"I laugh at those who think they can damage me. They do not know who I am, the do not know what I think, they cannot even touch the things which are really mine and with which I live." - Epictetus
I had a couple of days off, which I cannot claim were terribly productive.
- Returned a couple of Amazon Christmas gifts to the UPS store.
- Made a four-hour trip to town (Costco, Home Despot, WalMart, Feed Store) to re-supply us and the dogs through spring.
- Called for a propane refill, which cost me $1000, up from the normal $500-600 refill.
- Took the trash to the transfer station.
- Took down the Chistmas tree, bundled it up into storage bags, and hauled it to the garage.
- Spent an hour clearing the walkway to the shop with the snow shovel. Didn't feel like wrestling with the snow blower, and needed the workout anyway.
I wanted to finish up the big air compressor work, but the air compressor parts I had ordered from "Jack's Small Engines" back on December 11 were *still* on back-order as of January 18. Back when I placed the order, it was only after clicking "BUY" that the web page announced that one of the parts was not available, and that it would be placed on back-order. Bastards.
Five weeks was long enough of a wait, so I sourced the parts somewhere else. Having learned my lesson with "Jacks", I actually spoke with a sales rep at "Pacific Air Compressors" instead of shopping online with a mouse... He verified they had the parts in stock, and we had a friendly chat as well - a legit good experience. Jack's had slightly better pricing, but Pacific actually had the parts, and also offered great customer service.
An Amazon order arrived, and the box contained a full set of High and Low beam LED headlight bulbs for the snowplow, plus a front-and-back light bar for the roof of the plow truck. I gotta tell you, it's difficult and stressful to drive a plow truck around in the dark, with nothing but tiny back-up lights behind, and small plow lights ahead. The difference is incredible. It's like having a street light above the truck, plus the forward lighting is very impressive now.
Before: Stock incandescent lights that came installed in the plow headlights.
Below: Plow headlights replaced, and light bar turned on. The photo doesn't really do justice to the new amount of light.
The housings for the plow bulbs aren't all that big, because they sit in the way of your view. This limits the size of the reflectors, and the surface area of the light source. The bulbs need to be brighter to compensate for the small reflectors.
The light bar has different flashing modes, and you have to push a rocker switch through 16 modes to cycle through each of them. I'm really only interested in the solid light mode. The flashing patterns are irritating, which gets old really quickly.
Other LED bulbs in the Amazon box were for the Subaru instrument cluster. It looks dim and washed out compared to the brilliant green ones I recently installed in the climate control module. Below are a couple of pictures at different dimness settings.
When I find a couple of hours of free time, I'll replace those four illuminating bulbs with some nice bright green LED T3 and T5 bulbs.
UPDATE:
Pacific Air Compressors Delivered!! Four days after I placed the order, no less.
EDIT:
Got the instrument cluster lights done. Sort of. One of the bulb holders broke. The incandescent bulb had heated and embrittled the plastic base that holds the bulb in. No biggie. I got most of them changed, and it looks a lot better. It was a pain in the neck, like all the work on the Subie :)
Before:
After
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