Mostly Harmless

I like these little impromptu “my car is faster than your car” races out on the highway late at night. The other cars are so quaint. Points for the effort guys — your “Participant” ribbon is in the mail.

Now that it’s finally Winter it must be time to put the snow tires on the WRX.

I have a preponderance of tools lined up for the event:

• lightweight aluminum racing jack (I think that’s the one)
• electric impact wrench (possibly that model)
• an air compressor that’s way overkill for inflating tires (get a Husky Air Scout at Home Depot instead)
• convertible dolly/hand truck for hauling the wrench, jack and all four tires in one trip
• tire chalk (so I know the tire rotation order next year)
• tire inflator (nowhere near as nice as the one from Griot’s Garage)
• Husky 2 Mil, 45-gallon contractor clean-up bags (for the unused tires)
• gloves, lights, old clothes, etc.

Nice to have a heated garage for this, even though I have a narrow parking space with a brick wall on two sides.

I “had” to buy an air compressor that was beefier than my 12-volt compressor because the 12-volt model takes too damn long to top-off the air pressure of the four tires that have been off of the car for 6 months (which were probably only fully inflated 2-3 months before that). Also it cost me $1 to air up my tires at the gas station up the road (the free one was busy) so to stick it to “the man” I spent about $80 on a compressor and attachments. That’ll show them. Now I can conveniently air-up the tires in the apartment before taking them down to the car. (Note to self: next time get an oil-less compressor, or better ventilation.)

I did a little test and let some air out of a tire (reducing pressure by 10 psi). That would take at least 5 minutes to re-inflate with the small compressor. With the new compressor I did it in about 8 seconds — although technically I had the regulator set 50-psi higher than necessary.

The tires won’t be that low, probably only down 5 psi each, but I’ll save 10 minutes on airing up the tires. I’m intent on keeping them properly inflated because the dealer (combined with the first cold snap) actually did have all of my tires down to 22-25 psi. Thanks for the free alignment and brake job (yay warranty) but where the hell did my air pressure go?

The rule of thumb is that you lose 1 psi per month and 1 psi for every 10 degree temperature drop. So now would be the time to check your tires.

Another rule of thumb is that my car gets 25% better gas mileage on the highway immediately after (slightly over-)inflating the tires. The same thing happened with my other all-wheel drive car (Audi 90). My mechanic inflated the tires to 36 psi once and it made a huge difference in rolling resistance — so much so that I had to back off on the accelerator, it’s like the car gained 30 HP. Same thing happens with the WRX. None of my 2-wheel drive cars ever had a huge MPG jump like that (they just got better mileage all the time, but they were slow…).

I’ve got some of those air pressure indicating valve caps so now I can very easily see that I’ve got good pressure in the tires. I have the ones that are “hardcoded” for 32-psi. Found ‘em at at Radio Shack for $4 on clearance. They’re $10-15 everywhere else. I think the variety with the three color (green/yellow/red) indicator is probably nicer; it automatically adjusts to your air pressure and warns you if the pressure drops 3-4 psi from whatever it was when you put the cap on. I couldn’t find any cheap electronic models that I liked. Eventually the Pirelli K-Pressure system will be available, which looks cool (valve caps that transmit tire pressure to your phone via bluetooth) but is unlikely to be cheap.

(time passes…)

A week has gone by since I started this post. I put the tires on last Sunday night at 10 p.m. One could argue that’s not the best time for such things. I didn’t use my impact wrench for fear of making too much noise down in the garage — besides, I’m He-Man enough to deal with some puny lug nuts. Round trip time was 55 minutes. That’s: new set of tires on the hand truck, down to the garage via the elevator, four tire changes, and back up to the apartment with the old set. I cheated somewhat on the timing because I un-bagged and inflated the tires, put them on the ‘truck, and then started the clock. I stopped the clock when I got back into the apartment, not when I finished bagging the tires and putting everything away — for that has not happened yet. I can make my way past the cart ‘o tires in the hallway easily enough… but, yeah, I should finally put those away or something…

It did “snow” on Monday but there was no accumulation ’round these parts. Still waiting for a proper snowfall to fully appreciate the snow tires -vs- the crappy all-season tires.

Here’s a little visual to illustrate why I don’t use the all-season tires in the Winter:

OEM all-season tires (Potenza RE92):

Winter tires (Dunlop Winter Sport M3):

When people say to me that they use their all-season tires all year long I just roll my eyes and try to point out exactly how crappy the RE92s are for anything snow-related (read the reviews at that link for more). I haven’t swapped them out for proper Summer tires yet because they’ve only got about 10,000-12,000 miles on them. (Current mileage: 25,000) Actually when I replace them I’ll probably get some high-performance all-season tires so I don’t have to worry about changing over to the Winter set the second the temperature dips or at the first sign of snow, or *gasp* I could even use them all year long… that’s crazy talk!

It is a dark and stormy night. The power went out. The UPS made a lot of noise. After leisurely shutting down the desktop computer it is eerily quiet. Also it is dark, as I have mentioned.

Note to self: get a UPS for the TiVo. Also include the Firewire drive on the other UPS.

All the networking gear — in the living room “data center” — is not on the UPS. I could plug it in but I doubt that’d be very useful. For the moment my laptop is an island, which will last about another 2 1/2 hours unless the power comes back. If I get terribly bored working on my self evaluation (and “dry-blogging”) I’ll pop in the Hitchhiker’s DVD and watch it with the other audio commentary.

I don’t need to guard my car in the garage, I’d wager, since it’s very dark down there (thus removing one of a potential thief’s convenience factors) and I could very easily hear the alarm since it is eerily quiet, as I have mentioned.

Speaking of car security, which I’ve been investigating a lot since the break-in, the PowerLock seems to be the best anti-theft device you can get. It won’t necessarily prevent your steering column from getting thrashed, unless the potential perps know how to read window stickers (which I think I’ve established is not the case with the dumb-asses around here), but it is “guaranteed” to prevent them from hot-wiring the car. The price isn’t too bad, $200-ish + installation. I’m going to see if anyone around here sells ‘em.

I did order a security camera today, however. Not a crappy X10 camera — I borrowed one and couldn’t get a decent video signal from across the room so I didn’t even attempt sending video through all the concrete and metal between my apartment and the car. (Interestingly my 2.4 GHz cordless phone works perfectly fine by the car so it’s theoretically possible to get a clean wireless video signal from there to here.) What I bought was the MicroEye Digital Video Capture Camera (aka Home Guard). It’s 1/2 the price and has 1/8th of the features of a MemoCam, but it should suffice. All I need to do is point it at the car and any scofflaws who meander past will get their picture taken, covertly. It’s entirely self-contained so no wiring is required, it saves 2,000-8,000 pictures on its smallish (64 meg) flash memory and outputs video directly to a TV. The picture quality should be adequate, I’ll find out in a few days when it arrives.

(and now, after a 3+ hour power outage and just as I hit the red-zone on my battery, we’re back online! And right in time for MythBusters and Top Gear. I’ll have to consult the internet for the “Lost” premiere…)

Well, at least the alarm went off eventually, thus preserving my stereo equipment.

If you were wondering, you get about 1/2 a bucket worth of glass from the back window of a WRX wagon.

I’m waiting for the cops, currently. Someone else right around the corner from me had her car hit too so the cops have been here once today already. No alarm in her car though since The Perp had time to destroy her dash to get to her stereo. She said that every neighbor she’d talked to this morning had had their car broken into while living here. This would be my third time, but the first time nothing has successfully been stolen. (There’s always tomorrow, I suppose, but the subwoofer will be in the apartment.)

Not the brightest bulb, this guy, because he was trying to pry the front door window frame to break in. My car doesn’t have a frame around the windows… which makes it much easier to get in, in fact — which would be the reason for the alarm. Some people don’t notice alarm stickers or blinking red lights, but I guess the actual alarm wakes them up.

If I had some fricken lasers I’d set up a perimeter around the car. Sometimes I think it’s a shame that booby trapping is illegal.

Update – 9/13/05: So, first of all, you can’t get that rear window without ordering it from the Subaru dealer, which took days and days. I was driving around with plastic in place of the back window for a week (I did a lovely job though, it handled highway speeds and was rained on plenty, without incident). Second of all, it costs $1,000. My price: $0.00. Tomorrow I get an estimate on the damage around the driver’s door & the prior hail damage. Pretty much guaranteed to be out $500 + 20% of the cost of a rental car. (The $500 is my $250 deductible twice, once for the hail and once for the vandalism.)

I’ve had a week to think about security system upgrades. I may yet be able to include some frickin’ lasers, along with a motion detector, camera, and bucket of UV dye. I think I’m going to pass on the smoke screen in the car, because by the time the perp has broken in the damage is done. Why can’t these bozos learn how to use a slim jim or something and not cause thousands of dollars of extraneous damage?

I finally found a purpose for the mostly-useless center sun shade in my WRX. It makes a perfect mount for my new Lev-O-Gage Sr. inclinometer, erm, I mean, G-Whiz.

The shade still flips up and clears the mirror even though it doesn’t look like it in the pic. It would also appear that my parking spot is not quite level.

The (extra) markup on the Lev-O-Gage is not as bad as I suspected… only 100-300%. Those fancy infomercials ain’t free, ya know.

I bought it on a whim. Leave me alone.

Turns out (pun?) that my “moderate-speed” cornering is about 1/2 a G. It will be interesting to see what my high-speed freeway entrance and exit ramp forces are — I think I can get solidly into the orange zone (.57 to .84 Gs).

The original markings on the inclinometer are from 0 to 50 degrees, the markings on the “G meter” correspond to the tangent of those — which is good because that’s correct. It’s like Trigonometry or something.

Apparently the place to find these inclinometers is RV and boat stores, and, ya know, The Interweb. So if you’re too cheap to support clever marketing and high-quality G-Force calibrated sticker placement you can “build” your own for $10-$20.