I drove my car to the scrapyard today. I had a couple hundred pounds of scrap I wanted to get rid of - didn’t pay for the trip. It started up in 30 seconds with the help of a battery booster. I burnt gas I bought November 18, the last time I drove it. The tires (Goodrich Premiers I bought in 2002 for $230/4) needed no air (I had switched out the leaky tire for the spare.) It ran as well as ever.
I’ll make sure to have @CDAquila notified when I die in a fiery accident from a blowout or other mishap of defective maintenance so you-all can gloat.
The few times in my life that I haven’t driven for months, it sometimes takes a bit to get used to it again. When my sister was learning to drive, my dad posted a slip of paper on the dash with the shifting H pattern on it to help her remember where the gears were.
Yeah cleaning out here too except I’ve had hundreds of pounds of trash or paper going to the dump and not so much steel. I found a letter I wrote to my folks to try and get my car out of storage for Christmas leave from Basic. Since last winter I’ve hauled four trailer loads to the Salvation Army, five loads of paper to recycling, three or four trash loads to the dump (300-800 # each) and still looks like another one to go yet. I finally got rid of that Schwinn Airdyne by putting a free sign on it when the neighbors were having a garage sale. Still got a Nordic Trac that I think I’ll have to cut up. Yup cleaning out 20 years of stuff is no fun.
I drove my truck the other day. Hadn’t driven it in a week, so everything was one week older. Ran the same though, almost as if that week didn’t exist. Some kind of time portal? I expect you know all four tires on your truck should be replaced due to time, but not due to a time portal. For safety’s sake keep your speed down in the meantime.
I have not driven my Plymouth more than 100 miles in the last 8 years. I mounted a set of tires last fall, the old tires were installed in the late 1990’s and quite dry rotted. The car has not moved since replacing the tires, I might get in the mode to drive it this fall.
I don’t keep the under-side well polished, I don’t replace the fuel every 6 months, I don’t drive it every 3 days to keep the seals in order, I don’t have a trickle charger on it, I just keep a car cover on it.
Got great news on my boat today, screwed up tilt and trim accidentally, re positioning the boat while motor was down Left it at the boat guy, Leaking line, $78.36, yahoo, random troll
The news from the West Coast is that recycling paper and metals are piling up at the ports because China has put import tariffs on them in the latest chapter of playground politics. The market for the recycling stuff has dried up.
I have a bunch of old motor scooters that I keep and use from time to time. One might sit for 3 or more months before it gets any attention, then I use it for a couple of hundred miles before I swap it out for another. They are in a dry garage. I don’t do anything to store them. Sometimes I have to use a jumper to start them after a long sleep, but otherwise they start, shake off the dust and off we go.
Most threads on this forum are about problems. I thought I’d cheer everyone up with a happy story.
A staple question on this forum is the guy/gal who hasn’t driven his/her car for weeks/months/millennia the ‘expert’ advice is draining the gas tank, changing the oil, new tires, waving a dead chicken over it, etc. I’ll chime in with my experience of not having any of these problems despite mine having sat still for longer.
I still have the cassette tape from my last answering machine. 2 of the people who left messages have died since. It’s a time capsule to myself.
The place I went I had to drive over a scale, dump the steel, drive over the scale again. The larger trucks had open beds and thousands of pounds of stuff. The scrapper lowered his electromagnet over it and pulled it up. You didn’t have to cut up anything. At 5.5¢/pound they aren’t too picky.
What does dry rot look like? I’ve only seen it in movies on people and wood in real life. They’re cracked but have a lot of tread. The spare, a Firestone, is from '98.
Isn’t that crazy? We ship scrap metal to China, they turn it into ingots (or whatever) and ship it back to us: the round-trip is cheaper than paying an American or a Mexican. The same with scrap paper. The solution is obvious: subsidize recycling locally. One reason this makes sense is that we import more from China than they from us, so empty boats have to go back if they don’t have scrap to haul. If we stop importing so much from China, Little Donnie’s wish, recycling locally will make better economic sense.
I didn’t.
The battery’s fine; even with a new battery it can take time to start. I replaced it a few years ago but long-cold starting still needed help.
If your tires look anything like that then, congratulations. You beat the odds and didn’t have a catastrophic tire failure while driving on old tires against best-practice advice. Please don’t do it again lest your luck run out and you ram my car while you’re busy wrecking yours.
This is ‘Car Talk’ and pickups are a choice for the kind of car. I Fratelli Magliozzi accepted questions about pickups often.
I didn’t own a car until I turned 45 and moved into the country. I kept it after I moved to town but went back to bicycling most of the time. I ride my bike about 5K miles annually, drive the pickup a 100 or so.
If your tires are as cracked up as the ones in the photo that was posted recently, it might be time for you to start exploring buying some used tires from a local shop or wrecking yard. With the tiny mileage you drive they should be adequate without the great possibility of sudden catastrophic failure.
I drove my car again today! The first time since. I’d gotten used to using a battery booster, but it ended up sabotaging me. It seems to have discharged completely (I keep it on an out-of-the-way shelf, plugged in) - it had 0 volts: it was subtracting current. I took it off and started up with the car’s battery right away. It was fun to drive: down to Mesa del Sol, the business development the city hasn’t found any tenants for, then up to La Luz trailhead in the Sandias, then to Saigon Express, the combination Vietnamese restaurant & emissions tester: smells like Saigon! (Eat here and get your emissions tested.) My car passed, except for the gas cap; fortunately the old one (glad I carry spare everything) passed: 2 more years! 2 more years!
