Car Eit

Well, my travels back from Boston went fine. Until I got out of the airport, sat in my car, turned the key, and heard click. Hmm. Click is not a happy sound. It is a sign, surely, of jumper cables or a tow truck in my future.



Yeah. Suck.

I tried jumper cables at first, but it didn't seem to make any difference. I think it is possible that perhaps the jumpers were not set properly on the 'live' car (it was one of those annoying GM side-terminal batteries that you can barely get a grip onto), or perhaps the battery is completely dead.

Anyway, one bright side is that I got to find out the proper way to tow my car. I knew that an all-wheel drive Subaru is supposed to be towed with all four wheels off the ground (except for short distances), otherwise transmission damage results. And I've always seen those little pairs of wheels on the sides of tow trucks, and wondered how they worked. Well, I got to see them in operation.

Note that this truck is, as you would expect, the current "axle cradling" tow bar setup, as opposed to the ancient "hook and chain" setup (see the Wikipedia article on tow trucks for clarification). Are any of you both old and geeky enough to remember the old hook & chain tow trucks? They had a large rubberized mat or strap that held the front of the car up. I believe that they became obsolete with the rise of plastic (as opposed to chromed metal) bumpers--it was easy to damage them while raising/towing the car.

So the two-wheeled dollys fit one (wheel pair) underneath each (automobile) wheel. There is a bar that goes across, under the car, connecting the two dollys. You lock the frame together, then you use a 5' steel bar to turn a cam on the dolly, thus raising the automobile wheels off the ground (that is the operation being done in this photo). Presto--good to go!

The whole operation (towing back to my house) only cost $80 CAD, which--I thought--was a relatively good price. The tow operator decided to tell me his life story--by the end of the ride, I knew about his history of depression and medication, his growing up in Montreal, his brother with a heart condition, and the office parrot that swears during important phone calls. Well, it was entertaining enough.