Put the Ranger up for sale on the Lemon Lot last week and this morning sold it. The guy who bought it test drove it for all of half a mile, never exercised the 4WD (or the most of the other features of the truck, for that matter), and asked me zero questions about the truck's performance, maintenance history, or idiosyncracies. He paid me my asking price in cash approximately 10 minutes after getting in the truck for the first time.
Speaking of the asking price... I asked for the bluebook value, which it turns out is only $100 less than what I bought the truck for back in 2003. I purchased the Ranger from my bank as part of an estate sale and they had mis-identified the options on the truck (their receipt refers to it as a regular cab with the lowest trim package and no options, whereas the truck was actually the extended cab with a higher trim package and a bunch of options, e.g. the camper shell). At the time, this accounted for about $1500 difference in the blue book price and the bank low-balled the price big-time. The 35,000 miles I put on the truck in the past 2.75 years have now decreased the value of the truck to right around what I paid for it. Not bad.
Of course I did dump a bunch of money into repairs, maintenance, and upgrades of the vehicle... but still, I feel sort of like I had equity in the truck.
And the giant wad of cash was good for some laughs. Plus, it more than paid for the new camper shell I put on the Tacoma yesterday. I spent some time today familiarizing myself with the electrical system in the new truck. Hacked the fuse box to allow me to turn on the fog lamps whenever I want, instead of the stock restriction that the low-beams must be on and the car running for the fog lamps to work.
-------
In non-truck-related news... after selling the truck, I spent the rest of the morning down at Hodson's Hole hauling rock. Four of us this time, which made for a much more efficient bucket brigade than when Rod and I tried to do everything ourselves. We cleared a lot of rock. The cave was inhaling heavily today. I managed to break the head off the rock hammer, which I think means that I'm enormous.
Yeah, the fogs on Layla's RAV4 do the same thing. My BMW lets me kick on the fogs with just the parking lights on, which is nice when I'm pulling into a parking spot and don't want to blind anyone with my regular lamps.
When I wired the fogs in my Talon to be always-on, the NM laws stated that fogs were legal to run without headlamps only if you have popup headlights (which is odd, but sortof makes sense). I doubt anyone would ever pull you over for it (and I figure 90% of your fog-on action will be offroad anyway), but you may want to see if that's changed recently.
Oh, so does this make the Tacoma an Undeadguytruck?
Yeah I think the only times I'll be using the fog lamps will be if 1) there is actually fog, 2) I am off-roading at night, or 3) I am in a trying-not-to-blind mode (e.g. setting up at a group campsite or something).
I think I'm going to re-do the hack to make it less kludge-like. I can just pull the whole fuse/relay assembly out and put one of those tool-less splice connectors between the wires that feed pins 1 and 2 on the relay, cut the wire that normally feeds pin 1, and reassemble. No visible changes, no possible vibration issues, etc. Should be good stuff. Will, of course, post more nerdy HOWTO action on that.
While you're at it (where it==anything), can you set up an RSS feed on this-here loggus?
The reason the lights turn off when your high lights are on is because of the way Fog reflects and refracts the light. Fog lights are useful because they light up the are under the fog which means the light penetrates further under the fog and then you can see further. Using both high beam and fog is pointless as the fog simply rflects and refracts most of the light back into your face, also use of both could potentially dazzle oncoming traffic in low visibility.
Your comment makes sense if I only used the fog lamps for better visibility in fog. When off-roading at night, I simply want as much light as I can generate and thus I want the high beams and fogs on at the same time. Hence the hack. (that, and I want to be able to have the fog's on without any headlamps too).
Ben, I beg to differ. The reason you can't have your fogs and your brights on at the same time is because of the overregulation of traffic "safety" laws at the hands of the liberals.
You're a dork, Dan. PS: I assume your rapid response to this post means that the RSS is working? (does it actually re-feed with comments?)
It was actually just lucky timing.
And yeah, I just hooked up the feed--it looks like it works, even though you seemed to have named it "mouser.log," which is far more subfielding than I'm interested in.