The saga of the flat tire (cont.)

After finally getting a handle on the jack, so to speak, I got the bike-tire spare mounted, tossed the still hot & smoking flat tire into the trunk, and get the heck out of Dodge. I’m not a fan at all of these mini-spares that have replaced the full-size (read: actually usable) spares we used to have. Driving on the bike tire didn’t feel much better than driving on the flat had, but at least there was no smoke or smell. But a 50 mph limit when using the spare? Afraid I just don’t have the bone in my ankle that will allow me to do that; I did 60. Painful, that.

I had all day at work to stew about the imminent slow drive home and what to do about replacing the tire. It’s a Yokohama Advan which, as (my) luck would have it, is a $200 tire. That went flat at 18,000 miles. I found that fact to be quite irritating, and got to wondering if it would be covered under warranty. Note that I am not that naive, normally. I know that a tire warranty is more useless than last week’s lottery ticket. At least the lottery ticket has a one in gazillion chance of paying off; I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a tire warranty paying one red cent. Or one Yen, for that matter. But I thought it was at least worth asking the dealer.

The dealer is, of course, over on the home side of town, so I had to make the 35 mile loop on the bike tire. I just snugged in behind a big, slow truck and slowly cruised along, wondering if the bike tire had a ten mile limit similar to the low speed rating and what exactly I was going to do when it blew out. I don’t carry a spare for the spare, after all. There’s a dealer over on the work side of town, but I wouldn’t have been able to get a ride home from there.

I dropped the car at the dealer and headed home to await their verdict. It was quick. “Tough Sushi, buddy, warranty won’t cover it. Oh, by the way, because you have an all wheel drive car and they are sensitive to disparities in tire size, you need four new tires.”

18,000 miles on a $900 set of tires before needing full replacement? Not that impressive. I told him to “not take this the wrong way, but if I’m buying four new tires to replace a set that got my all of 18,000 miles, I’m shopping it around.” He took it fine; they’re a car dealer, not a tire shop.

I went back to the dealer and moved the car across the street to Tire Discounters. I’ve been wanting to throw them some business for a couple of years now. Back when they first opened, I brought one of the Miata tires in for a patch after it had picked up a nail. (The Miata was a nail magnet for the first couple of months that I had it – three in two months!!) When I went to pick up the repaired tire and asked how much I owed them, they just waved a hand and said don’t worry about it. I haven’t forgotten that, and it is exactly the type of great service that I miss so much these days. I wanted to reward them with my (paying) business.

It wasn’t to be. Don Quixote had his windmill to joust with, I had this written Yokohama warranty with more flowery, promising language than a wine review. The Tire Discounter guy wasn’t a Yokohama dealer, though, so he couldn’t address its applicability, veracity, or utility. As he put it, “it pains me to do this, but I’m going to have to send you to Discount Tire.” Now, me having just had a birthday numbered in the high forty’s and therefore having become incrementally more forgetful and confused, I had to look at the sign on the side of his store to determine just why, in fact, he did not know that we were already at Discount Tire. Ah! We were at Tire Discounters, the polar opposite of Discount Tire. I could see why it pained him. Those two must surely be mortal enemies.

It pained me, too. Not only because I wanted to give Tire Discounters my business, but also because going from one to the other involved another drive on the bike tire, which surely at that point must have been close to having given its all to the cause. Nothing for it, though, so back on the road. Only to find Discount Tire closed for the day at the late hour of 6:20. Now that’s the kind of customer-friendly service to which I have become accustomed. I decided then and there that if the Yokohama warranty was not going to contribute to the cause, the bike tire was going to get yet another road trip back to Tire Discounters.

The key to the car was slipped into an envelope and tossed into the feeble looking night key depository. As I was doing that, I thought that if I was ever on the lam and needed a car, I’d just find the nearest Discount Tire and grab a key out of the box. Upon a few seconds more thought, I realized that that wasn’t such a great plan. The car I’d be stealing would probably have a flat tire, and recent experience has shown me that you won’t get very far on one of those.

The Discount Tire guy called me at work first thing in the morning, which is a bad time to catch me on Wednesdays due to a weekly report that I have to do – it’s a long, detailed process to put the report together and I hate interruptions while doing it. He told me that the tire wasn’t covered under the warranty because it had road hazard damage, which is a catch-all for every tire failure imaginable. Again, you’d have better odds with a lottery ticket. Anyway, I told him to just lock the key in the car and we’d come pick it up late, late at night, long after they’ve closed and gone home. Like 6:30 or so.

About ten minutes later, I got to thinking that I might be letting my dedication to Tire Discounters influence my decision making a little too much, and there was certainly a lot to be said for just having the tire replaced where it was and not having to drive around on that bike tire anymore. I called the guy back and asked him what he could do for us. He said that we were right on the edge of being able to replace just the one tire, and that if it was his car, that’s what he’d do. $226. I told him to go ahead and do it.

“I can’t. I already locked the key in the car.”

Sigh.

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Subaru engineers don’t know jack

Well, I actually like both of my Subies. Great cars. Except…

As I was driving along to work this morning at oh-dark-thirty, the Legacy started wobbling around a little bit. At first it felt like the effects of a strong, gusty crosswind, but a quick call to the Bolton Field AWOS reported winds at 4 knots. The wobble quickly progressed to a pronounced wiggle, and was soon accompanied by a sound that could only be a flat tire. Not keen on changing a tire on the side of a dark highway, I took the next exit. Which put me in a dark, downtown parking lot. Fire pan, fire. Short leap.

Given the environment I found myself in, I thought it better that I just change the thing myself once I’d waited long enough for it to stop smoking – it got pretty hot flopping around on the highway – rather than call and wait for roadside service.

The cooldown period gave me plenty of time to get the jack out of the trunk and make all of the other preparations for the one wheel pit stop.

That’s when I ran into the very best of automotive engineering: the scissor jack:

Think, for a moment, about the usage cycle of a scissor jack. It goes under the car, so its first useful mode is fully retracted. It jacks up the car, the tire is changed, and it is fully retracted again to lower the car. So, how does Subarau store the jack in its nifty custom fit piece of foam? Fully extended, of course! You have to retract it all the way before you can get started on changing the tire, and that is not as easy as it sounds. You have to attach the turning handle and find a way to hold the extremely light jack still while simultaneously using both hands to manage the unwieldy jack handle.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. So I asked myself why they would store it that way. After all, it’s useless in its stored form, so why do it? The best theory that I could come up with to explain it is that they showed an extended jack to a focus group and asked them to identify it. “Jack!” Then they showed a fully retracted one to the same focus group. They looked at the flat, black metal box and said, “Dunno!”

Well, that’s my theory, anyway.

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Farm Walkabout

You know those hot (but not too hot), dry (or at least not too humid), summer days of August? Clear skies, light winds, with just enough heat to remind you that it’s still the heart of summer. Borderline hot in the sun, but cool in the shade. Days that can help repress my dread of the impending winter (which comes sooner in the year every year – this year it started in June) for another week or two. That’s what we had today.

These are the days that I remember from my childhood. Those were the days of driving from Cincinnati to The Farmtm to mow the lawn and visit with my grandparents. On days like these, we’d be outside most of the day playing around the barn or outbuildings. Or go down to the Greenville Creek. Crawl out on the rocks that make our little bitty waterfall. Ride the mini-bike around the fields. Shoot BB guns. Chase the fat pony around. Just… stuff. Summer, outside stuff.

With that in mind, Papa and I lifted off in the direction of The Farmtm mid-morning, the time when flying conditions are the best they’re going to be all day and it’s not yet hot enough to make the RV-6 greenhouse too uncomfortable. Basically, the opposite of what I could expect on the return leg. And in a case of insult to injury, it looked like the trip home would also be against a light headwind since we were already starting to see the benefits of a tailwind helping us along. But that was in the future, and summer days are all about living for the moment. We’d deal with the trip home later. And besides, it’s flying! How bad can it be?

As we climbed out to the west, one of the rental Cessna 172s from the FBO at Bolton called in over Lilly Chapel, a small town 8 miles or so west of Bolton. Lilly Chapel has the dubious honor of being a reporting point for planes approaching Bolton from the west because of the highly visible grain elevator just outside of town. Interestingly, he reported that he was 2,500′ descending upon his first contact with the tower. As much as I wish they would, very, very few people do that. I wonder if he always does it, or if he had been monitoring the tower frequency during my takeoff and wanted to pass that valuable piece of information on to the airplane that he knew was heading right at him. Since the tower won’t.

I had told the tower as I got my takeoff clearance that my departure was VFR to the west. By the time the approaching Cessna called, about the furthest I could be from the airport was 3 or 4 miles. The Cessna, if over Lilly Chapel, would be 8 miles west. I don’t understand why I don’t even get advisories from the tower when he knows that I have departed in the direction of inbound traffic. I also don’t understand why they don’t ask the approaching aircraft what his altitude is and report it to me. I’m reluctant to barge into the frequency and ask him directly, but I’ve been sorely tempted to do it a number of time in the past.

The grain elevator at Lilly Chapel

Approaching Bolton from Lilly Chapel

The traffic conflict quickly resolved (by dint of our already being above 3,000′), we continued our climb to the west. The air was fairly smooth once we reached 3,500′ so we leveled off there and creeped up to our cruising speed. As we were loafing along, I did a little math in my head to try to compute our gas mileage. It seems that we were getting better than 25 mpg. Let’s verify:

140 knots = 161 mph
161 mph / 6 (gallons per hour) = 26.8 miles per gallon. Not too bad! The Miata gets 28.

Having a tailwind on the way to DarkeCo International Aerodrome(tm) is always welcome, and not solely because it gives us free miles. No, the other big deal about an easterly wind is that I can use runway 9. The opposite approach (runway 27) is more normally favored because of the prevailing winds out of the southwest. Those winds bubble around a stand of trees on the south side of the approach end of runway 27, and they cause me all kinds of grief when I land there. Runway 9 is always a welcome change. And I made the best of the opportunity with an almost-greaser. Not a 10, by any stretch, but a strong 9.2.

Without Brave Sir Hogarth along with me to act as walking partner, I had to borrow a substitute. Faygo, being ever-ready for a walk and not overly particular about whom her leash is attached to, rapidly and readily accepted the invite for a walk. Or a guided sniffing tour, depending on which of us you asked. We made the rounds of all of the groundhog holes, sniffed and snuffed at the entrances but found no one at home (or at least no one foolish enough to openly welcome a predator in for a visit), and slowly made our way down the banks of the creek. We saw plenty of wild flowers and wild (insect) life:

It’s sometimes perplexing to me to ponder the fates which can have such pretty plants hung with the moniker of ‘weed’. It must all come down to location, location, location. Luck of the draw. Grass? Nothing more than a weed with a great PR department, in my opinion. Roses?? For crying out loud, people. They have THORNS!! How in clear conscience do you reward belligerence like that by awarding the status of ‘flower’, yet relegate harmless little plants to weed status. Oh well. If nothing else, the distinction has built two huge industries. Where would florists and weed killer manufacturers be if there was no difference between the two?

I always like to visit my brother’s shop while I’m out and about, so I made a stop by later in the afternoon. He’s currently working on a 1939 Dodge with a cracked exhaust manifold. I wandered around and took pictures, of course:

These are just pictures of old cars stored in an even older barn, but I kind of like them:

I love the old stone and hand-hewn girders, but I can’t find a way to get a compelling picture of them. That probably means that I like them for what they stand for more than I do for their aesthetic appeal, I suppose, but the fact is that I like to look at them and keep trying to make a picture that adequately conveys the effort and artisanship that went into their making.

The birds seem to like the architecture as well. They’ve done a number on this old Corvair:

I hereby nominate Ralph Nader as the Schadenfreude King of the Weektm. He will be ordained by last week’s Schadenfreude King of the Weektm who was, as you may recall, that neighbor that Elizabeth Edwards was so “afraid of” because he had a Republican sign in his yard. He has got to be enjoying the brewing scandal surrounding Mr. Edwards.

What? You don’t recall last week’s Schadenfreude King of the Weektm? Well, that’s because I just invented it today in honor of the irony of birds crapping all over the car that Nader crapped all over to make his name. That said, if I could anoint an honorary Schadenfreude King of the Weektm for last week, it would be that neighbor guy. You know, that gives me an idea for a new blog…

By the time I got back from my walk, it was getting to be about that time when I start to get the urge to head home. The flight back was hotter, but not horrible, and the expected bumps were definitely there, but again not at an uncomfortable level. And get this: the headwind never bothered to show up! We made a good 135 knots at 2,200′ rpm on the way back. I know that “Tailwinds both ways” is the fishing story of flying, of course, and quite perversely, “Headwinds both ways” is far more often actually the case, but it’s true! Tailwinds both ways! Well, if you grant me that “no headwind” is close enough to “tailwind” to count. You know, for the sake of the story that’s in it.

This field caught my eye as we flew over:

Recently irrigated that one, I’d wager.

We had a pretty decent landing back at Bolton, aided more by the limp windsock than any proficiency on my part, but they all look the same in the logbook. Score a 9.5 for that one.

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London Pit ‘O Cobras

They don’t call it anything near as cool as the “Pit ‘O Cobras” of course, but that’s what I would call it. The real name is the London Cobra Show, which I find to be somewhat lacking in describing an event that shuts down a few central blocks of London, OH to provide a venue for a gathering of hundreds of Shelby Cobras (99.999% of which are replicas, but still… each and every one of the possesses the winning trifecta of shiny, loud, and fast!) every June.

Flying being off of the agenda for various and sundry reasons, the criticality of the Weather-out-the-Window(tm) forecast was reduced such that I could safely delegate the task to a lesser denizen of the house:

He reported back that it was weather sufficient to the task of a top-down Miata ride across the 20 intervening miles from home to the burg of London. An early start, as usual, being desired in avoidance of heat, weather, and crowds had us (me and my photographic gadgetry) on the road by 0900. A swell drive it was, with nary a slow granny or even slower farmer to be seen on the country paths that are my preferred means of navigation when traversing the Central Ohio farm land. The problem with a drive like that is, as you may be able to imagine, the temptation to just keep a-going upon arrival at the presumptive destination, but said temptation was easily averted upon the hearing of the deep, bass tones of a high powered V8.

As mentioned, the very, very large majority of the Cobras at the show are replicas, and a very large majority of those are built from a kit, and a good sized majority of those come from a kit manufacturer called Factory Five. Factory Five could be considered as the “Van’s Aircraft” of Cobra replicas: they have sold thousands of kits, peer-level support is incredibly easy to find, and the kits have gone through multiple iterative enhancements to refine the building process down to something resembling a science. I think that they are on at least their third re-design of the basic Cobra kit, with each preceding re-design having been focussed on improvements in kit quality, ease of construction, and not least importantly, safety of the end product. There are no air bags in these cars, so they are built tough and crash worthy.

Here’s a naked one; you can see the steel cage that protects the driver:

Here’s some of the suspension gadgetry – it is no coincidence that it looks like the suspension of a race car:

The Cobra kit can be built by using a Ford Mustang as a donor car for the rolling bits and engine, or you can buy a kit that provides all of the parts needed (except the engine and transmission) brand new.

Here’s what they look like with their clothes on:

I’ve been looking at these things for years with the idea of building one, and I think it would be a great deal of fun to do so, but there’s a problem. At the end of the day, I’d end up with an expensive toy, and I already have one of those. A car like this would not lend itself to my daily drive to work (the cost of the gas to feed even a small V8 alone would be prohibitively and painfully expensive) and would be difficult to store. Beyond that, I don’t have the tools for facility to support the build. And, as it turns out, you’re always having to work on the darn thing:

I could build a variant that could be used for spec car racing, but as cool as that would be, racing is expensive, time-consuming, and puts an uninsurable $25,000 car at risk every time it goes out on the track. Not for me, thanks!

So, best to just look at these every now and then:

From the comments:

Your reasons for not getting one are well-considered, logical, and show great perspicacity and restraint.

So what color is yours going to be?

A very astute question! You guys know me too well! And as fate would have it, it’s a question that I have given long consideration to. I was thinking something like this:

The purists would hate it, of course, but a subtle reminder that they themselves are driving replicas should suffice to squelch the criticism.

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