A less thrilling part of being self-sufficient is dealing with emergency repairs. They seem to happen far too often, and it depends on what is in need of maintenance. There are some things you can repair yourself, but for others, you may need the help of an expert. For instance, if you want to repair your furnace and you’ve never repaired one before, you may want to search for a service that was ranked for top furnace repair in your local area since there is so much that can go wrong if you don’t repair it properly. However, for this emergency repair story, I’m not talking about a big repair issue, I’m talking about a small one. We use our snow blower to remove snow from our long driveway, as well as create paths to the various animal enclosures. It’s in this second capacity that I encountered problems the other day. The snow blower moved in an unexpected manner while working around the chicken coop and the side of the wheel hit the coop stairs. A small pop sounded, but I didn’t really notice. I did notice a few minutes later when the tire deflated and the snow blower was no longer usable 
. Emergency repairs are just an unfortunate part of adult life that can affect us in the most random ways. It may be something like your garage door that suddenly becomes faulty, which is not ideal but must be dealt with quickly and efficiently. If this sort of thing happens you’ll want to consult with local garage door technicians in Whitestone, New York. so that your garage can return to full working order as quickly as possible. Nobody wants to keep needing emergency repairs, but you’ll be grateful when you receive them.
Trying to blow the tire up with a hand pump didn’t work because the bead had popped. So, that meant putting the snow blower away and continuing snow removal by hand. Four hours later, I finally completed the task with Rebecca’s help. Nothing provides quite as much exercise as four hours worth of snow shoveling in freezing winds, but we also needed to get to town to fix the flat (as well as perform other tasks).
The snow blower is too large and heavy to get into the Explorer. So the obvious course of action was to get the wheel off and take it to our local repair shop. The only problem was getting the wheel off. The bolt holding the wheel in place is designed to provide a tight fit and proved quite resistant to any effort at removal. Blocking the tire would normally provide enough friction to allow removal of the bolt, but that technique didn’t work in this case because the wheel simply turned within the tire. I finally improvised by attaching a large deep reach c-clamp to the wheel, which blocked the wheel and made it possible to gain purchase on the bolt.
At this point, the bolt wouldn’t move at all and penetrating oil (WD-40) wasn’t helping much. I brought out my persuader-which is a length of pipe that I slip over the end of my socket wrench handle to increase the torque I can apply to the bolt. Actually, it isn’t a pipe in the conventional sense. I saved the torsion bar from our old garage door and have cut it into several pieces that I use for a number of tasks, including persuading bolts. Extending the handle of the socket wrench gives you a physical advantage and makes it easier to remove stubborn bolts, but you have to be careful not to break the sockets as a result of using the pipe. Moreover, fortunately, I have a few torque wrenches similar to these tekton torque wrenches in my automotive tool kit so I was able to carry out this task relatively easily.
Bolt removed, the wheel still wouldn’t come off. The snow blower shaft is keyed and the wheel fits quite tightly. Unfortunately, working with the front of the wheel wouldn’t accomplish anything because the wheel goes on in that direction. The back of the wheel isn’t easily accessed because the snow blower transmission is in the way. In order to gain access to the back of the wheel, I angled a 2 × 2 over the top of the engine and hit it with a mallet. After a few pounds with the mallet on the end of the 2 × 2, I turned the wheel 90 degrees. Each 360 degrees of movement saw me applying a little more WD-40 to the front and back of the wheel shaft. Eventually, the wheel came off.
Getting the wheel fixed was quick and easy. The local repair shop has a compressor and the tire blew back up without problem after applying a sealant to the bead. The tire is back on the snow blower now and the snow blower is ready for use after today’s snowstorm. The point is that you have to think ahead about the potential for emergency repairs and have a strategy in place for dealing with them. Yes, the approach we used was a bit inconvenient and time consuming, but it did work. But, of course, while things like repairing a snow blower can be done by us, other things that may need doing after a snowstorm, like slab foundation repair, should always be done by experts.
What sorts of emergency repairs do you think about when thinking about self-sufficiency? Do you have contingency plans in place to handle your emergencies? Let me know at [email protected].