New Tailgate

We bought our 2004 Chevy Silverado 2500HD new. It was only a few months after paying it off in 2010 that the rust began showing up. The first place that it became evident was on the tailgate. I had the truck in for some body work after hitting a deer in 2011, and the guy said he wouldn’t even give me a price on fixing that rust. He said that he could make it look good as new but it’d be back in two weeks. He blamed a defect in the design.

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New Bumper

The first update that I attempted to make on the truck was the one that seemed straight-forward enough: replacing my rusted-out rear chrome step bumper with a new aftermarket one that I found online.

Rusted-out factory bumper. The panoramic photo makes it look more wobbly than it really was.

The new bumper came with the plastic step cover trim already installed, and included four brackets and a handful of nuts and bolts (though one nut short of having everything needed for installation).

Reversed Polarity

We’ve been getting the itch to go camping, and the mandated social isolation seems like a perfect opportunity to change our scenery. We made reservations for next week, and will be getting a full-hookup site at a campground a little under one hour from home. The full hookup site will be nice to un-winterize the water system. Today I uncovered the camper, installed the propane tanks and hooked up the battery.

When I went to hook up the battery, I made a mistake that could have caused a lot more damage than it did. I am thankful for strategically-placed fuses that protected the electrical system and appliances, and prevented this from becoming a much more expensive mistake than it was.

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Truck Updates Coming

When we bought our diesel Chevy Silverado 2500HD in 2004, it was a necessity for work. By 2012, the work I was doing no longer required a heavy-duty truck. However, it was paid for, and I’d gotten very used to having a pickup truck, so I did not want to get rid of it for something more “sensible”. Justification for keeping the truck was cemented by the purchase of our 2016 Sunset Trail 33′ bunkhouse travel trailer, which has an approximately 7000 lb. dry weight.

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