Double Yellow's Company Driver to Independent Thread

Was hoping to pull a rabbit out of the hat in the waning days of 2015, but it doesn't look like the truck is going to cooperate:

My compressor is worn out and its excrement gums up the governor whenever temps get into the teens (lately every day) which means I stop building air at the most inopertune times -- like just as I start heading down Eisenhower. And that small oil leak from the rear main/Detroit rear supports decided to go from 1 gal every 10,000 to 1 gal every 1,000 miles (at $39/gal). Of course you might as well do the clutch once you drop the transmission... And the turbo has been surging a lot lately -- especially after hitting a bump or dip. I've been too unmotivated to even pull off the inlet tube, but I'm guessing its got a lot of play after 1.6 million miles. And I never got back to KC to get the PS gearbox replaced under warranty so looks like I'll be paying twice for that once I get home.

Plus I still have all the little items waiting at home that I listed earlier: coolant tank, coolant sensor, signal stat, brake light switch, clutch switch, air supply valves, cab shocks, cab suspension bushing bracket, etc. And the engine is due for its post-inframe overhead. Plus it'll be a good time to do the bull gear that I put off at the inframe...

So I have a substantial maintenance bill looming, but I have to defer it until 2016 or risk falling below the Obamacare threshold for 2015. I started the year planning on engineering my finances to keep from being above that threshold, but now I've got the opposite problem -- hard to view the year in a positive light.

So for 2015 I managed to combine the worst of "low volume high profit" and "high volume low profit" to create "low volume, low profit." Lots of smart folks gave me great advice along the way; advice I either bullheadedly ignored or just couldn't make work for me. Suffice it to say, my 2015 numbers will be worse than the Sept 14-Oct 15 numbers I put up in post #1108 ( http://www.thetruckersreport.com/tr...ndependent-thread.265975/page-12#post-4795022 )

 

Well, even with rates being down, I could have had a decent year if I'd been more like @blairandgretchen and just kept my head down and made the best of it. So that's the plan for 2016.

Long term? Get out by 2018 unless the market improves drastically... And now that my intellectual property no longer belongs to Con-Way, I'd like to develop and patent some ideas I have to improve trailer performance.