Flat Tire

 

J.R. Oregon Tires & Auto Care

Daughter got a flat tire this morning while she was driving up West Burnside road on the way out of Portland. Hit something hard, probably a pothole. She tried to fix it herself but immediately ran into a problem when she couldn't loosen the wingnut that was securing the jack in the trunk. So I got called to assist. She was right, the wing nut was tight. I couldn't loosen it until I applied some Channellock pliers. I know who the guilty culprit is. He tightens everything super tight. Now we need to get to the lug nuts. The YouTube video she has pulled up has mag wheels while she has steel wheels and hub caps. So the lug nuts are behind the hubcap. Lugnuts revealed, she tries to loosen one. No go. She stands on the end of the wrench. Bounces. Still no go. I stand on the wrench and bounce and my heftier weight (double hers) does the trick. That was the toughest one. Thanks, Costco. She was able to break loose the rest of them.

Got the tire changed and looked around for someplace to get it fixed (it's Sunday) and find J.R. Oregon Tires & Auto Care in Beaverton. It took him maybe 15 minutes to fix the tire and only charged $20. I call it a deal.

Now I'm on Google Maps looking for Streetview images of this place. The one at the top is the first and it doesn't really give a good view of the place.

Union 76

So I move to the corner, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but the old Union 76 gas station that used to be there. I dunno how long ago.

J.R. Oregon Tires & Auto Care

Switch to 3d view and we get a good, if distorted, overview of the whole place. What isn't shown is the pile of several hundred tires on the far side of the main building.

This is in a small commercial district in fairly unscale neighborhood. The commercial district has been on the skids for while. Half of it has been fenced off and looks like it is going to be demolished. The only remainging businesses there are Harbor Freight and DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles).

I think the last time I changed a flat was on our old Windstar van, and that must have been 20 years ago.

Car Wash Troubles

Car Wash from Far Side artist Gary Larson

When I was kid, I thought the automated, drive thru car washes were the cat's pajamas. We probably only went once, they cost money you know, but evidently it made an impression. Since I got married, and appearances are important to SWMBO, and I had more than two nickels to rub together, I started using the local car wash, which made my inner ten-year-old very happy. Not so my daughter. Girl can travel the world without having to call home, but can't go to the car wash without her pappy. Now I know why.

I've never been very good about keeping my cars clean. As long as they ran, that was enough. I did thoroughly clean a few cars, but that was usually because I was putting them up for sale.

Anyway, I seem to have had more than my fair share of problems with Kaddy Car Washes. I took our SUV there a few years ago and once I got fully into the car wash tunnel, water started pouring in. What the heck? Seems that somebody closed the sunshade but had forgotten to close the sunroof all the way. The wet interior was the least of my problems. Seems that sunroof mechanism is kind of delicate, and it wasn't up to the task of closing while the overhead brushes are beating on it. It closed, but something in the mechanism broke and now it won't close completely anymore. I have it propped up with a couple of wood blocks.

A few months ago I took my car to the car wash. I heard a bang, it seemed to come from the car in front of me, a late model Toyota Prius. They stopped the car wash to fix the problem, and then they restarted it. A few seconds later my car is where the previous bang came from and now something is beating the tar out of the side of my car. Seems a big rotating brush had snagged the side view mirror of the car in front of me and ripped it clean off. When my car got to that brush, the mirror assembly was still caught in the brush so every time it went around, my car got beat.

Kaady did right by me, they paid to have the body shop fix it and paid for a rental car for me to use while mine was in the shop. Cost them $2,000. They also gave me a bunch of passes for free car washes.

2016 Mazda 3 Roof Trim

Yesterday, my daughter comes by and she wants to get her car washed. Usually her husband washes it by hand, but he is tied up with work, so she's going to help him out. So we go to the car wash. Halfway through there is a big bang. We look at the car afterwards and don't see anything. Once she gets home her husband takes one look and notices that one of the trim strips that line the edge of the roof is gone. I managed to retrieve the trim strip from the car wash. It is a piece of aluminum with some plastic clips to hold it in place and at least one of those clips is broken / missing. So we are going to have to find a new way to attach it. I think a generous application of silicon sealer will do the trick.

I could holler at Mazda and Kaady, but being as the damage easily can be repaired, it's probably not worth the hassle. Mazda and Toyota may want to try making their cars more car wash resistant. I mean, a car wash brush shouldn't be able to rip things off of your car. Or maybe Kaady needs find some snag free brushes. Or they need to ban me from their car wash.

Batteries & Warranties

Battery

 

 

All the squirrelly problems with the Mazda went away with the new battery. My experience with automobile batteries over the last 30 years is that they last about five years, and when they die, they do so suddenly. I tried to keep our Ford Windstar running when its battery died, but that only lasted a couple of days before I threw in the towel. I've had a couple of batteries die in the truck and at least one in the Mitsubishi. When the batteries in those vehicles showed signs of flaking out I replaced them post haste. Don't bother with jumper cables or voltmeters (though I always check the voltage because that's the kind of guy I am). Just go to the store and buy a new battery.

The business with the brake pedal kind of threw me. I still haven't figured that one out. It could be psychological, or it could be some kind of electro-mechanical gimcrack that doesn't come into play until the battery dies. And then there were the flashing lights and the instrument panel going crazy, but all that stuff is presumably digital now and can operate with just a breath of power like you might get from a dying battery, so that is probably just the kind of behavior you should expect from a nearly dead battery.

Quickest, easiest and cheapest solution is just to replace the battery. It only takes ten minutes, unless you count the time spent going to the auto parts store. Then it takes an hour. The battery was $150, which is chunk of change, but nothing compared to having the car towed to the dealer so they can replace whatever computerized doo-dad has died and gone to meet Mr. Jobs.

Baxter's only offer 18 and 30 month warranties. The last few batteries I bought all had 5 year (60 month) warranties, and that's how long they usually lasted. I can't imagine the quality or durability of batteries has dropped that much, rather I think the terms of warranties have changed. I think my previous warranties were basically prorated for the life of the warranty, i.e. you pay for all the time you have the battery. This new warranty offers free replacement if the battery fails in the warranty period, which is very different.


The battery we are replacing is only two years old. (The car is a 2016 and now it's 2018.) I am surprised that it failed. I suppose it could have suffered some internal injury when the car was wrecked, or maybe the Florida sun cooked its goose. Whatever. I just hope it isn't going to be a habit.

Odds of needing to use the warranty are slim. I use warranties to judge the quality of the product. I figure a more confident manufacturer will offer a longer warranty. These days, they have probably collected enough statistics on battery life and failure modes that they can calculate to the penny how much they need to allow for warranty returns.

The oddest thing about this whole operation is that there are no auto parts stores in downtown Portland. We had to go seven miles down Interstate Five to get to Baxter's. I noticed on Google Maps that there was a Fred Meyer that was closer and Freddie's sells some basic automotive supplies, like oil and batteries, and most of them do, but not this one. I always thought that auto parts stores were pretty much evenly distributed according to population. I remember when I lived in Ohio there was one 24 hour auto parts store in Columbus and it was right downtown. This exclusion of auto parts stores from the downtown area in Portland smacks of elitism. More likely the space / rent squeeze had just forced out anyone who cares about how much rent they are paying. Or maybe cars are better built now and we just don't need that many auto parts stores.

New Age Car Lingo

How a Brake Booster and Master Cylinder Work
The Mazda is being difficult, which is foxing dutiful daughter. It won't start and when you try if acts squirrelly. Being a modern car, you need to push the brake pedal before you push the start button, so according to delightful daughter it's a 'push-start' car, which foxxed me when she said it. To me, push-start means a couple of guys pushing a car to get it rolling and then popping the clutch to start the engine. This used to be common knowledge. I wonder if anyone under the age of 30 has ever done it.

Anyway, back to the Mazda. Under normal circumstances, when you push on the brake pedal prior to trying to start the car, it moves, not much, but you can feel it move a bit. But now, devious daughter tells me, it doesn't. Being an independent sort, she did some Googling before she called me, and now she wants to know how power brakes work. I explained it as best I could, but then I thought a video might help, so I went looking and found this one and it's pretty great. There are some subtle funnies mixed in with explanation, and it's all technical all the time, so I enjoyed it.

2016 Mazda 3 Front Marker Bulb Replacement

How to Replace Parking bulb on 2016 mazda 3?
A marker light on the Mazda burned out and Osmany thought it should be something we could handle. The above video gave us a clue: the bulb can be accessed by loosening the fender liner and bending it enough so you can get your arm in the gap. You loosen the fender liner by pulling the snap-expansion plugs out and unscrewing a couple of screws under the nose of the car.

I could almost reach the socket from the under the hood by contorting my arm around and through some pipes, but that was all. I could touch it but I couldn't get a hold of it. Osmany was able to reach it from underneath, but he still needed to use a pair of needlenose pliers to untwist the socket so he could pull it out. We just used a screwdriver to pop the plugs holding the fender liner in place, we didn't buy one of the orange plastic crow bars shown in the video.

Liquids

Water And Oil by Setsiri Silapasuwanchai

My stomach was a little queasy this morning, but I had several things to do. If all goes well I could wait and everything will fall into place, but that is unlikely to happen. So, first thing I drove to the ATM at the community credit union in downtown Hillsboro to deposit a check and get some cash. Then I went to Black Rock Coffee on TV Highway near Shute Park to get coffee (with cream) for Anne and myself. When I got home I sat down at my computer and mucked about while I drank my coffee. My stomach was still not happy and the delicious coffee pushed it over the edge and I vomited the coffee in the bathroom sink. It was unpleasant, but a quick urp and it was all over, not like when you've drunk too much or when you have the flu and you think you are going to die. I think the whole thing with my stomach is related to my toothache, my reduced food intake and the pain killers I have been taking. Rumor has it that the vagus nerve is the culprit.

Took Ross to First Tech FCU so he could get a money order to pay for the application fee to rent an apartment. The credit union doesn't sell money orders, all they offer is cashier's checks. Hopefully that will be good enough. When he was done there, I gave him a ride to the Max commuter train station adjacent to Intel's Hawthorne Farms campus on Cornell Road. On the way home I stopped at Costco to fill the tank on my pickup truck with gasoline. My stomach was still unhappy. I almost pulled over so I could puke in the roadside ditch, but I held it together. When I got home I had some oatmeal and jam and that seemed to help. Or maybe that was before. It's kind of a muddle.

Now Osmany has arrived to pick up the dresser. I take a 20 minute nap while he empties the dresser of the computer cables and parts that I had stored there into some cardboard boxes and loads the dresser into Anne's SUV. When he is done we drive to Accurate Auto get the oil changed in the Mazda. Turns out that a 2016 Mazda requires synthetic oil, which means an oil change costs $70 instead of $35. The recommended interval for oil changes has gone from 3500 miles to 7500 miles, which is good, but that still means an oil change twice a year, which is my standard for our other cars, which all use regular oil.

The deal with regular oil is that if your car is used in 'extreme service' it needs to have the oil changed every 3,000 miles, but for normal driving, the oil only needs to be changed every 6,000 miles. 'Extreme service' is funny in that it can mean either of two extremes: one, vehicle is mostly driven at high speeds with heavy loads, or two, it is hardly driven at all. The first one is kind of obvious, but the second one is kind of confusing. How can too little driving be extreme? The problem here is that if you only drive a mile or so at a time, the engine never warms up. I'm not quite sure exactly what the problem here is, but I suspect it is some kind of chemical thing. For instance, water is a by-product of combustion, so every time you start up a cold engine, a minuscule amount of water is going to get into the oil. If you drive the engine long enough for it to reach normal operating temperature, that water will be vaporized and the PCV (Positive Crankcase Ventilation system) will suck that water vapor out of the crankcase. If you never drive the car long enough for the engine to reach normal operating temperature, that water will remain in the crankcase and continue to accumulate. Water in the crankcase leads to the formation of acid which can eat away at things like bearings and rings and can lead to the engine wearing out prematurely. So if you don't want your engine to wear out early, you change the oil more often to remove the water.

I suspect that most people are not interested in that long winded explanation, and a smart service adviser is not going to inflict it on their customers, so they play it safe and recommend the 'extreme service' interval to all their customers. Since a car costs about $500 a month to operate, one extra oil change per year is only going to add about 1% to that bill. Not doing the extra oil change on a car that needs it will likely result in the car's engine lasting only half as long as normal. If we figure that replacing an engine costs about $3,000 and under normal conditions an engine should last 20 years, that means the engine costs about $150 per year. If it wears out twice as fast, it will cost $300 per year. So if you are going to keep your car, the extra $70 a year in oil changes is a pretty good investment.

But I don't know if the same recommendations regarding 'extreme service' apply to Mazda engines using synthetic oil. I should check. Actually, Osmany should check, but he has his hands full with managing his international family and making a living. Me, on the other hand, have no pressing demands, other than digging ditches, washing dishes, paying bills and driving to the pharmacy and the airport, I should be able to look into it.

When we get back from Accurate Auto, Rob and G (the lawn and landscape guys) are here. They've repaired the leaks in the irrigation system (that were caused when we were excavating to find the leak in the water main). We need to finish filling in the hole, and since we are here and the fiber optic line is almost fully exposed I'm thinking we need to armor it somehow to keep it from getting cut again. It happened once before and it was dang annoying being without internet for some days. I forget how many it was, not many, but I didn't like it, not one little bit.

Mazda Insurance

2016 Mazda 3 Sedan

My daughter and I went to Miami a couple of weeks ago. She was planning on attending school there, so we were getting her established with a place to live and a car to get around. We found a 2016 Mazda 3 sedan at a small shop on the southern edge of the city for $11,000. I thought this was a heck of deal, as a visit to a dealer had turned up one similar car for $20,000.

Although it looks like an obvious deal, there is a caveat. The car we bought had been in a front end collision, had been written off by the insurance company as a total loss, and then repaired by the small shop, so the title is 'branded', and there is even a sticker on the door frame that says 'rebuilt'. But the car looks good and it drove fine, so we bought it.

When my daughter's plans for school collapsed, we had to decide what to do with the car. We could have tried to sell it, but given that we were trying to get out of town, that didn't seem like a good idea. We could have shipped it back to Oregon at a cost of  $1,600. Since this debacle had already cost us a small fortune, I was loath to rub salt in my wounds. Eventually, we decided that my daughter and her husband would drive the car to Oregon. They took a week and they got to see the country, all 3,000 miles of it. Gas was $200, motels were $1000. If you add it all up (airfare, lost wages from time off of work), I am sure shipping the car would have been cheaper, but the experience of The Great American Road Trip has to count for something. Just glad that my pockets were deep enough to afford them this experience.

The car made the trip without any problems, so I expect it will probably serve us well for many years to come. Now something may come up that will cost a couple of thousand dollars to get fixed, but we did save nine grand on the purchase price, so even should a small disaster strike, we should be ahead of the game. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, just in case.

When we were buying this car we talked to the proprietor. Seems that rebuilding cars is what they do. They buy late model Mazdas (and only Mazdas) that have been in front end collisions and written off as totaled by the insurance company. They repair the damage and then resell the cars. The curious thing is that some of these cars may only have $1,000 worth of damage. Now maybe she was exaggerating, or maybe that was just how much the parts cost, but still you get the idea that there is something funny going on here.

I think I have figured out that is. I don't know, but I suspect, that classifying a car as Totaled frees the manufacturer from the obligations of their warranty. Now a large percentage of new-car buyers will take good care of their cars, drive them conservatively and see that the required maintenance is performed in a timely function. After all, buying a car requires a considerable financial investment. On the other hand, I suspect there is also a large percentage of people who don't do any of these things. They drive with wild abandon, never bother with maintenance and don't even think about the car until it won't start. Then they call the dealer and scream out their frustration.

If all car buyers belonged to the proper, conservative, first group, then the manufacturer would probably not need to set aside more than $100 for each car for warranty work. But the devil-may-care bunch in second group could cause the manufacturer to set aside several thousand dollars to deal with their warranty claims.

I can think of no other reason to explain why the insurance companies would declare a vehicle with so little damage to be totalled.