Stupid Keys. Wal-Mart suprises.
I locked my keys in my car for the second time in the last couple months. The first time it WASN’T my fault! I have a long lanyard on my key chain and it got caught on the door as I was closing it and sucked the keys right out of my hand into the car as the locked door slammed shut. And I didn’t have any spare keys. Ugh!
This time it’s my own dumb ass fault. I just got out, locked the door and left the keys in the ignition. GRR! I’m always so paranoid about locking my keys in my car too. That I usually check twice to make sure I have my keys when I get out of the car. And I STILL didn’t have any spare keys for this car! Dumb ass moment again, I know.
So the guy pop the lock with relative ease. And I paid him and I head to Wal-Mart to finally go get a spare set of keys made. As I walk up to the automotive counter, they are JUST shutting off all the lights. But the girl closing counter is nice enough that she said she’d make a set for me real quick. I was shocked to find someone that nice and willing to take extra time to help somebody out when they could just punch out and get the hell out of there. But as she’s looking, they’re out of the keys I need! GRR! But I still thanked her for being willing to help me even after they shut down. So I didn’t walk away feeling completely disgusted.
But I STILL don’t have spare keys for this car. I’m going to have to go by True Value tonight or something. I gotta get some damned keys…or a slim jim. I can’t afford to keep paying locksmiths every couple months!
I’m putting diesel in my car from now on.
Diesel oil anyway. The fact that my car has 209,000 miles on it now says something about how well the previous owners have taken care of it. To this day the car doesn’t leak a drop of fluid anywhere. But with as many miles as it has, it’s pretty important to make sure I’m not pushing the envelope. On the oldspower.com forum a bunch of car guys were discussing the best oil to use for our cars. Surprisingly most people said oil for diesel engines was best. They reason why is kinda complicated, so if you don’t really care, please skip ahead to the picture of the ostrich head.
Back in the day cars were far less complicated than they are today. You had all those moving parts grinding against each other, so yesterday’s oil was packed with all sorts of great lubricating agents that worked pretty well. Infact lead was put in gasoline as a lubricant! In a car as the valve closes, it slams against the valve seat like a little jack hammer. And it will do this millions of times over the life of your engine. So they put lead in the gasoline and it would cushion the impact. Then the government decided it was bad to be burning up all this lead and spewing it into the atmosphere. They said, “Hey you can’t make cars that require leaded fuel anymore.” So the manufactures had to start manufacturing hardened valve seats which didn’t require the lead lubricant, but of course were more expensive. So if you’re driving an old car circa early 70’s on back. You’d better have stock piles of leaded gas, or use a lead additive to every tank!
This is much the same story for motor oil. More than dead dinosaurs go into the oil you put in your car, there’s detergents that break down the dirt and crud that can get caked on inside, there’s additional lubricants like ZDDP (zinc dialkyl dithio phosphate). Both are good things for any fuel burning, friction producing motor, and diesel oil has more of both! Unfortunatly the government decided burning and leaking this ZDDP all over the place was bad for the environment too! So they told the car makers and the oil manufacturers that they were starting to limit the p.p.m. of ZDDP allowed in conventional motor oils. This caused manufactures to rethink how they designed the components of your engine, to tolerate the less effective oils now mandated.
This is most important for cars with flat tappet camshafts instead of roller camshafts (the difference). The more ZDDP the less wear on the lobes of the camshaft, and all the other parts of your engine for that matter. So even if you don’t have a flat tappet cam (which I don’t), the benifits of ZDDP are still realized through better overall lubrication of your engine!
So that’s why I’m using diesel oil. You could use it if you wanted. But unless you have a car made before circa 1985 it’s probably not completely necessary, but it’s certainly not doing any damage either. Quite the opposite in fact. And when the price of cars keeps going up and up. Don’t blame GM, blame our good friends in California and the EPA. I am fielding bets though on whether I make it through this oil change though. 2:1 odds says I do. So you give me a million dollars, and if my car blows up before 212,000 miles, I give you TWO MILLION! I take cash or paypal. No personal checks please.
Work in progress…
There’s a kind of an annoyingly hectic joy that comes with restoring a car and trying to drive it at the same time. Although I don’t really consider what I’m doing a restoration. Just fixing stuff. Add random weather in the mix, and it’s a wonder I get anything done on the car at all! If I had a garage it’d be a little different story. But for now I have to take over the warehouse at work.
I think I’m getting close to the halfway point on this little project. The board is out. The old fabric and the foam is out. I still need to get the sail panels out and get them stripped. Then just need to do a little repair to the board and start gluing the new fabric on.
Here’s some pics as of this afternoon:
This is all the old foam. Yummy. Some of it was still in pretty good shape beneath where the sun visors are. The original color of the foam is kinda a banana yellow. Apparently after 22 years of heat and humidity, rotten orange is the color it becomes. Quite crumbly.
Here’s the actual rigid board that the old material was on. It’s all scraped and sanded and just about ready for the new stuff. It’s a material similar to the rigid poster board you can buy at Wal-Mart or what not. It’s got a thick paper glued to each side of a stiff foam. Some of it has deteriorated around where the seatbelts go to the roof. I’ll patch it up enough to give the new foam something to stick to, and the molding should hold it all in place once I get it back together.
This is what my car looks like right now, hehe. Wires everywhere! You can see the sail panels by the rear window that are sagging a bit that I still need to remove and recover. It’s the usual chaotic destruction that I drive around with for a while when I’m working on these kind of projects. Luckily (usually) when I get it all put back together it looks better than before. Let’s hope that’s the case this time.
I’ll be out of town this weekend going to Andrea’s nephew’s 1st birthday party. So the project is on hold until then. But hopefully early next week it’s all done and ready to go. Next update when she’s done!
02.28.07It’s nice to have a project again.
Well a few weeks ago I ordered new headliner material for my car. It’s just been sitting in my office at work because it’s been so friggin’ cold out I didn’t feel like messing with it. Last thing I need is to be cold and frustrated working with brittle plastic. NOT a recipe for success! But today was beautiful so I took it upon myself to get started on the project.
Like most of the projects I do what I dread the most is usually the easiest and what I think is going to be easy inevitably leads me to cussing and breaking things. While the trim around the headliner popped right off, the dome light was held on by one screw and three washer clips. Gimme a break! Why would you not just use four screws? You saved 2 cents per car to ensure that no one could take the dome light out without destroying those clips? Thanks, Oldsmobile. Thanks.
But I got it all apart. It’s old and crumbly, that’s for sure, but there’s some fresh new material waiting to be glued to the board I pulled out. And behind that board. For some weird reason someone taped the final factory build sheet to the top of that board. So this sheet has been riding around in my roof for the last 22 years!
Click to zoom in.
This sheet lists every option that this car came with (which is a lot!) and also mentions that the car was built in Linden, New Jersey and shipped to Grainsfield, KS. Kinda neat to find a little tidbit like that tucked away somewhere so random.
I’ll try to remember to get some pics of it torn apart tomorrow. It’s quite the mess! And I’ll be sure to post the finished product!
01.4.07Goodbye old friend.
This is all that remains of my old 1990 Pontiac 6000, which later came to be affectionately referred to as “Lil’ Brudder” (inspired by this Strongbad e-mail.) Lil’ Brudder finally was laid to rest at the local salvage yard, sold for the grand sum of $50.
The poor car, really did have the heart of a champion. After all it had been through, it still ran like a champ clear up until I took my last drive the other day down to the junk yard. It didn’t all happen at once, the car has had a long history, or wrap sheet, which ever you prefer.
I have to admit, before I got the 6000 I considered them among the ugliest cars ever made, while that opinion has waned a bit over the years, I still think the A-Body offerings from Oldsmobile and Buick are far more appealing. Below are (from left to right) the 1990 Buick Century, Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera, and Pontiac 6000.
Since I already didn’t care much for the styling of the car, I decided that I’d go ahead and have some fun with it. And three rolls of 1″ white electrical tape later, the car had racing stripes, effectively adding 300 horsepower. I always hated the front grille and headlight design more than anything. And sticking with the electrical tape trend, I blacked out the fog lights on the inside to make the grill seem less puny and to take some of the focus off the gawdy headlights. This is probably the best Lil’ Brudder ever looked.
It didn’t last long though. As most everyone knows, the car has a long history of simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Most of the accidents weren’t my fault though. Let’s see if I can remember all of them…
The Accidents:
#1 – Within the first month of moving to Manhattan a hail storm blew through and pelted the car. Good thing I had insisted on that full coverage insurance at the time. (Not my fault)
#2 – Rearended by some guy with a suspended lisence while at a stop sign in Manhattan. Busted out the rear tail light covers and pushed the trunk in. (Not my fault)
#3 – Pushed into a gaurdrail by a big moving truck that didn’t stay in the inside lane when turning left through an intersection. I was in the right lane, he started moving in, and there was no where to go. (Not my fault)
#4 – Hit in the left front fender while at my sister Jamie’s apartment. Never found the cluprit. (Not my fault)
#5 – Car spun while hitting a patch of ice going to work. Spun the car 180 degrees and slid into the curb blowing out the left rear tire and bending the rim. (Okay, that was my fault.)
#6 – The deer. (Not much you can do when they jump right infront of you.)
So after all this is added up…you get…
Ouch! I almost forgot how that car looked the morning after the wreck. Still running like a champ though and I couldn’t exactly afford a new car, so I had to drive this thing. But first I had to make it legal and get two working headlights.
Thanks to a $5 Wal-Mart bolt on flood light, I did.
And this is how she looked until just the other day when she drove off into the sunset. It was certianly an ugly car to begin with, and even uglier in the end. I really think the car would have drove forever. But in the end, it needed a lot of work, a lot of attention, and a lot of money to make presentable on a car that I wasn’t too crazy about in the first place. After all we’ve been through together though, I must admit it earned a special place in my heart. For a little car that got no love, and went though it all, it never would give up. Heart of a champion…*sniffle*.
12.14.06And I thought my car had a lot of miles…
Peter Gilbert was a salesman. He needed a reliable vehicle to drive all over Wisconsin. In 1989 he bought this Saab 900 SPG. 17 years later, he’s racked up 1,000,000 miles. Yes that’s right over a million miles. I don’t know if that’s a world record, but it’s still impressive.
Apperantly the only work he had done outside routine maintanance was a transmission rebuild at 200,000 miles and body work after eight deer collisions (Not eight deer at once). Let’s be honest though, 8 deer in 1,000,000 miles sounds about right. He changed the oil religiously every 3000 miles and did all the recommended maintance one would do. Maybe there is something to keeping your car well maintained!
He donated the car to a museum after Saab verified the milage was genuine. And why wouldn’t they? It’s great publicity for Saab. But I got to wondering what this car would be worth in the ol’ Kelly Blue Book. Appearantly KBB refuses to accept the possibility of any car making it to the one million mile mark. After all, that’s all the way to the moon and back…twice!
My car currently has a little over 204,000 miles. But I have no intention of challenging this guy’s personal best. I just put 75,000 mile tires on it not long ago, and I fully expect to wear them out. The car runs strong and soldiers on. But when you have a car with a lot of miles like this, you can’t help but wonder how far it will go (knock on wood).
They don’t make ’em like they used to.
Yep, another wallpaper. Hope this doesn’t turn into the Wallpaper blog again like it did a while back. Hehe. I put together a little homage to Oldsmobile’s history. Lots of Cutlasses and only one Toronado! Click the picture for the hi-res version.
Here’s My New Car
As you know, Matt and I put some model cars together. Mine is cooler than his tho! hehe
Mine is a 1968 Chevrolet Corvette Roadster (as pictured above). What do you think of the huge motor? Pretty cool, huh?
I got some black paint specs on the body, but luckily in this picture you can’t really see them.
Oh well, that’s my car. Enjoy!
11.1.06A new car!
And I built it! It’s been a long time since I put a model together. I honestly can’t remember the last time. But I used to build them all the time. I had them all over my room, hanging from the ceiling, on shelves, pretty much anywhere I could set one. Putting this one together brought back a lot of forgotten memories. The smell of the glue, the way it feels if you get it stuck on your fingers. How you have to be really careful poping some of the pieces out without breaking them.
Andrea built herself one too. A ’68 Corvette. We were looking for something to do together, so we each picked out a kit. It was fun working together for the most part, but there were times when tensions were high too. =) Sometimes it can be a little stressful trying to make the actual product look like what they made on the box.
It was fun. But I don’t think I’m going to take it up as a major hobby. I don’t have the tools or the skills to make them look really good. But this lil’ Monte Carlo looks pretty good sitting there on the shelf in my office.
09.15.06Car back in the shop.
Well, when we took the trip up to Kansas City my car started shifting a bit funny. When speeding up, it would go through the gears too quickly, then when slowing down, it’d stay in a high gear too long, bogging the motor down. I was a bit worried the transmission was going out, but it never really got worse or came out of gear completely, so I babied it all the way back to Manhattan from Kansas City.
I did some research and I don’t think the transmission itself is the problem. But the torque converter clutch. This little thing sits inside the transmisson and tells the torque converter clutch when to engage and disengage, and I believe that it’s gone bad. I talked to the mechanic today after he’d had the car for a while and he seems to agree with me so far, but he’s going to “make sure it’s not something else.” These guys have been pretty honest in my past experience, and they have done excellent work. So I trust them.
So the good news is it’s looking like I won’t be spending $1000 to rebuild the transmission, probably just a couple hundred dollars to replace a $40 switch. But it’s an old car, and like I tell everyone, I expected stuff like this to creep up when I bought the car. I might spend $200 at the repair shop every few months, but that’s still cheaper than a $350 a month car payment. And what can I say? I’m a sucker for old cars. It’ll probably be the death of me.