One day, a few months ago, I was blessed with a very old but new to me excavator. After years of digging with a goon spoon (aka, a shovel) I could suddenly do in half an hour what used to take days of back breaking, sweaty labour.
Knowing that it was old, I was deliberately gentle with it, and it was not only a great labour saver, but it was fun to learn how to use it.
And then one night it rained. And rained. And rained! And all that rain was enough to cause a nice big mudslide over my road, completely blocking it with mud, logs, boulders and other debris. But I had an excavator!
It took me about an hour to walk it down to the slide and then the work began. The slide covered about 700ft and it was pretty sloppy. It sucked because every time I’d take a scoop, it would just fill back in. Being gentle soon went out the door and I was really working the old machine.
Then, a few days into it, it started to overheat. Not good. But I didn’t have much choice except to keep digging. Thankfully the creek was flowing fairly clean and I was topping off the radiator every hour or so.
Nine days later, I opened the road and could get my SUV through it in 4 low. But the old machine was not happy.
I nursed it back up to my place so I could finish my waterline project. As long as I kept the rad topped up it was good enough. But it started to use more water and was losing power. Until one day it was blowing lots of white smoke and then it stopped running.
Is it a bad injector? Head gasket? Or, God forbid, a blown piston?
I pressure washed the engine and started poking around it but still don’t know what the problem is.
Praying for a miracle.
Does God heal excavators? 🤷♂️👨🏻🔧