i pull into my carport this evening and my japanese milf next door neighbor has the hood of her ’03 corolla propped up and is staring at her engine bay with a befuddled look on her face. she’s apparently late in picking up her jailbait daughter so being the mechanic and all around good samaritan that i am i offer my assistance. she tells me in really effed up english that she’s looking for the “coolant” so i point to the radiator cap and coolant reservoir tank. we somehow come to the conclusion that she doesn’t have any extra coolant to top off with, and not wanting to mix whatever she has with the wacky coolant i use, i tell her she can temporarily use water. so we get the hose and put about 2 cups of water into the reservoir before it’s full.

so then i bother to ask, why did you think you needed coolant? “was it over-heating” to which she says yes, and now i’m worried, because there was plenty of coolant in the system, and if it’s still over heating it’s probably the thermostat which is a trip to autozone and at least 30 minutes of wrench time. but while all this is going on in my head, she gets in the car and turns on the air conditioner and is unhappy that it’s still blowing hot air!

i guess it makes sense. coolant = cool temperature… it’s a logical conclusion… woman or japanese aside. so now i’m thinking fuck, she needs to recharge her AC compressor with R134a, and it probably has a leak, so even if i do a recharge it’s not going to last long, and the AC isn’t blowing *any* cool air, so it must have a hell of a leak and it’s going to be a costly repair for her.

then i realized she never pushed the fucking AC button.

i was standing out on a balcony of my office talking to dave about random things on my cell phone when i saw a gun-metal grey hummer h2 roll buy that said csi on it. my first thought was like “hmm, i wonder what happened.” my next thought was “wow csi really do drive hummers.” then an identical hummer drove by a few seconds later followed by a police car that said “miami dade police” grrr. i didn’t see any of the main characters driving them, so i assume they were just taking them from the studios to some off-site location to be filmed.

the chevron near my office is always a few cents more expensive than most of the gas stations in the area, but this morning i was on empty and figured i’d just put in $20 so as not to pull a ben.

my car requires premium, so at $3.959 per gallon, my jackson barely got me 5 gallons of gas! at least it can’t go any higher.

5. talk on my cell phone… i can never hear shit.

4. fit anything in the trunk.

3. pretend i don’t hear people talking to me from other cars

2. sing out loud to my music. the sound from the speakers stay pretty well confined within the cabin. my head being above the window sill means my pitchy voice carries well.

1. wear my “salmon” colored shirts.

i love my car, and like most people fear and loathe dents, even small ones. i usually park way in the back of parking lots so that no one can get close and ding my door. i park in corners where i can get as far away as possible from the door next to me, preferably next to a passenger door which is less likely to be used. i even look at the type of car i park next to. i prefer the medium-high priced cars that are in good shape. people don’t care about crappy cars and the really rich don’t care either. i also try to never park next to 2 door cars as their doors are 1/3 as long as sedans.

all that said, this weekend i got a massive ding, right on the bodyline, having not followed any of my own advice. when i checked into the hotel last saturday, i figured since i was only going to be away from my car for 5 minutes, i parked next to a lexus sc430 (pricey), which is a 2 door, and on its driver’s side. gah! and i figured since the ding was on the bodyline that pdr probably wouldn’t work and i’d have to go with the expensive (quoted $600) route of real bodywork and paint.

i called around and was referred to david pelikan of sos dent out of los angeles. he came to my place, spent about 45 minutes working on it with various tools, and for $150 completely took out the dent. i was pretty skeptical that he could get it completely out, but he seemed to know what he was doing. he was really friendly and even explained the process of energy waves as he lightly hammered my door in places no where near the ding. anyway, amazing work, and i definitely recommend him: http://www.sosdent.com/

before:

after:

feel free to ask me offline what i did to the sc430 when i saw it in the parking lot later that evening :)

^fergie: glamorous, anyone?

well, the integra is finally gone. i had that car for 10 years. 10 years! i seriously grew up in it, and it was hard, but definitely time to let it go. i sold it to some kid who seemed a lot like me 10 years ago and i’m sure her ricer days are far from over.

i bought it right after i turned 18, so it was mah ride for all my adult life. i bought it with 30k miles, and sold it yesterday with 193k. i drove that car a distance equal to 6.5 times around the earth, or three-quarters of the way to the moon. in all that time, it only stopped running on my 3 times, once that i was able to fix on the spot, and twice on the 405 right next to eric’s place where i pulled in and spent a few hours fixing it.

i replaced the timing belt and water pump twice, the brake master cylinder once, the starter once, all the hoses twice, the distributor once, 5 axles (one of those was costin’s fault), 3 radiators, 2 motor mounts, a/c lines once, and of course regular maintenance like tires, oil, plugs, cap and rotor numerous times. while that may sound like a lot, it only adds up to a couple thousand dollars over almost 10 years.

i also spent a lot of money on ricer stuff. it had 3 different sets of rims, 2 different sets of seats, 4 different sets of sideskirts, 3 different front bumpers, 1 different rear bumper, and i had a carbon fiber hood on it when i sold it.

damn, and think about the gas. even at an efficient 30mpg, 160,000 miles / 30mpg =  5633 gallons of gas. at an average of what? $2 for regular over the last 10 years = $11,266! that’s only a few thousand less than i paid for the car itself.

and how about the pollution? this site says that a 1.6l (the integra was a 1.8l) car produces 200grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer. so for my 163k miles (or 262k km) that’s over 115,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, yikes!

well, what’s done is done, and i’ll definitely miss that car.

them were the days:

i’ve had my car now for about 3 months and just finally got my license plates. they usually only take like 2 weeks or so to get, but the douchebags at the dealership kept stalling. the story they kept giving me, was that because they’re a dealership, $700 of the registration fees should be written off, but that the dmv wouldn’t release my license plates until they paid them. all of the fees were negotiated into the final price of the sale, so it wasn’t my responsibility, but every week when i called them, they kept saying they were negotating with the dmv. wtf?

the funny thing is, i remember when eric and i were haggling with the first guy at the dealership, he mentioned that i’d have to pay an extra $700 transfer fee or some such thing on top of the negotiated price, but the closer guy didn’t mention it, and we negotiated a final price that included it. In the end they ended up just eating the loss and paid the DMV the money they owed them. So this weekend i finally was able to remove that damn sticker in my window and get rid of the fugly paper plate. yafuu!

two of my favorite hobbies now have their own kentomatic spin-offs on the interweb.

for all of your long beach inshore and offshore fishing interests, check out www.fishin-impossible.com. this site has actually been up for about a year, but i haven’t really done much with it until now. the site will have my latest fishing logs and stories, and other fishing news from around the world.

for all of your honda s2000 interests, i’m pleased to introduce the s2k blog. this site will be dedicated to the honda s2000, and will focus on installs, upgrades and how-to’s.

i hope you enjoy the new sites, and thank you for all of your support over the last 1000+ posts on kentomatic.com.

stupid fucking best buy (and us for trying to save a buck). this weekend eric and i got together to do car audio stuff. eric knew exactly what head unit he wanted to buy so we went to best buy to pick it up. they had it in stock but they also had an “open item” that was the exact same model, but 25% less. we looked in the box and everything looked brand new and the wire harness had not been cut, so it seemed that someone bought it and returned it without even trying it so it was prolly a safe bet.

i spent about 30 minutes making the perfect wire harness with the cleanest soldering points ever, and when we hook it up, the damn volume dial doesn’t work! there wasn’t really any way to test the volume control before the wiring harness was finished. so eric goes to best buy to exchange it for a new one, and since he doesn’t want to return the wiring harness that we made, he gets the new unit and has them include the new wiring harness with the old head unit for the return, which is probably the exact same thing that happened with the last person that returned it, and i imagine the same head unit is now even more deeply discounted (with a new wiring harness so it seems to be fine) on the shelf for another sucker like us.

i think this’d be funny as hell to rock, but how the hell would i explain it to my friends/family that aren’t in the know?

[from jalopnik]