QTDDTOT : Questions That Don't Deserve Their Own Threads

The jb weld was supposed to be a gasket because I couldn't find any that fit the pipe diameter at autozone. But the bolts stripped really fucking easily and I just said fuck it.
I'll probably try something autistic like you suggested tie it on there, to keep it from flying off on the highway if anything else

My car is aproaching 100.000 km, a oil change is due anyway, should I change sparkplugs and gearbox oil?
Is there anything else I should change?
Airfilter is still fine, 0,99 bar absolute intake pressure at full power.

Engine is 1KR-FE, gearbox is a 5-speed Toyota MT

>plugs
Plugs usually last 5ever on modern engines, but it should be cheap and quick so you might as well

>gearbox oil
Typical MT will go its entire life without ever being changed anyway. Not necessary, but it certainly would do no harm, especially if the manual recommends it.

>air filter
Change it. Cheap as hell, basically a wear item, and you wouldn't notice a difference in intake pressure until it's caked in mud anyway.

You might be about due to change the coolant. Fuel filters usually don't need to be changed until the car is old enough to start accumulating rust or other crap in the tank, but that's usually pretty cheap and quick and some people just say "eh, I'll change it anyway."

Check brake pads and other fluid levels of course, change or top off as needed.

I have heared bad things about lifetime oil fillings.
Most companies design theyr cars to run with no issues while in warranty, but don´t care about anything after that.

I have my driving test next week Wednesday any tips you guys have for me?

I just changed the spark plugs on my shitbox 2009 subaru imprezza base model. Not an STI or a WRX. Just a garbage auto tragic wagon.

I got the plugs recommended by the manual. The issue is now the car smells like gas when I drive around. Nothing else is being affected though, runs and idles well. What do I do?

I would check for leaks on the gas lines, you migh have damged one while changing the plugs.

In a manual gear box in an average car, it's not really going to be running the gear oil hard, and there's almost no grit or gunk for the oil to absorb (unlike in an auto where the fiction bands are wearing into the transmission fluid).

For me personally, I'll wait until about 30,000 on the odometer or whatever is convenient, and then switch the original gear oil out for synthetic. The idea here is that the original gear oil has by that time accumulated most of the microscopic metalic particulate wear, and now I have silky smooth synthetic cold winter shifting for the rest of the car's life.

Heavy duty applications, trucks, towing, racing, obviously would indicate more frequent maintenance (including the gear oil in the differential). But I assume a 1KR-FE is not doing much heavy duty.

>I assume a 1KR-FE is not doing much heavy duty
Pizza delivery&legal wangan, so it is under quite some load pretty often.

Gas lines run under the manifold and are kind of hard to damage, although he might as well check around the fuel filter (upper right side of the engine bay) in case he managed to give that a bad yank in the course of doing the plugs.

I've heard voodoo claims that the bog standard copper NKG plugs are the magic sauce for those engines, and that for some reason other plugs don't work as well, but I can't substantiate that because I had the same set of NKGs in for like 80k miles until I finally got rid of the car.

I doubt that you really need to change the gear oil, but it certainly can only be meaningless or good if you do. And it's not expensive -- just stinky.

Thanks guys, I will check both. Im using NKG Laser Platinums in mine. I pulled out NKGs too.

Folks back in the day were all about the coppers specifically. I don't understand why it would make a difference or how it could lead to running rich enough to smell like gas; but I don't care because the cheapass coppers ran forever and looked so good every time I took them out I just gave up and stopped checking them.

Assert dominance by having your seat warmer on high and theirs on low

Anyone know the quality of £15 car radios are? I just want somthing to replace the dead one from my car.

The ones I pulled out were nasty as fuck. What else did you do on your Subie? I am at about 99k miles. And there is a bunch of stuff that is suggested to do at this time.

Make sure they can see you move your head as you check the mirrors. They won't be watching your eyeballs to confirm.

If you make a mistake, don't freak out. Just correct it. If you have a decent guy and you pulled off everything else well enough it's not necessarily an automatic fail.

They make exhaust clamps

I plan to trade in my 2000 v6 mustang for something that can handle snow better and maybe better fuel economy as well.

whats a good car with AWD that i can find which is at least as quick as what i already have for a fair price?
ive been aiming for sub $10k moosebux and so far have been looking at an impreza 2.5i from 2008

Pretty much the stuff I mentioned here I also ran half a can of seafoam into the intake and IAC holding the engine at ~3kRPM. Then WOT redlining in second for a while to get it good an hot, and then ~10oz of water into the intake (careful with this, but if you go slow and keep the RPMs up then it won't hydrolock and bend a rod on you) followed by WOT redlining in 2nd for a while. The first cleans gunk off the intake; the second cleans carbon out of the exhaust. My engine was in good enough health that this did next to nothing, but I've had it perk up old gunked up engines a bit in the past.

I wish I had replaced the shocks by maybe 130k or whenever I thought it would be about halfway through the car's life. Made it ride nice again.

What did your plugs look like? Oil gunk? Pitted and ragged? Black and sooty?

2.5i isn't what I'd call "quick" by modern standards even though that was often considered to be a "pocket rocket" 10 years earlier when the competition was Tagumi-type cars.

It is however pleasant and good for some grins, and the car will eat snow all day long. I strongly recommend the manual for extra control, acceleration, and full time 50:50 torque split. If you wind up in a slushbox, it won't be as engaging but if you chuck it in low gear then it will lock the front and rear axles and that can be variously fun or useful in the snow.

the plan is manual for whatever i go with. do you know how well it pulls on the highway for merging and whatnot?

It's adequate for merging. I had a 2.2 Impreza and it really had more than I needed for merging even into aggressive traffic. That being said, I often took that opportunity to redline it for fun. Although I should add that I had a light weight flywheel, which makes an obvious difference in 1 and 2 and sometimes in 3 (top of 3 is roughly highway cruising speed).

For highway pulls and passing, that's where you will find disappointment and discover that the drivetrain drag of full time AWD makes it feel like much less than it is.

Now that I'm in something a bit more powerful, merging and such is categorically more fun even though I miss having as much of an excuse to wind it all the way out.

I'm looking to get my first car and took a look at a used 2007 Chevrolet Cobalt.

It only has 43k kilometers and the dealer is asking $6300 canadian.

It drove well and seemed otherwise I'm great condition, but the dealer wasn't able to answer questions about driving patterns - whether it was from more occasional short trips or if it had extended periods of inactivity.

Should I walk away? Or am I too paranoid about low km?

>but the dealer wasn't able to answer questions about driving patterns - whether it was from more occasional short trips or if it had extended periods of inactivity.

The dealer didn't personally follow the previous owner every day of his ownership of the vehicle to know how it was driven.

Any answer besides I don't know is likely to be bullshit.

I don't think I'd be very concerned. Very short commute? No commute grocery getter? Sat somewhere untouched for a long time? Autistic Chinese kid who bought it "because" and just rarely drove it? None of these are bad possibilities.

My current car the dealer happened to be able to tell me what the previous owner traded it in for and why, but that was total BS for all I know. But the story fit like a glove at least, and was consistent with my guesses as to why they were selling it low price, relatively low miles per year, and pristine condition.

Your better off pulling a radio at a junk yard or Pick and pull

Yeah, that's fair. I figured they may ask about it, but if he doesn't have information then it can't be helped.
Thanks for the dose of common sense though. I guess I'm just paranoid about vehicles.

My concern would be "drove a bunch, then not at all" as I figure the car having been idle for a long period would be bad for it.

But maybe any issues would have surfaced during test drives.

Black and sooty. Since its an automatic I was thinking about doing the transmission oil or fluid and then doing a coolant flush though I am really not sure how to go about that.

Letting a car sit for a long time isn't really bad for it unless mice are eating the wires or it's rusting to hell. Basically it flatspots the tires (nonissue) the gas goes bad and potentially gunks up the injectors (surely it has good gas in it now; run some injector cleaner and change the fuel filter in a year) and anything iron/steel in the engine might have gotten a little bit of rust on it if it wasn't fogged, but that has burned off by now and isn't worth worrying about.

Black and sooty shouldn't be a concern if it wasn't caked on. Mine were usually a little blacker than the tan you see on interbutt sparkplug comparison web pages, but it's an engine that tends to run very slightly sooty anyway (as evidenced by the inside of the tailpipe). If it was really looking ugly, maybe the plugs were just done. If they look gross again next time you take them out, then you might suspect your wires or coils are aging and you're not getting a strong enough spark, your front O2 sensor is aging and causing it to run too rich, or possibly just that you're not hooning it enough :D

If I were you I'd go ahead and change the transmission fluid. That's the kind of thing where once you wait to long the damage is already done. And you can tell by the state of the old fluid, or if it shifts worse afterward, that you might have a wear problem beginning to manifest. An actual flush would have to be done by a shop. Simply draining and refilling should be sufficient and doable in the driveway.

I forget the service interval for the the coolant, but this is probably a good time to change it if that hasn't been done in some years or some tens of thousands of miles. That's piss easy to do: there's a stopcock to unscrew at the bottom of the raidator: drain that into a bucket or whatever (if you need to jack up the front go ahead -- it's not critical to get every last drop out) and then you pour new coolant in the top, drive until the engine warms up, and then top off the coolant again because probably it will be low now after having had to burp some air out of the system.

Ah, ok. I was worried that some liquids may have broken down over the years and caused issues - something I recalled a family member mentioning once.

So ignoring the idleness - do you think it'd be an alright deal? Google seems to suggest that it was a death trap but it's hard to say if it's all due to the ignition heavy keychain issue.

Can't comment on the car itself, but if the fluids have been changed then probably you're good to go. If there's no service record, then go ahead and change the oil and oil filter of course. I guess after 10 years of ??? you should probably do the coolant as well, and if it's an auto then transmission fluid change would also be sensible.

Oh btw, I don't know when you last did the timing belt, but what makes most sense of all is to do the coolant change when you do the timing belt, since the radiator has to come off for that anyway. When you do the timing belt, also do the accessory belts, the water pump, the timing belt tensioner, and the oil pump.

That whole set of things can all be done easily in one operation, and will save you from having to take that all apart again later.

My car intermittently makes a whining sound from what I believe is the fuel pump (it's behind the passenger rear wheel)

It'll make the noise every once in a while when I turn it on and will continue to whine the duration of the drive. If I turn it off and start it again, then the noise usually stops.

It doesn't seem to correlate to any other factor that I can tell.

Should I get it looked into? Don't want to cause unnecessary strain on my car in case it's just a fuel filter that needs to be changed.

Thanks for the tips man. And Ill do that next time I get a day off.

How much do you guys think the labour would be on changing out a FWD halfshaft? I want to do it myself but my jack blows and the way my driveway is and my shitty non low profile jack i can jack it up safely but the only place to put jackstands safely is on the pinch welds. The jack blocks out where the manual says to put the stands like right behind the wheel before the pinch welds start. That and i am a pretty big mechanical virgin only having changed my oil, quickstruts and little stuff.

I don't know what to make of that without being able to tinker with it myself. The fuel pump should be running with the key in the on position but without the engine having been started, so you can see if the sound changes if you cycle the power on and off short of running the engine as a way to maybe try to get another clue.

I just remembered some cars have auto-leveling rear suspension that depends on an air pump situated in the rear that can make funny noises. Or is there something else strange back there? Motor-operated antenna or even rear wiper motor something?

At any rate, as a general rule, once you notice something strange, if there are no obvious consequences or explanations, then it might do to simply pay attention to whether it gets worse or changes; it might just be some weird thing you happened to notice or that your car decided to start doing. Mentioning it when you take next take it in for inspection never hurts as a way to get a free second opinion.

You can probably stick the jack stands on any place the suspension bolts on to the body, e.g. at the body end of a control arm might do it for you. There might even be somewhere a bit more inboard on the front subframe you could put it / them; as long as the rear is on the ground and stable the car isn't really going to want to tip over.

Labor to get it done? Depends on the car but I would guess $100-$200 maybe? They might be able to tell you over the phone since a lot of places just charge routine work at the book rate regardless of how long it takes. I had to get one of mine done one time when I could get the goddamn pin out and it was somewhere around $100, but it's a pretty easy job on that car.

So I'm leaking coolant into the engine and I need new head gaskets, but I just can't afford to do it right now. Is there anything I can do to keep it running for another month until I can afford to do a proper repair?

Keep the coolant topped up, check your oil often to make sure it's not getting milky, and drive with one eye on the temp gauge so that most of all you don't overheat it.

If it's not that bad, you should be able to keep that up for a month with no ill effects. Change the oil after you do the gaskets. Coolant might or might not have dissolved an unusual amount of oil or exhaust gases, so see if it looks like crap or if it's close to the change interval, and then decide if you want to go ahead and switch out the coolant as well.

Thanks for the advice. If the oil is getting milky does that mean I've run out of time or can I change the oil to stall it for a bit longer? It isn't milky yet I'm just curious.

Milky means change it right away because it's got coolant in it and can't lubricate properly. As long as you keep changing it often enough to avoid it being visibly disturbed and you're not out racing around and demanding peak performance out of it, you should be fine to limp along that way for quite a while.

u can't even afford a $20 tester
how u gonna afford diagnostic software?
youtube.com/watch?v=Bmz67ErIRa4
>just. give. it. up.

Thanks again user. I'll just have to drive like a grandma and check the fluids daily until I can fix the poor thing.

I have a Jeep Grand Cherokee that has been left out for about 5 months in storage. I will be going back to pick it up and start driving it in 2 weeks. Other than a dead battery, what else should I expect from the car after 5 months of sitting around?

I left it in neutral and the hand break off. I hear there might be some issues with the breaks after not using for so long. I plan on going to a mechanic to get the oil and filter changed in the first few days, should I ask them to check on some specific things while they're at it? Should I mention anything about the car not being used for so long?

How about the wheels, the car has not been moved in that time unfortunately. I read somewhere that the tires might be damaged with a somewhat "flat" spot where they touch the ground. Should I expect to buy new tires?

>bought used car
>title came back clean
>check VIN somewhere else
>clean but there was frame damage at 8000 miles
>seems like it was fixed from insurance and all that, not declared total loss since it's still a ''clean title''
>still feel shitty
Should I get an alignment check with a laser to make sure I'm good? I feel like an idiot.

Yeah, mention its been in storage and ask him to have a look if there's anything obviously the worse for wear. There shouldn't be. By the time you get it there the brakes will have scraped off any surface rust or whatever, and I assume the gas in the tank is in good enough shape (might as well fill the tank straight off to get a superior new:old gas ratio).

Flat-spotted tires work fine. They're just bumpy. If you're lucky they might become a little less bumpy as you heat them up and wear them back in. And then you can decide whether to live with them or get new tires.

Alignments are inexpensive enough that you might as well get it checked to see if it's badly bent or not. They'll be able to tell you if crash bolts or anything like that were used to compensate. But if it is bent what are you going to do now? If you can still align it within sepcs, it doesn't wear the tires unevenly, and it doesn't drive funny, then, you know, live with it.

Keep an eye out for oddball issues that can pop up from collision damage. Sometimes it can be subtle, like a door that doesn't quite seal out the rain, or something that will be discovered in the course of yearly safety inspections, like a part of the suspension that took a year or three to wear out after being bashed.

BOUGHT NEW CAR, GOT LICENCE
WHAT ARE THE BEST SUPER EUROBEAT ALBUMS TO DOWNLOAD?

ok.jpg
it's at 36000 miles now, here's to hoping for the best

Is this close to the racing line? Could you draw the racing line?

Put Deja Vu, Running In the 90s, Gas-Gas-Gas, and Night On Fire, on a loop.

You can also occasionally put this on when you're on the Freeway.
youtube.com/watch?v=y0OmkdDPGAM

I CAN'T JUST LISTEN TO NOTHING BUT THOSE FOUR FOREVER
(I already only listen to three remixes of running in the 90's on loop...)

Try these:
youtu.be/44OQmW5N5_k
youtu.be/0-loUnvQ_Bs

Is the 2011 CR-Z a shit? I'm looking to get a car with an mpg in the high 30s and in the $7000 price range and the car seems pretty appealing

It's a little bit different, but there are some pretty neat 90s/00s best-of compilations of animes OPs and EDs that have a similar
>TURN ON THE HAPPY EXCITEMENT MACHINE ON FULL BLAST FOR 5 MINUTES
vibe

Is the racing line any different if you insist on drifting?

ALBUMS NIGGA
Well it'd all be well and good if I had itunes or bandcamp links but just saying they exist doesn't help.

iunno mate I ripped CDs from my anime nerd friends and downloaded MP3s off of their computers. Maybe try punching "1996 Best Animation Collection Vol. 1" into JewTube and letting the autorecommender help you out narrowing down to things that catch your fancy.

Depending on your taste in jamming jap music, you might also like Boom Boom Satellites. Try the album Exposed.

Here, track #2 from Exposed
youtube.com/watch?v=aRZ4g0SBJbo

Don't use JB Weld. Use exhaust crack/joint sealer. It's like $5 at O'Reilly. It's currently the only thing holding my exhaust together. I tried JB Weld first, like you, and it just flaked off after 10 minutes of driving. The exhaust shit has held up, tho.

do you guys like my elantra sport?

When people do shit that changes engine characteristics (I.e. rpm), do you also need to buy and/or install a new tachometer? Will it stop at the old redline, or keep going past the limit?

Ditto the speedometer, I guess

On a modern electronic car, the tach just takes a reading off the crankshaft sensor or cam sensor and puts the needle where it belongs. These sensors just get triggered once per revolution or on fancier cars X times per revolution. Computer tach doesn't care as long as it know how to translate that into a dial position.

If you change the wheel diameter or final drive gearing then the speedometer (and also the odometer) will read wrong because they are making the wrong assumption about how to convert the reading taken from the transmission into the correct speed of the vehicle. In this case, you need to change the programming of the computer or I guess install a different dial if it's mechanical.

I'll look into doing all of that if I go for the car, thank you very much.

I'm currently deciding between that, or spending a few thousand more for a Mazda 6 GT with 151k km.

Can't decide if I want a smaller (supposed) deathtrap or a more expensive but more modern option.

Okay, but like

What if your stock pos engine rev limits at 7500, the dial optimistically goes to 8000, and you end up with a new redline at 9k? Would the dial go to where 9k WOULD be, there's just no visual marker there because the designers didnt anticipate it needing to go that high?

I am looking for a 1995 Dodge Intrepid rack and pinion unit for as cheaply as possible. Local junkyard has nothing older than 1999/2000.
New will cost too much because of core I don't have to return. Craigslist is dead, too.

What do?

Depends on the dial. It might have a mechanical stop or it might keep going beyond the markings or might spaz out because the ECU sends it a signal it wasn't designed for or the ECU might artificially limit it at 8k because it was programmed that way or the ECU might spaz out because you didn't reprogram it to deal with an RPM reading higher than it was originally designed to deal with.

The ECU is just a low-powered computer. The dial is just like a pixel in your monitor that gets told how bright to go.

Depends on how the dials are designed, many can go beyond the Original redline provided theres not resting peg keeping it from doing it.

Do performance chips or module work well on early 2000's v8 engines?

Were ther any changes in the 1999/00 models or are they the same part number?

I don't recall them making drastic model changes between the mid 90's and the Mid 00's on the intrepid. Hell they may even share parts with Mitsubishi's at the time since Chrysler was in a partnership with them.

would you guys buy a car from a shitty salesmen?

the guy didn't know the difference between trim levels, that one of them wasn't even available last year. he was wrong about which model has more leg room, and repeatedly tried to sell me a model I had no interest in.

thought the car we test drove last years model. didn't know zero to 60, or quarter mile times, just HP.

poor bloke couldn't even do basic arithmetic.

No? Is this a Rhetorical question?

idgaf. It's my job to know about the car. It's his job to let me drive it and negotiate a price.

No.

Had me going till

>>didn't know zero to 60, or quarter mile times, just HP.
>Implying a salesperson is gonna know performance metrics for whatever shitty accord lx you're trying to buy off the top of his head

Quick, user, tell me the 0-60 of every 2016 Toyota model! Without Googling because, you know, be like the sales guy, and it would be fucking unprofessional to pull out one's phone to check speed metrics or fucking legroom while trying to make a sale

They’re all forgivable if one simply says they don’t know and will find out instead of answering incorrectly.

Last time I went a-looking I had to sheepishly ask how to put it in reverse because I didn't know about those little lockout rings they have on the shift levers these days. But that was cool because my guy thought it was funny watching me try to pull myself out of the back seat while he was getting the key, and then he commented I probably knew more about the car than he did and asked me questions about the engine.

That was my idea of a good salesman experience.

Looking at pictures of them, it looks like the later models have cast in mounting ears. The 1995 has bushings and mounting straps like a sway bar.

This is for a custom application.
The pictures are small but I think you can make out what I'm saying.
93-95 Intrepid/Concorde.

Well you're going to have to expand your search area, Hit up Ebay, and possibly some out of state junkyards.

That's what us older BMW owners have to resort to.

>browsing trucks
>2014 ram
>180,000 miles

how do you drive 60k miles per year?

If you drive basically all day long you can do 1k per day. That would be 360k per year. Some people have a walk in life that involves a lot of time on the highway.

I heard that. Even whole cars for sale.
I'd prefer a junkyard so I can get the u-joints and fittings and what not.
I figured that's what I'll use today, I'll have to make some calls in the morning.

If anyone knows about the Mitsubishi option, I'm all ears to check them out.

bumpu:
2007 Cobalt LT with 43k km for $6300 canadian, vs. 2010 Mazda 6 GT with 151k km for $8900 canadian.

Does lower mileage beat out death trap reputation and less niceties in this day and age?

Is it a bad idea to replace only one rotor? Obviously i will change both sets of pads but one side will just have a new rotor. Unable to find any rotor/pad sets that ship from the same place as my other items on rockauto. Kind of in a tight spot and don't want to be charged 47 dollars in shipping. But if i buy just one rotor and pads it only adds 13 dollars in shipping. Add another rotor and it goes back up.

One of my rotors is warped from a seized guidepin that i lubed up. But it still squeeks like a mofo until you break because it constantly is hitting that uneven part of the rotor. Don't believe the other rotor is warped.

just replace them both and be done with it.

you might be able to find a set of rotors locally at autozone, oreily's, advance auto

Friend is selling his BMW E46 323 Ci -99 for 2,5 k dollaroos.

It has 24 k european miles on it

Is it worth it? I don't know nothing about cars.

>24k miles
At least make it credible when you roll back the odo

240k km
Is it too much?