Time to rant a little

Here's the story: Over the winter a friend of mine sold me his wheels off his race car so I had Discount Tires mount my slicks on them with steel valve stems. Steel valve stems are needed in drag racing, the rules require it. Well, after getting them mounted one of the wheels wouldn't hold air very long and the other would eventually leak out too. So I thought the wheels just couldn't seal well enough and bought some very expensive drag racing inner tubes for them. Now Tuesday comes along and I decide to finally get them put in so I head over there and they tell it's going to be $100 to put two inner tubes in my slicks!! Yes I was shocked, I just looked at the guy and no thanks I'll do it myself and walked out. As I leave I'm telling myself I'll never go to that store again, little did I know I'd have an even better reason after what I learned today.

I called my friend who I buy all my tires from and he tells me he's not surprised and to just bring them to him and he'll take care of me. I went by his store, a Discount Tires store, and he takes the wheels to unmount the slicks and he tells me the valve stems aren't in correctly. One of the pieces was upside down and wouldn't allow the valve stem to fully seal against the rim. So he suggests we try it and see if it leaks, so we do and hooray it doesn't leak, but the sidewall does. This means the tires are bad and I have to buy new slicks now, which I was planning on for later in the year, but still a shocker.

So the Discount Tires that's less than a quarter mile away has lost my business due to their incompetence. I was fully expecting to pay to have the job done, but $100 is flat ridiculous especially when I buy all my tires from them. Forty dollars wouldn't have been a bad price and then they can't even put a valve stem together correctly, sheesh.

I wonder if I should take my Explorer to my friend, I had to have a tire replaced and now wonder if it's done right.

Take care of your customers and they'll stick with you for life, or reject you for life your choice.

Opening day

Today is opening day in baseball, and being a big fan of baseball I'm loving it. I have a subscription to MLB.com so I can watch all the out of market games I can, mainly the Padres games. At one point today I had three computers running each with a different game and the TV on tuned to the Rockies game (currently in the bottom of the 7th tied at 8-8). If you like baseball at all I recommend getting the package, and with a laptop and wireless you can take it outside with you.

More snow & truck tips

How about that, we had to wait until spring to get any snow around here. Now I'm not complaining, well maybe a little, because the grass really needed it. Of course race season is coming up so naturally it has to start snowing all the time, but what can you do.

I was asked about F-150 trucks and here's my opinion: If you can get a repossessed '09 model for $15k, take it because that's cheap. I'll tell ya, the new '09 model is a good looking truck too. I think this would also be the case for a '08 model, but the '07 model might be easier to find for around $10k. Obvious things to look for on any truck are, leaks onto the pavement, leaks around the top of the motor, does it rattle while driving, tires still good, and does it smoke at all. You'd want to know about maintenance too, how often was the oil changed, transmission fluid and so forth. Colors, white is so-so, blue is better, black is nice but gray or silver is best!
Oh yeah, is leather really needed, I actually prefer the cloth it's cooler in the summer but leather would probably have heated seats. Have fun looking!!

Snow

They have been forecasting snow all week long and finally on Thursday we had some. It started lite then turned into a blizzard then stopped, started again and snowed moderately all night. It's funny how the weather forecasters around here can never get it right though. First it was supposed to start Wednesday night and snow lightly into Thursday, yet when I got up at 2am it was only partly cloudy, no snow had fallen. Then about 5am it started snowing and that lasted about an hour and finally around 9am it started falling pretty good.

These same weather people also said that the farther north of Longmont you went the less likely of snow accumulation would occur. What happened was it started snowing pretty hard with blizzard conditions way up in Greeley and slowly worked it's way south. So by our house around 11:30am we had a pretty good blizzard going on and it was pointless to try and shovel the driveway. About 3pm it had stopped snowing so I ventured out to shovel the driveway off and the weather service called off the blizzard warning and then said the snow would stop by midnight. Well it didn't, it snowed all night and was lightly snowing until around 7:30am.

I'm glad it finally snowed, the grass around here was getting pretty dry and luckly we had the yard arreated last weekend. I can't remember when the last snow fell around here so it's been a pretty long time since we've had any mosture. The good thing about spring snow is it's usually very wet and that should help the lawn out a ton.

Stupid headers

I'm referring to the exhaust headers on my race car. I bought a set from my racing buddy last year to put on but was hesitant because they're bigger. Well I decided to swap them out last weekend and failed. I started with the passenger side, unbolted them from the cylinder head and then found it impossible to get them out of the engine compartment. I tried sliding them out the bottom and the flange would hang up on the transmission. Then I tried sliding them out the top and they would hang up on the motor mount, failed again. Next was unbolt the motor mount from the car, jack the motor up and then see if there's enough room to slide it out, failed again! So after 4 frustrating hours of this madness I'd had enough and bolted the header back to the head and called it a day.

You read right too, 4 hours of struggling with this I had accomplished nothing and that is very frustrating.

Race car testing

This past Friday I was able to get the race car out and get some testing done with it and was pleased that the car ran better than it did in the fall. I made 6 runs mainly testing out what rpm to launch the car and what rpm to shift at, I'd like to one more test & tune with it to test some timing changes out.

These are the numbers the car ran:

(in order)

E.T. MPH

1. 11.837 @ 113.32
2. 11.845 @ 113.45
3. 11.873 @ 113.17
4. 11.824 @ 113.47
5. 11.911 @ 112.86 --------- Had bad tire spin at the start
6. 11.817 @ 113.60

So I know your looking at those numbers and saying, "ok what does this mean?". The answer is for the most the car was consistent and if it can do this when I race I should have a better year than last year. Consistency is the key in bracket racing to winning and that's one thing I didn't have last year.

Interesting discovery

I was out in the garage working on the race car when I noticed a large bump on the side wall of a tire on the Explorer. Upon further investigation I discovered the tire would blow out the side wall very soon. So off to Discount Tires I go in search of new tire, thank Santa I purchased the road hazard warranty and the tire was free (more or less). It also happens I need to get the slicks for the race car mounted on the new wheels I purchased from a friend of mine so I brought them along too. I paid to have them mounted and balanced but they only did one of those, mounted, and had to order a new tire for the Explorer. Now I'm back home with the slicks and I find out they didn't balance them, so I have to take them back the next day with the Explorer, to get the new tire remember, and have it done.

It's the next day now and I was told the tire should be there by 10AM, I get off work at 11:30am home by noon and back at the tire store by 12:30. I get there and no tire, should be there on the 1pm truck and will be mounted after that. So I leave the Explorer there to get finished, walk home and wait for them to call me and tell me it's done. Now I'm waiting, and waiting, and still more waiting then I decide I'm going to call them. You guessed it, it's done and been done for a while now, why no call I ask, not written on the invoice I'm told. Wow, left me speechless, I guess I'm supposed to be psychic now and know when they're done with it.

So to finish my rant, the Explorer was done 3 hours later, they finally balanced the slicks for me and all is well with the world.