gwax's rumblings

Since the recent demise of my poor Subaru, I have been effec­tively with­out a car. Being with­out a car isn’t such a big deal since I live in the city and can use my long­board for most of my trans­porta­tion needs but occa­sion­ally I have busi­ness out in Sunset, down the Peninsula or in the South Bay, which are not the most pub­lic trans­porta­tion acces­si­ble loca­tions. Up until now, I’ve been abid­ing lim­ited mobil­ity, incon­ve­nient mobil­ity and bor­row­ing my room­mates car but no longer. Friday, I signed up for an account with Zipcar. The whole process from apply­ing to accepted took about 20 min­utes and then, rather than wait­ing for it to come in the mail, I wan­dered to the local Zipcar office, a few blocks away, to pick up my Zipcard. All in all, it was about 30 min­utes between apply­ing and being able to bor­row cars. Yesterday, rather than bor­row­ing my room­mates car to run an errand, I picked up a Zipcar; it was a pain­less and easy process. Based on my cur­rent auto­mo­tive needs, Zipcar really does seem like the best approach and, based on my expe­ri­ences thus far, it seems like they’ve imple­mented their ser­vice correctly.

My old 1993 Ford Explorer finally decided to come to an end when it started leak­ing gaso­line at a truly alarm­ing rate (you could see the pud­dles and drip trails). I sold the Explorer, right quick, over Craigslist for the rea­son­able price of $150 (with­out the stereo sys­tem). Then, between my solidly good 2006 tax return and my mother’s offer of sup­port, I set out to pur­chase a new vehi­cle. My new pur­chase was intended to be my first pur­chase of a car in good con­di­tion, to date.

I went to a num­ber of deal­er­ships with a very spe­cific set of min­i­mum require­ments in mind: 4WD/AWD, ABS, >20MPG, seat 5, have room for my stuff. The first vehi­cle that I encoun­tered, which met my require­ments was a Subaru Outback Sport but, upon test dri­ving, the car made a funny sound and really didn’t have much pickup. There turned out to be rel­a­tively few cars that met my stan­dards and seemed decent, namely a few Subarus and some Honda CR-Vs. In the end, the spe­cific car that most caught my inter­est was a 2000 Subaru Legacy GT. The Legacy had 71k miles on it, the clean­est engine that I’d seen, sounded great and felt great dur­ing test dri­ving. I ended up buy­ing that Legacy GT and am, really, quite pleased by my purchase.

I’m very happy to have a new car, espe­cially one as nice as the one that I’ve gotten.

UPDATE: It turns out that the Subaru AWD setup is decid­edly not over­rated when it comes to han­dling snow. We had a bit of a snow­storm – just over a foot – and I had needs that were best served by dri­ving to Target and Rainbow (our local gro­cery chain). There was, as expected, a solid layer of com­pacted snow sit­ting on the roads at the time, which allowed for ade­quate adverse weather han­dling tests. During the few instances when I found myself los­ing con­trol, the loss was min­i­mal and con­trol was regained in an instant. I should also like to note that the ABS com­bined with four disc brakes was quite fan­tas­tic in its stop­ping power. All in all, I am pleased to note that my car meets my adverse weather han­dling requirements.

Today I tore apart the trim on the pas­sen­ger side of my truck, and ripped out the God fore­saken “Premium Audio” fac­tory installed ampli­fier. The fac­tory amp has long been the bane of my truck’s stereo sys­tem for a very long time now. The num­ber of prob­lems I can blame on that stu­pid amp are many and I won’t bother enu­mer­at­ing them but now it has been replaced by a by-pass I bought at Tweeter, which con­sists of noth­ing more than 8 wires and a cou­ple con­nec­tors. Now that I’ve got­ten the thing out and my truck’s audio is finally up to par, I’ve got to fig­ure out what I’m going to do with this silly amp; I’m not elec­tron­i­cally inclined enough to do any­thing really inter­est­ing, but I’m open to suggestions.

Things sound so much bet­ter now; I’m so pleased.

It turns out that lunch breaks are a fan­tas­tic time to get some auto repair time in. I changed two of my spark-plugs yes­ter­day before work, two on my lunch break yes­ter­day and the final two on my lunch break today. It’s per­fect; there’s nice, flat, well-lit tar­mac in our park­ing lot and I’ve got an hour of free time. I don’t need a garage as long as the weather is ok and most of the minor work I’m doing doesn’t take even an hour, so why should I bother wait­ing for a week­end to have some time dur­ing the day to work on my car (I don’t want to bother with get­ting lights to work at night). I still need to change my oil, but I’ll prob­a­bly end up doing that at home tomor­row because I don’t really want to wait for the end of the week­end and I’ve fin­ished replac­ing all my spark-plugs, so there won’t be any more work to be done on my car right in the imme­di­ate future. Oh well, even if I don’t need to do any­thing more, it’s good to know that I’ve got a good place and time to do my mechan­ick­ery when I do need it.

I hap­pened to be next to and then behind a brand spank­ing new H3 on Memorial Drive ear­lier today and I formed a few, mostly neg­a­tive, impres­sions on the thing. Ok, so first off, this thing doesn’t even look like a HMMWV any­more; the Hummer was a civil­ian­ized HMMWV and the H2 was a gen­tri­fied Hummer, but the H3 is a soc­cer mom SUV that’s styled to vaguely remind you of an H2. I’ll give you the most bla­tently stu­pid exam­ple of what I saw on the H3: on the back right of the thing, I saw a thick metal ring of the sort that you could hook chains to so as to pull a heavy load but when I looked for a match­ing ring on the left, I saw the license plate, which means the one on the right must be orna­men­tal. How retarded is the idea of an orna­men­tal heavy towwing ring? It’s not a nice or classy orna­ment; it basi­cally just says, “when you look at my truck I want you to think that I’d like to be able to tow really heavy stuff but will never actu­ally have any desire to do so”. This whole SUV as an image thing is just get­ting ridicu­lous; if you want to look hard­core, be hard­core, cut out this fuck­ing poser crap.

It was look­ing to be dry enough to do a bit of truck work so I set about doing so. First things first, I hopped under my truck and checked that the oil fil­ter and oil pan drain plug were nice and tight; they were. Having checked my prime leak sus­pects, I checked my oil level, seemed fine, which leads me to won­der if I just under-filled it ear­lier, which is what I’m going to assume for now because I’m lazy and that’s the eas­i­est assump­tion to deal with. Then I checked to see if my rear brakes are drum or disc; they’re drum brakes (grum­ble grum­ble). I’m not the big fan of replac­ing drum brakes, because it’s a bit more effort con­sum­ing than replac­ing disc brakes, so I came up with a bril­liant idea to get around the mat­ter and get my tires replaced. Since I have been pay­ing for my car insur­ance, and sav­ing my par­ents a pretty penny, I thought I might see if I could talk my mom into spring­ing to pay for replac­ing my tires and brakes. I fig­ured that it would prob­a­bly cost me on the order of $300 in parts and $400 all told, because that’s about what it would cost for the same oper­a­tions on all pre­vi­ous cars I’d dealt with and my mom seemed amenable to the idea, so I set off for Sears Auto Center to see about get­ting it all taken care of. Sadly, it turns out, Ford Explorer parts are about twice as expen­sive as Honda Accord or Toyota Corolla parts and replac­ing my tires and brakes will be a bit over $600 in parts and about $700 all told. $700 being rather a good bit more than $300-$400, pretty well derails my plans for brakes and tires and puts me back at wait­ing until I have some money of my own before deal­ing with any­thing on my truck.

However, I did just get a pay­check that I’d for­got­ten to expect…

I need to do a bit of work on my truck as soon as the weather will allow it (damned rain). The big thing that I need to do are get under my truck and check that the oil fil­ter and oil pan drain plug are tight­ened suf­fi­ciently; I seem to have devel­oped a slow oil leak since I changed my oil, which makes them my prime sus­pects. Beyond that, I’m pretty sure that I need to change my brake pads (I really hope that I have rear disc brakes and don’t have to deal with drums). After that, I’m going to make a check of all my fluid lev­els and go back to wait­ing for enough money to change my tires. I’ll prob­a­bly fid­dle around with things a bit too, just for fun.

For those of you that are con­cerned, these are minor issues I can deal with myself, except the tires, that I need money for. Soon I get work, then I get tires, that’s the plan. Until then, I’ve got a spare so I’m ok if any­thing goes wrong (except for a high-speed blow-out).

And yes, I am phras­ing things to incite you.

Beat up old cars are great.