There's a limit to what I can do

[Midorikawa]

Needless to say all four guys payed very close attention to what the 5'5" 105# bleach blonde was telling and showing them.

Yeah. I've learned that the women working at garages and auto parts stores a lot of times know more than the guys. Sad, but true. Guess it makes sense. The guys have this "I'm a guy and I know by default" attitude that the women don't. Thankfully, I usually know exactly what I'm looking for and where to find it in the auto parts stores, but things like sensors, ditzy caps, etc, are behind the counter where I'm not allowed to be.

I've learned to double and triple check that they got me the right part after many trips back and forth with them getting me the part with 2 numbers transposed, or +/-1 number.

[LillFilly]

I'm paranoid about survival, so I keep an emergency kit in my Rav4 including MREs, bottled water, kitty litter, automatic jump starter, fix-a-flat, etc.

I love my Rav. Hoping maybe to find a 6-cylinder that will fit it, maybe outfit it with hydraulics, add missiles to the roof rack...

[Midorikawa]

I love my Rav. Hoping maybe to find a 6-cylinder that will fit it, maybe outfit it with hydraulics, add missiles to the roof rack...

That's how I am with my Duster. That thing is my first car, my first love, and my baby. It comes second only to my wife. :-P

[42_42_42]

A suprising number of them and thier direct descendants (The straight six in older Jeep Cherokees for example) are still kicking and will continue to do so until the bodies rust away around them.

Have you seen what they did to a Toyota Hilux on Top Gear?

[Seshat]

You'd like me, but you'd never meet me, since I keep a spare, rotate my tires (sort of), and can change my own tire.

He still might.

I once had a radiator hose split on me. A NEW radiator hose. I got the 'marbles in a milo tin' sound and the needle flipping to red and the water dumping out of the radiator all in the time it took me to hit the brakes and flip the key off.

I'd done everything right - but the car was still undriveable, and unfixable without a full workshop. (Unfortunately, the heat had damaged the engine - otherwise a new radiator hose and a radiator flush would have done it. Damn.)

[ParkingWitch]

Yeah...mine runs like crap for the first 15 minutes after a rain, or if I hit a puddle just right. It's definitely the old water under the distributor cap bit. I need to find a way of sealing it without it being a permanent "replace the distributor rather than the cap" seal.

Hairspray, the only time in my life I 've bought hairspray was for my car. If I parked slightly downhill and it rained my Sentra needed the distributor cap dried out. The mechanic said to just give the top side a light spray. That one shot lasted me about 2 years.

[Midorikawa]

Hairspray, the only time in my life I 've bought hairspray was for my car. If I parked slightly downhill and it rained my Sentra needed the distributor cap dried out. The mechanic said to just give the top side a light spray. That one shot lasted me about 2 years.

That's just crazy enough to work. I'm remembering that...and stealing some of the wife's hair spray... :-D

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

I always like to say my check engine light coming on performs a valuable service for me. It tells me my check engine light is working.

I think it's always the gas cap not being screwed on perfectly. That light always comes on shortly after I fill up the tank. I just turn the cap a little bit and the light goes off after a few trips.

The instruction manual for the car even says this can cause the light to come on. The light never flashes, and the manual makes it seem like that's when you're supposed to worry about it. Still, I always cross my fingers that damn light doesn't come on just before I'm supposed to take the car in for an oil change--that would be a great opportunity for the mechanic to tell me my engine is just about to call it quits or something.

[Kristev]

I'm so glad I don't drive.

[Ben_Who]

I tend to plan for my last disaster; you can tell what kind of trouble I've been in by looking at the emergency equipment I carry. I have a blanket, snow shovel, five pounds of rock salt, flashlight, and jumper cables in my trunk. On the other hand, I don't have a full-sized spare. I have a donut. All this means is that I haven't had a flat tire since I drove a 1963 Mercury Comet, and changing a tire on an old GM car with fins isn't exactly brain surgery.

My roommate blew out a tire and limped his Camry carefully to the curb to deal with it - this was right in front of the apartment building. About an hour later, he came in sheepishly, looking for help. He could NOT get the tire off the car. I went downstairs, and my eyebrows did their eyebrow-thing.

He hadn't jacked the car all the way up. The tire was still resting on the ground - in fact, it was resting on the ground with enough weight to distort the partially-pressurized tire out of shape. Nevertheless, he had managed to get three of the lugnuts off. Right - three. None of that quarter-turn, quarter-turn, quarter-turn thing for him.

I jacked up the car the rest of the way and tried to remove the last lugnut. No good. I put the other three lugnuts back on and tried to remove the last lugnut. No good. With part of the weight of the car resting on one lugnut, he had managed to tweak it a little out of true, and getting it off would require pneumatic tools. I suggested my garage, four blocks away. To save the price of a tow, he drove there.

My check engine light drives me INSANE. Not because it goes on and off all the time, but because I don't have a clue what it means. With an old Pontiac I drove, the check engine light could mean anything from "You're a bit low on windshield washer fluid" to "Your engine is about to explode" and all stages in between. At least in the newer cars, it has the courtesy to flash when it's serious. I just had the check engine light come on because the gas cap was slightly loose - in a car I'd only owned for three months, it was a sobering experience. In my last car, the check engine light would come on when I hit a bump in the road - the fault was in the dashboard control for the check engine light itself. The check engine light was warning me of a malfunction in the check engine light.

Hm. Maybe I should hold "tire drills" and practice changing a tire. I can see where that could turn into a lost skill if not exercised every once in a while. After all, Roommate must have known how to change a tire at some point; you don't get out of driver's ed without learning it.

Love, Who?

[Shalom]

Yeah...mine runs like crap for the first 15 minutes after a rain, or if I hit a puddle just right. It's definitely the old water under the distributor cap bit. I need to find a way of sealing it without it being a permanent "replace the distributor rather than the cap" seal.

Depending on the age of the car, it might not be the distributor cap. If it's a 1977 or later, there's a ceramic gadget with two coil resistors in it that sits on the engine side of the firewall, just under the edge of the hood, that is part of the new-for-1977 electronic ignition (which Chrysler claimed would let you run as far as 18K miles on one set of plugs! Imagine that.) If that gets wet, the car won't start at all.

As far as jacks...I still have the old original Widowmaker that came with my Duster. It's gotten me out of a few annoying binds, too, although the jack was 1) never built for that (put the car up on a ramp, the ramp slipped, and went behind the front wheel, between the back side of the tire and the tire well next to the door. The widowmaker was all I had.), and 2) I know better than to crawl under the car with that death trap in place.

If that's the ratchet thing with the hook that goes into the slot on the bumper, I know what you're talking about (although the term "widowmaker" I've usually heard applied to split-rim truck wheels, which tended to fly apart while you were trying to balance them). The great thing about those jacks was that the vertical bit was a hollow channel, so if you found that the gorilla at the last tire place you went to had tightened the nuts to about 300 pound feet, you could slip the jack over the flat end of the lug wrench and get another four feet of leverage to help unwind the nut.

I do remember seeing the maintenance guy at my high school, back around 1981, working under a car held up with one of those jacks, and if that wasn't bad enough, he had it sitting on a couple cinder blocks for extra height... I have to say I was astonished that he survived this experience without being flattened..

[Plague*Star]

Some things you should do when you buy a car.

<snip>

3. Find out if the jack is a decent one, or a piece of (*#&^$. If the latter, replace it with a good one.


5. Make sure the tyre iron/spanner/whatever is one you can use. If you can't change a tyre with the current tyre iron (stand on it if necessary), get one that magnifies your muscle power. They do exist.
Every driver of the car should be able to take the nuts off, and put them on to sufficient tightness to get home safely, with the tyre iron kept in the car.

6. Get a tyre pressure gauge, tread depth gauge, spare bulb kit, spare fuse kit, and first aid kit.




.... yeah, okay. Ranty.

No, good points. Here's three more:

3a. Make sure the jack *works*. The one in my '79 Toyota Corolla looked OK, but when I tried to jack the car, it was so corroded it wasn't possible. Half an hour with various lubricants later, it was working again. Glad I found out AT HOME in my driveway on a pleasant day.

5a. Make sure the lug wrench fits ALL the nuts, one car I bought had THREE different size nuts on the wheels!

6a. The tire gauges with the little rod that pops out usually are crap. Spend $10 and get a digital gauge. You'll save that in gas and tread from not using the gas station gauge, which *surprise* spends all day getting dropped on the pavement and run over.

It occurs to me that I don't have first aid kits in my cars. Maybe I should remedy this, at least in the car that the trunk only leaks somewhat <g>

P*S

[Argabarga]

That's just crazy enough to work. I'm remembering that...and stealing some of the wife's hair spray... :-D

I've heard WD40 works for that too...

My old 78' Dodge PIckup had a finicky electrical system that didn't like the rain either. If it was damp out, well, igntion/headlights/wipers/radio. Pick any two. Trying to have three or more running would stall the truck.

[wolfie]

Heavy trucks (tractor-trailers and the like) generally carry only an unmounted tire, don't they? I always wondered how they expected to mount that at the side of the road. Maybe those are two-piece rims or something. In any case there are commercial tire services that come out to heavy trucks with flats, but god knows how much they charge. They probably don't take AAA, either...

With a heavy truck, you ALWAYS call a tire service (big tires inflated to 100 PSI can kill you if you don't have the right equipment). The reason for carrying an unmounted spare is that if a tire fails unrepairably, buying another out on the road is expensive. The one they're carrying is from the company's regular supplier back at home base, where they get a (usually substantial) discount on tires.