Wheels

I admit that when it comes to insurance it's all pot roast stew to me. You can change the amounts of different vegetables but in the end, it's still stew.

Today I changed insurers. I've was doing business with Allstate, a respected name for the last 5 years. I've had no problems with them (but then, I haven't had a claim either). Yet two things changed that led me to the little green lizard guy GEICO.

My insurance agent was right down the road, less than two miles away. This was handy in that as a cash and carry kind of guy, I'd drop in, pay 6 months at a time and with papers in hand, know it was covered. Car insurance is important, you want to know it's there and have someone handy if you should have questions or actually need it use it. Admittedly by driving across town I could have kept Allstate but the agent also no longer accepted cash payments at the office. Lastly for someone who does as little driving as I do, with a clean record Allstate was charging to much.

I likely would have stayed with Allstate if I could have continued to pay cash and my agent hadn't moved, GEICO sweetened the deal by saving me 20 bucks to boot.

Several small lighting problems on the truck have been bothering me, but not enough to move them to the 'Do It Now' list. My 'Do It Now' never was short but the night before the right side lowbeam of the headlight burned out and that was the straw that sent me to sorting electrical problems.

There was that left headlight, I couldn't get it to adjust right. The left front parking light was out and the left turn indicator stayed lit whenever the lights were on, a sign of a short or a poor electrical ground.

So I pulled into the Walmart lot after work to pick up a headlight and bulbs and looked down and saw why the left headlight wouldn't adjust right. The previous owner installed the headlight upside down. Well, that's a easy fix, but I felt like smacking myself in the head for not catching it earlier.

Onto the turn signal problem. Swapping the left side bulb didn't work. I didn't expect it to, but who says you can't get lucky. At least the front parking light started working, after cleaning out a lot of dried white grease, one out of two. The wiring harness has several grounds. The bed lights ground to the drivers side frame rail just behind the leaf spring shackle. After cleaning, no fix. The cab section light harness grounds on the drivers side of radiator support, hidden by the horn, After cleaning and sanding the contacts it's fixed.