Well I finally finished it. Friday morning I went to Uhaul to pick up my hitch receiver for my new car. After four days of working on installing it, I have finally completed the mission. I knew I didn't need to pay them that $50 to install it in 30 minutes. I realized I had misjudged my car's situation when I found out I didn't have threaded holes in the frame and I would have to drill 1 inch access holes into the frame to get bolts and spacers inside of it. This was a very hard task. Drilling into the frame was hard work. My shoulder is still sore and aggravated from pushing on it. My eyes and face have endured many metal shavings. Digging them out of my eyes has become a common thing, even after the drilling stopped. During the drilling the metal was very hot and burned my arms several times. I had to cover my whole upper body in aprons to try to keep them off. It didn't always work. When I was done drilling and I had the bolts in place, I thought I was home free. Then, I realized that some metal was still in the way of putting the hitch up in its place. Luckily, the cable cutters I have snipped through this pretty easily. After bending this out of the way I figured it would go up in there smoothly. Wrong. When I took the nuts off the bolts to place the hitch onto them, two of them fell inside the frame as I only got one on. Failing to fish them out of the frame, I gave up and went over to the other side of the hitch to see what I could do there. I wrapped some rubber bands around the bolts after I took the nuts off in hopes that this would hold them in place while I placed the hitch over it. It worked. Awesome! Score one. Now back over to the other side. I had to dig around in the house to find a strong magnet to fish the bolts and spacers out of the frame so I could re-fish them through the frame with the metal spring. Re-doing work I thought I was already done with. I love doing that. I'm just glad I remembered to put on some locktite when I did the final threading of the nuts. A few twist of the socket wrench and I was done.
Now I have to find a bolt or locking hitch pin that will fit the 1 1/4" adapter that I have to run to accommodate my 2 inch bike rack. The receiver is nicely hidden under the car and would probably look really pro if I had a 1 1/4 inch bike carrier. Instead it has to stick out an additional 6 inches and I'm praying for clearance on elevation changes like driveways and dips in the road.
Since writing the first part of this post, I went and rode my bike, utilizing the new hitch. It works. Not going to lie, I was staring the bike and hitch down the whole time I drove to Shelby Farms. I was pretty paranoid about putting my brand new Air 9 Carbon mtb bike on the rack for its first test. The rack worked well and the ride was awesome. I love the new bike. It is incredible stiff and the 2x10 X.O group is rocking. Now that I have this task completed, I'm going to trek down to Birmingham tomorrow to do a very intense 2 day training camp. I'm hoping to get about 4 hours of training on Tuesday and at least 3 hours on Wednesday. I'll do all three sports both days and do the complete race course several times. Hopefully, this will really help me do better at the race in two weeks. Knowing the course will definitely help.
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