Re: GM slashes Chevy Volt prices to spur flagging sales

Pretty much true. Once I got over the minor hurdle of buying a code reader, there's very little change in basic diagnostics. OBD2 codes have been enough for me, so no scanning. The internet is a boon. And components are generally more reliable than before, with basically more sensors to go bad. Fuel regulators, pumps, injectors, coil packs and belted accessories are the main problems. I don't pull engine or trans anymore, but haven't had to. Had one car to a trans shop once to replace a valve that caused hard shifting. Jackstands are all I need. But hoists are easy and cheap enough if I needed them. Honestly, for about 15 years now, the only time my cars have been to a shop is for exhaust or tires.

I've replaced a few window motor/regulator combos. Most I paid was $105 at a GM dealer. The other 2 were mail order aftermarket, about

60 bucks each. There's some labor, but not much. An hour or two for me. I'd rather have manual windows, but they just aren't offered. Stuff like tail lights are best had at the boneyard if possible for your car. My main concern with modern cars is behind dash componentry. Very difficult to work with, but that's just how it is. But it's been only a worry, since I haven't had to do it. Good reliability from all my modern cars.
Reply to
Vic Smith
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True. And the electronic diagnostics today are a big help -- although I wonder if the net effect is any better than I did with my old Heathkit 'scope and homebrew four-channel adapter. Still, I'm not knocking it. And one of my engines is a six-cylinder, anyway.

It's just more investment in learning that I'm willing to go for these days. When you're done, you have...just what everyone else has. I could always tweak my old engines. For example, I even converted my old '64 Beetle to a centrifugal-only distributor, with a piece of fuel-line hose. Mileage went to hell but you got about three or four more horsepower in the midrange, and much better acceleration, that way.

I miss those things. It made it all worth the effort. I guess I either have to stop getting old or buy some old car for a toy.

Sometimes I like those things. For the most part, though, I still like my cars simple. I have my son's Garmin in the glove box of my Focus but I've never taken it out. But I do have a folder full of maps. They don't run out of batteries. d8-)

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Eh, consider a Caterham 7. No electric windows -- because it doesn't have windows.

For that matter, it ain't got no steenking doors, either. Who needs 'em? No trunk latch -- because there's no trunk lid.

Floor carpets...yuck! The original Austin Healey Sprite had some pebbly rubber stuff that you just hosed down. The sports car magazines called it "Unborn Gila Monster hide."

You guys have me longing for a '54 Ford...

Reply to
Ed Huntress

On Sun, 16 Jun 2013 21:01:05 -0400, Ed Huntress wrote:

That '64 bug would do. I had one too. And I put a centrifugal advance dist on it , but it was a new Bosch. Never noticed mpg change, but that's what 25 cent gas does to you. Also put new jugs, pistons/rings in it. 60 bucks for the set. Ground the valves with a reversible drill and compound. It ran sweet. It was fun taking care of it. There was NEVER any frustration/confusion. Might have something to do with my youth. Here's a little test. Ever notice a very high pitched whining coming from the engine bay? Many of the era had that. Very simple fix, but still about half I'd see had that whine. Cough up the answer, and I'll tell you how an orange peel stalled me out on the street. No, I'll just tell you anyway. One day coming home from work the bug stalled on a pretty busy city street. I coasted to the curb, restarted it, but it would stall on acceleration ("acceleration" hehe.) Anyway, first thing I did was pull the air cleaner to see what the fuel problem was - maybe accel pump bad. I hadn't had the air cleaner off for at least a couple weeks, when I was last tinkering. Right away I see a bright orange peel from half an orange in the carb throat, blocking it. I tell you, it was a twilight zone moment. I wish I could have seen my face. Anyway, pulling the peel fixed it. Took me about 15 seconds to remember I'd put the air cleaner on the back seat floor temporarily a couple week ago. and that sometime before that I had eaten a couple oranges while driving and tossed the peels behind me. The orange peel had lodged in the air cleaner throat sideways when I put the air cleaner on it, then finally closed like a choke a couple weeks later. But what if I had died in the meantime, and the car had passed on to somebody else? So it gets towed to a VW shop, and the owner gets a bill saying "Labor: $80.00 - removed 1/2 orange peel from carburetor. Shop overhead and rag fee: $20.35" The possibilities are endless.

Reply to
Vic Smith

Oooh, fancy, schmancy.

Yeah, it wasn't a big issue at those prices. What happened is that the all-centrifugal advance (which the 36-hp versions had at one point, which is where the idea came from) encourages you to put your foot in it because there was a large difference in output at full throttle. And it ran a little funny at part throttle. So I used a lot more gas.

I remember those days.

Jeez. You had all the fancy stuff. I had a hand-crank valve grinder and considered myself lucky.

Hmm. No, but my memory is losing its edge.

Aha! The old citrus choke trick! d8-)

Which reminds me of my most infuriating repair bill. It was for my '71 Super Beetle. We had a cold winter in Michigan and melted snow from my shoes ran through the carpet and re-froze on the other side. Eventually, you couldn't move the throttle from the ice build-up. The car heater sure as heck wouldn't do it -- it was still a VW. It just heated enough to melt it off my shoes. After that, all bets were off.

So I took it to the dealer, which was the only heated garage I had access to, and asked them to just let it sit in the garage for a day to let the ice melt and I'd pick it up. I bought the car from those guys, so I thought they'd do me that favor.

When I went to pick it up they handed me a bill for $35 -- for chipping the ice off. I went ballistic so they reduced it to $20. I was still pissed. The service manager was gone for the day so I had no one to appeal to. But I never went back to that dealer.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

weight penalty to the system, plus an increase in cost from having dual systems.

across a state. When an electric car can do the same in the same time from a minimal charge (Some electrics go "bricked" when they run down completely and cannot be recharged) then stuff will start to change on performance, but price will still be a question.

Everything depends on whether or not there's some advancement in storing electrical energy. My guess is that we won't be using an electrochemical battery in the future - that's so 20th century.

Reply to
dsi1

Oh yeah! 25 or 30 bucks. I was a real high-flyer, I was.

Even then a cheap reversible drill was....cheap. Say. are you the fella who walked 10 miles uphill to school, then 10 miles uphill back home?

It's the fiber cam follower on the points squealing against the dist cam. A tiny touch of white grease fixes it. I don't think it was more than a couple years ago that an old bug went squealing past me. I was about to yell "Grease your dist cam!" but he was already gone down the road.

You must have had a really terrific heater. I don't recall mine once melting the snow off my shoes (-: Anyway, I loved it enough. But I get better mpg in my almost 2 ton Chevy Impala. And the heater works just fine. Not nearly as much driving the Chevy though.

Reply to
Vic Smith

Not me, but I did use an old maple tree for an engine hoist. And I broke it lifting out a Jag XK 120 engine, for which I caught hell for a week. d8-)

Aha. I can't recall ever having heard that sound, but that was a long time ago. I always used that little plastic blister of white grease that came with a new set of points. It was good for a year or more.

That was one of the advances in the '71 Super Beetle. The heater almost worked.

My '64 had one J.C. Whitney booster-blower on the driver's side. The passenger couldn't see out of the windshield until spring.

Today's cars are great engineering -- and as dull as a tree stump.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Was it broken, or just to make routine maintenance easier? jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

It was pretty worn and blowing some smoke, after 13 years or so, and we were going to replace it with a rebuilt engine that had a "C" head on it.

It wound up being done at a local garage, while I sawed a big maple limb into firewood. d8-)

Gawd, those old Jag engines were *heavy*.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

With tools like Auto Enginuity you can monitor troublesome sensors in real time. That's one of the better ways to diagnose an intermittent problem if you don't have a bucket of parts to swap in.

I have a Garmin that's mounted in my eye line. It's connected to 12V and turns on whenever the car starts. I don't need it that often for navigating, but it plays mp3s full time. Smart phones are better in some ways for navigating, but they can be rendered useless if you're out of data range.

Imagine if you could show all this new tech to someone from olden days and blow their mind. Oh wait, that's us. :)

Reply to
whoyakidding's ghost

A couple days ago I got to visit a concours '41 Chev. convertible. Very attractive, until I think about driving and working on it regularly. Because I haven't forgotten the lousy power, shitty brakes, bad ride and handling, and poor reliability by modern standards. Yeah it would have some charm, but so do lots of modern cars.

Reply to
whoyakidding's ghost

I've had to give in a couple times in the last 40 years. Road trip AC repair on the motorhome. And changing a firmware option on the Volt. I even do my own tires. I can't really justify things like that, but I hate wondering if some cretin wearing greasy coveralls will jump into my car, or throw my wheels onto the floor shiny side down etc.

Mine too. Must be reliable complexity. :)

Reply to
whoyakidding's ghost

My son, who works and attends school in D.C., has the Focus for a few weeks. I hoped he'd get a replacement power cable for the Garmin so I'd have it when he brought my car back.

Last night I asked him how the Garmin was working -- he took his girlfriend to a concert in Columbia, Md., and I knew there was no way he'd find it without a GPS (he's hopeless with a map -- hasn't read one in years. He'll have a Master's degree in math in about six weeks, and the squirt can't read a map!)

"Garmin"? he asked. "I don't use it. That's what smart phones are for, Dad." [implication by tone of voice -- "Dad, you hopeless dinosaur."].

That's me, at least. And I was so up on this stuff until, oh, maybe 15 years ago. I just don't care about it anymore.

The squirt did get me two Yankees tickets, for him and me, for Father's Day.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

That's easily fixable. Find a heater hose on your modern car, and clamp it off with vise grips. Pull the fuse on the AC. Leave the doors on their safety latches, and roll all the windows down an eighth. Install a little hotplate in the glove box and trickle some oil over it while driving. etc. :)

Reply to
whoyakidding's ghost

LOL!! Yes, I think I had a couple of those.

The windows are a nice touch. That reminds me of my friend's TR3. In the rain, a trickle of water ran down from the front corner of the side curtain, right onto your thigh. Driving it in the rain required bending your left leg over to the right, so the water ran down onto the floorboards. Working the clutch was tricky that way.

I eventually had to drill some holes in the floor of my MG, to let the water out. I almost never used the top but the tonneau was effective, except where it wasn't...

Which brings up the one thing you're missing, common to all old British sports cars -- the smell of mold rising from the floor carpet on damp days. They all had it. It's like perfume to an old sports car nut.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Reminds me. Had a '67 VW squareback too. As fond as I was of the bug, hated the squareback. Sure , it had a little blow-by, but I never could seal the engine cover to keep the smell of burning oil out of the interior. Dumped it for that reason. Not the heater. It had a gas heater. Then again, that was a bit scary when it lit off - but it sure heated well.

Reply to
Vic Smith

There are cars that push the technology and are more interesting and fun to drive, and also less reliable. I might put the Volt in that category along with a bunch of BMW products.

But there are also millions of dull but reliable cars out there. Then again, back in the sixties there were millions of dull but reliable cars out there too, it's just that people don't remember them so much because they were dull. And, the amount of preventative maintenance required back then was substantially more than it is today. Modern engines, you can drive a long time without doing proper maintenance before they blow up. Back in the sixties this was not the case.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

Reminds me of a story from my gas pumping days. Beetle seemed to be taking too much. Opened the hood to find cargo submerged in a lake of fuel. What a mess. But these days I suppose you'd have to put cones around the vehicle and call Homeland Security. :)

Reply to
whoyakidding's ghost

Oh, sure. I agree completely. Driving most of today's cars is like hurtling around in a nice, safe, reliable, shiny...cocoon.

Most of the interesting cars are out of my price range. However, I'm sometimes sorry (not really) that I didn't go for the $4,600 dealer option on my Focus XR3. You could get a 4.7 liter V8, and conversion to rear-wheel drive. I think the conversion kit was from Kugel but Ford dealers would install it -- with warranty.

It really was a simple conversion. No joke. And it's still available as an aftermarket item...hmmm....

Reply to
Ed Huntress

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