front hooks so I could be on some higher, drier ground and pulled.  While I must admit I really had to dance with the differential brakes and throttle I managed to get him pulled out.

But the camper was still blocking the road.  All my tractors’ towbars are too low for this monstrosity of a camper. There was no way we could put install a ball and put the camper on a tractor we figured. So I grabbed the bobcat. Now the bobcats got zero traction in mud like that so I had to sneak up kind of from the side while staying on the roadbed, get a tooth from the edge of the bucket under the trailer coupler, lift, and slowly but carefully push the trailer back and then pull rearward so that the coupler was now lined up on the road and he could re-hook his truck without being in the mud.

The 430v ( with a little help from the bobcat) saved the day!

PS: I was a little upset that my 430 V got so wet. :-)

Spencer