Several last jams had major penalties and so were skated over. Then it became a tie and went into another three minutes of play time. Talk about hard-fought. The Cherry Bombs ended up losing by a couple of points. Probably good for them as they won’t be too complacent about training for the upcoming championship. Don’t miss the championship on October 15. Its at the convention center to accommodate the anticipated attendance. But get tickets ahead because it will likely sell out.
Banked Track Rollerderby is fixing to get serious!
8-21-11 —
This morning I went to the veloway to start accruing the 100 miles I try to get in every week on the seat of a bicycle. I ran into Dawna Destruction of the Cherry Bombs and had a nice chat. About the time she left several members of the Rhinestone Cowgirls showed up to skate a few laps and we had a nice visit. So, that reminds me to remind you…..Saturday 7:00 PM at the Palmer Events Center we have the Cherry Bombs vs. the Rhinestone Cowgirls. These are currently the two top teams in the league — both undefeated so far this season, the Cherry Bombs undefeated last season as well. The winner of this upcoming bout goes straight to the championship bout, the loser has to play the #3 team — the Putas del Fuego — to go to the championship. Having sponsored the Cherry Bombs for the last few years I have my bias, but really this one is too close to call. If you go and find the bout boring, I will personally reimburse you for your ticket! I have made this offer before — no takers yet! If you can’t make this one, the playoff and championship bouts are in October.
More misinformation from Click & Clack
I don’t listen to their radio show because it annoys me how much they laugh at their own tired jokes. But today I read their column in the Statesman. The first topic they answered well, the second, not too well at all. It concerned someone who drove a ’98 Toyota Corolla on bad roads and experienced steering wheel shimmy at 60-70 mph despite having had the car’s wheels “balanced and aligned.” Click and Clack offered two possible explanations:
1. Tread separation on a front tire.
2. A loose tie rod end or ball joint in the front suspension.
Tread separation would have been caught by a proper wheel balance job. A loose tie rod end or ball joint has the following symptoms: Clunking and knocking at low speeds when turning or going over bumps. If a tie rod end or ball joint is catastrophically loose, a wicked “death wobble” vibration will be triggered when you go over a bump at about 30 mph or less. This vibration is such that you will pull over to the side of the road wishing you had a change of underwear with you.. High speed shimmy is not generally a symptom of a loose tie rod end or ball joint.
The following are common explanations for high speed steering wheel shimmy:
1. A wheel balance operation was not successful due to poor equipment, poorly maintained equipment or operator error — happens all the time. My 3/4 ton crew cab diesel truck has wheels too big to fit our shop’s balancer. NTB flat out cannot balance my truck’s wheels — after they tried several times I got disgusted and tore off all the weights they had put on and it shimmied far less! Recently, Discount Tire was finally successful on about the sixth try. This was with new Michelins and me standing over them telling them how to do it and insisting they use different equipment than what they had tried without success on two sets of new tires. And, that said, Discount Tire is one of the best of the “big box” tire chains.
2. Front tire out of round or rim grossly bent so the wheel/tire assembly is technically balanced but does not roll true.
3. Shimmies when brakes are applied at highway speed because of brake rotors that are not flat and of uniform thickness due to warpage from the repeated heat generated by braking. Probably 50% of vehicles on the highway have this syndrome to a greater or lesser degree.
4. Inner CV (constant velocity) joints on the front wheel drive axles can cause a wicked vibration up the steering wheel any time the gas pedal is applied at high speed and they are under torque. This is, in fact, particularly common with the drive axles used on certain Toyota Corollas and Geo Prisms.
All four of the above are commonplace, but Click and Clack only mentioned #2, (sort of).
If you think they are entertaining, that is a matter of personal taste. If you think their information is to be trusted, I regret to inform you it is not.
Trendy restaurants in Austin: This one really IS good says Mr. “Hard-To-Please.”
Talking about barbeque. No, not Franklin’s, which may or may not be good for all I know — see below, 7-24-11 — but Live Oak Barbecue on East 2nd. Top notch meats, friendly immediate service, superb sides, and a menu that is far more creative and varied than most BBQ joints.
What have things come to? Bottled water—rant!
8-12-11 —
Yes I know its hot, and as someone who bicycles 100+ miles/week I know the importance of drinking plenty of water in August in central Texas. But what seems insane to me is Nestle’ or some other mega-food corporation takes municipal water somewhere, possibly performs minimal filtration on it, puts it in a plastic bottle, ships it a few hundred or a few thousand miles and marks it up like 10,000%!! This is madness! Its only water! When I was a kid, bottled water was unheard of, but we were not dying of thirst right and left. We drank out of water fountains and water was free and available at most any public place. If you want your water filtered — not that Austin tap water is at all bad — its child’s play for a handyman to plumb a filter under your kitchen sink, that is if your refrigerator doesn’t already have a filter in it. There all all manner of insulated stainless steel canteens for sale allowing you to drink water that has not absorbed carcinogenic plastics. In our current Texas climate, it won’t take any time at all for these to pay for themselves, to say nothing of the huge environmental benefits. I am not a hard-core tree-hugging, recycling freak, eco-nazi — unlike my stepson Tony 🙂 🙂 — but bottled water strikes me as an abomination! Happy to report that Tony comes to the shop and fills his one gallon canteen from the water cooler/filtration unit in the office. Apparently bottled water does somehow appeal to many “tree-hugging, re-cycling, green” folks, because it occupies considerable shelf space at Whole Foods Market and other such stores.
I’m listening if anyone can explain this to me!
Heat wave brings out unscrupulous opportunists
Seasonal snake oil … If this product actually kept refrigerant oil from clinging to the walls of the components in the AC system, the compressor would promptly seize up causing repairs in the $1000 + range. Most likely, it simply does nothing. When it gets hot the snake oil salesmen hawk magic AC system additives, when gas prices surge they hawk all manner of gadgets and substances claiming to improve mileage, reduce emissions and increase horsepower all at once. Of course, health issues are such an intrinsic part of our existence that they are responsible for the lion’s share of snake oil marketing. My personal trainer has heard it all regards ways to drop 100 pounds of fat and gain 50 pounds of muscle in no time and with minimal work. None of it works, but wishful thinking and gullibility are universal human traits. I know better re’ automotive products with extravagant and implausible claims, but I am sure I have been duped in other areas at various times in my life. It is pretty pathetic how often advertisements for a scam product are presented as news.
Trendy restaurants in Austin: buzz is usually total BS
I don’t know if Franklin’s Barbecue is pretty good. It may well be, but I am not going to wait in line three hours to find out with the risk that they will be sold out just before I get to the counter. I am 65 years old and gradually retiring, so I have some time on my hands — but not that much time to waste! One of the reasons for the long lines at Franklin’s is a recent article in the well-known gourmet magazine, Bon Appetit. The author heaping lavish praise on Franklin’s knows nothing about barbecue brisket, absolutely nothing! The following quote makes this painfully obvious: “Whereas most places smoke brisket for seven hours at a blazing 500°, Franklin cooks his for about 18 hours at 250° to 270°.” Nobody in Texas smokes brisket at 500°, not even Bill Miller! 18 hours might be a little longer time in the smoker than some establishments allow, but it is hardly unusual.
All over town there are recent popular burger places that boast “organic, grass fed, locally sourced Black Angus beef.” OK, nothing wrong with that, but the burger costs 2-4 times as much as one from McDonald’s or any other equally wretched fast food purveyor and the beef consists of a generic, thin, machine-made patty that could not be distinguished from one from McDonald’s or Wendy’s in a blindfold test.
Thanks to my wife, I dine so well at home I rarely eat out except for a convenient lunch. When I do, I avoid the new places everybody is talking about this month as I find them inevitably over-priced and over-rated.
Don, what do you think about this F1 racing?
Many people know that while now unofficially retired, I was involved in 1/4 mile dirt-track stock car racing since the early ’90s and drove my own car since 1996 — with some occasional success, including a track championship in my class in 2008. Its an understandable assumption that I would follow NASCAR and eagerly anticipate the F1 track coming to Austin. Nothing could be further from the truth! I find the worship of billionaire sports superstars very distasteful. F1 racing epitomizes that. If you attend an F1 event, you get to pay some huge amount for the privilege of seeing some aristocrat zoom down a track at 200 mph+. NASCAR — ditto. And, unless you are also an aristocrat, you don’t even get to see it up close. The experience is 100% vicarious — totally lacking in any participation or community with the racers and the racing effort. Sad that sports to so much of the public means watching from a distance — TV being the ultimate distance — and NO participation. Here’s a contrasting example: I am racing at a dirt track south of San Antonio and there is a wreck resulting in a flat tire and possible other damage. I pull into the pits where I am greeted by three generations of the Mares family. My buddy and fellow racer Abraham Jr., is a warehouse manager at Acme Brick — hardly an aristocrat. Father, son, grandson, cousins — you name it — swarm my car. They change the tire, quickly pry out a fender, do a quick inspection and gesture to me to get the hell back out before the track goes green. Later Abe Sr. gets a feature win in the Super Stock class and I would like to think it is in part because I helped tweak his carburetor earlier. THIS is what I call exciting and real! You can be directly involved with grass roots sports regardless of physical condition. I am far too clumsy to attempt roller-skating, but I sure get a kick out of sponsoring two TXRD rollerderby teams. School teachers, nurses, barmaids, state workers, students, they get to be local heroes on a banked track every 2nd or 3rd Saturday night, while we go wild for the jammer who just took the lead. Many league members have become my personal friends, many are customers at my shop. Seeing these ladies kick ass is a thrill.
Everyone has choices in their involvement with sports. You can sit in some seats that cost you hundreds of dollars, drinking too much beer and eating junk food, while the wealthy do their thing in the far distance and laugh all the way to the bank. You can get a similar totally vicarious experience much cheaper through television. But you can also get involved with you child’s, or your grandchild’s, or your godchild’s little league team. You can become a roller derby sponsor, you can help set up the roller derby track, as my stepson and one of my other employees do. You can go bowling with your co-workers. You can participate in the Capitol 10,000 — it doesn’t matter at all if, like me, you are not a front-runner but walking is your speed. You can get together with a bunch of bubbas who race riding lawnmowers! Instead of passively expecting to be fed entertainment, invest something besides the cost of tickets and beer and get a real payback.
Speaking of which, since I recently started taking Thursdays off, I really need to ride my bike over to The Driveway and check out some local bicycle racing! I have a friend who sometimes bike rides with us in the evening and is also a Don’s Automotive customer who races there.
“I already had it checked out, but they want way too much. How much would you charge?”
If I never hear this again it will be to soon for me. With rare exceptions, the premise this question is based on is intrinsically flawed. Is the other shop trustworthy or not? If the other shop is trustworthy then just let them fix what they have already inspected, diagnosed, confirmed by testing etc. An old cliche’ about switching horses in mid-stream comes to mind. If they are NOT trustworthy, then their repair recommendations beg a second opinion far more than their prices. In fact, when money is spent on car repair with poor or no value received, an excessively high price for a well-advised choice of repair procedure is almost never what happened. In the overwhelming majority of cases, poor value is received because A: The suggested remedy did not address the problem, or B: Unnecessary repairs were sold.
This question is also highly insulting to the repair facility who essentially is told, “I went to the high-dollar experts to find out what needs to be done, now can you do it cheap?” When dealing with independent business people, I find I receive the best value in the long term by being respectful.
Rollerderby
YEAH!!! Its been a good season so far despite the fact that the two TXRD teams that Don’s Automotive sponsors don’t look good for the championship this year. The Rhinestone Cowgirls have a captain that goes by the track name of “Kategory 5.” She is a former speed skater from Norway and lightning fast and nimble. But a superstar skater can’t score her team points without the team being there to help her through the pack and block the opposing jammer. The word is she has had her team on an extreme training regimen with no down-time since last season. It sure looks like it. They beat the Putas Del Fuego by 16 points Saturday night and are probably on a fast track to the season championship.
On July 23rd the Cherry Bombs — proudly sponsored by Don’s Automotive for the last few years — play the Hellcats at Palmer Events Center. The two teams should be about evenly matched, so expect a real nail-biter. Starts at 7:00, over before 10:00. If you find it boring just let me know and I will reimburse your price of admission!