Simple to Stupid in Two Quick Hours

This is the story of how something that should be really easy turns into something stupefyingly difficult. To spare you my pain, I'll make it as brief and to the point as possible.

We bought a bike rack. I couldn't get the trailer hitch insert off our car in order to use it. The pin holding the thing in place wouldn't move. I sprayed it with WD40 and PB Blaster every day for a week. I hammered at it. Nothing happened. So I called our local body shop and asked if they could take care of it. The guy said, "Sure. You got a couple minutes? Come on over now and I'll get it done for you." He's a big guy and he used a much heavier hammer than I had. The pin didn't move so they cut it in half and punched out what was left.

 

Here is our friend the pin after it suffered an ugly death.

 Once the pin was out, they hooked the hitch insert up to a winch that applied 3,500 lbs of pressure. Nothing. Not a wiggle. Not a slip.

Next, they tried heating the hitch with an acetylene torch in hopes of loosening the rust and then letting the winch do its work. Nothing. Not a shiver. Not a hint.   

I got so hungry during this two hour (!) odyssey, I resorted to eating the movie popcorn Suzy and I had left in the car the night before when we went to see Snow White and the Huntsman. It was neither a nutritious nor a satisfying lunch. Look at my sad face. That's a face of a man who wants his trailer hitch to work and who wants a cheeseburger.
 

They decided they couldn't properly heat the hitch without melting the bumper cover. So they took the bumper cover off. Nothing. Not a shimmy. Not a quiver.

This is the car with no bumper cover, no bumper proper, the hitch having been heated with a torch, pounded with twenty pound hammers by burly men, and having a winch pull it constantly for over an hour. Nothing.

This is the entire trailer hitch sitting on the floor of the body shop. With no other option available to them and saying to me, "Well, you're in it this far. Do you want it off or not?" they took the whole thing off the car. Each of the guys working on it said they'd never seen anything like it - a hitch insert that utterly refuses to budge.

The thing is still with these guys - they plan to get it red hot and try to punch the insert out from behind. Whatever. If that doesn't work, we'll have to buy an entire new trailer hitch set up to reattach to the car. A couple hundred bucks is what the guy said. It's not like we can't cover that but - I just wanted to be able to strap our kids' bikes to the back of the car for the occasional bike ride here or there. I really didn't want my entire car dismantled or to provide the body shop guys with a story to tell their friends. I certainly didn't want to spend two hours and who knows how many hundred dollars at this place. I did not want to eat movie popcorn for lunch. It was bad times. 

The one bit of light in this whole process was this: at one point when burly man #2 was wailing on the hitch with a hammer, this little item dropped off the bottom of the car. It's one of Dad's magnetic spare key cases. He put these on all of his cars just in case. I had no idea this was there so, when it dropped onto the floor, I had to smile. This  whole fiasco is exactly the kind of experience that I would have called Dad about - so this thing plopping onto the floor made me think of him and feel like he was nearby.

I will let you know how the world's most expensive trailer hitch removal goes next week.