It was amazing really. After travelling around the country for two weeks with Brodie (see his blog:
Jellycan), the truck broke only once I got back home. By one day. Oh, and it is not my truck either - sorry Mike.
I had returned home and during our travels the engine had been missing and getting worse, so the next day I headed out to our neighbouring town of Trelew, about 60kms away, to get it fixed. The computer that Ford in Trelew had would tell us exactly what was causing the problems... but I never got there.
This is the truck that just broke.
While driving on the main highway there briefly came a noise for a couple of seconds that then disappeared. It sounded more like the wind than the gearbox, until it returned again only seconds before a bang. At that point a puff of smoke came out from around the gearstick and smelt distinctly like powdered metal. The motor suddenly revved freely. 5th gear was gone.
With 5th gear gone, I tried changing to 4th and discovered that it still worked. Now because I heard no other bad sounds, I figured that the box was still ok and I had all the other gears. It was likely that only a part of 5th had broken and was now sitting out of harms way on the bottom of the gearbox. I was half-way and decided to continue, partly because turning on this busy route was not a good option and partly because the damage seemed less than I was soon to discover.
On reaching the service stations outside Trelew, I slowed down and shifted into 3rd gear but there was nothing. A freaky feeling hit me at that point. I tried 2nd, nothing. 1st, nothing either. There were no gears at all other than 4th. By this stage I was going slow, and realised that if I stopped I may end up stranded completely.
Not knowing the town in which I was in nor any workshops where I could take the car, I prayed about returning to my home town, now 60kms away. After prayer I felt sure that it would be safe to proceed, so at 80km/h I nursed the vehicle back to Puerto Madryn. There were no unusual sounds, no strange smells or other problems, and I arrived safely.
The next problem was where to go. To take the truck back to where I am living would not have helped to repair it, so I took it to the only place I knew of - the Ford dealership. This is the most expensive place in town. They gave me quotes of from $6,000 to $8,000 pesos and a minimum of three weeks to do the work. It was looking pretty bad.
Today however, I moved the truck to another workshop where Raul will start work tomorrow. They have quoted somewhere around $4,000 to $5,000 pesos depending on what they find when they open up the gearbox. So by this time tomorrow we should know just how severe the damage is. Currently we are thinking that maybe one of the main gears has disintegrated and the rest of the box is fine...
...but until we look inside, nobody really knows.