Because they are making the table to sell at the lowest price while the bin has a specification. Price, stop buying things based on the price! I bet you didn't even ask about the materials used in the table. I can assure you the city who bought the bin asked what it was made of. So the fault, really, is yours.
When you return the table tell them that... and you will be ignored because they made a lot of money selling the same crap they sold last year in spite of the few who returned them.
Illegal because the patches are crap and the rest of the muffler won't last another six months. My mufflers don't get leaks, the flange breaks off on the pipe. Try fixing that.
Because it isn't worth it. When any part of the exhaust system goes bad you are better off replacing it all.
No, it's not. It's still the same steel that lasts around 4 years.
You bring up pinging, which, I forgot, we now have knock sensors to help control, so that's likely one more reason for longevity (that is, no pinging can occur nowadays, at least not until it overpowers the retarding of the timing that the knock sensors do).
The aluminum alloying science has made leaps in the last 50 years - and so has steelmaking and heat treating. Never heard of Cryo treatment years ago. Never heard of powdered metal either. Lots more chromium and moly and cobalt etc used in exotic steels today too.
Synthetic rubbers and plastics have also improved in thousands of ways in the last 50 years. This means seals , belts, hoses, etc can ALL last MUCH longer than their older counterparts.
Emission management , as I noted previously, does a lot more than make cleaner air. How do you think we get as much horsepower out of a 2 liter engine today as we got out of 5 or 6 liter engines in the very recent past???
The oil pressure sensor has nothing to do with it until the engine fails. The coolant temp sensors are much more accurate than they used to be, and now they actually do something more than telling you if the engine is overheating. The oil level sensor is also an afterthought and basically un-necessary - as most engines will go over 3000 miles without using ANY measurable amount of oil.
I've explained it in another post
What is the average MTBF on certified aircraft engines???? Most are doing good to get over 1500 hours. at 60mph that would be only 90000 miles in a car. Many have the top end rebuilt long before that - or cyls replaced. They also burn prodigious amounts of oil.
You don't see it because you do not understand all the implications of fuel mixture control.
There again, you have no comprehension of the inticacies of corrosion control and metal primers etc - not to mention seam sealers. Goes WAY beyond the surface coating, color and shine.
It's more the prep than the paint - but the paint has REALLY changed in the last 20 years - more rhan in the previous 100.
The timing changed when the points wore, among other things.
And you don't think plastics and rubbers have changed appreciably for the better?
Even back in the early seventies I was using wires that allowed me to run my old Chrysler products with a carwash hose trained on the ignition system. The cheapest wires today are better that those top quality "space age" wires.
And unleaded gas is one of the main reasons this is possible today.
The platinum is a large part of this - you never saw platinum plugs in the past. Iridium finewire plugs were the hot item for snowmobiles and bikes back then - and they were PRICEY.
Believe me, as someone who worked on Toyotas back in the very early seventies, quality was not their strong point back then They rusted like a ford (or worse) and they had metalurgy problems in their aluminum heads, and a lot of other places. What made the difference is they learned from their mistakes - the Japs have never really been inventors - but they can refine a poor design into something fantastic
- that's what they do exremely well.
Most cars were junk at 10 years back then. People didn't put on the miles they do today, generally speaking, but I've put a LOT of vehicles over the 200,000 mile mark in the past.
But if they have to work too hard, the bigger engine won't need as much repair - so it sometimes more than ballances out.
She doesn't have a "honey-do" list that, in her mind, takes priority over the car repairs?? "you haven't got it fixed YET???" -
At least my oldest is back in the country most of the time now - even though she's only been "home" for about 3 weeks since the middle of September and she'll only be "home " for about 15 days between now and Christmas. "home" being about 5 miles from here. She will be in Africa and Asia the rest of the time (work)
BUT you do need to replace the rotors (wrecking yard is probably OK) if you kept putting off changing the pads until they stopped squealing and the backing plates started grinding deep (1/4") grooves into the rotors. Amazingly enough, braking worked just fine until the hogging-in started.
Speaking of ratchet box wrench, I learned long ago that the "fancy" tools were worse than the simple tools.
There's nothing wrong with a box wrench. Nothing.
It doesn't need plastic inserts. It doesn't need a ratcheting mechanism. It doesn't need replaceable heads.
All that stuff makes it BIGGER (which is bad when it matters). All that stuff makes it WEAKER (which is bad when it matters). All that stuff makes it less reliable (which is bad too).
While I'm sure the fault is always mine for buying *anything* but garbage bins that is made of plastic, I'm not as confident as you that the material is so easy to figure out.
For one, we still don't know what material the garbage bins are made out of (coating or otherwise).
So asking wouldn't work unless we knew what answer we wanted to hear. What I'm saying is that it's not so simple.
I'm also assuming that NOBODY here knows what the answer should be. Do you?
What chemical are we looking for?
Luckily, Costco takes anything back (except electronics), even years later.
I don't disagree. I hated working on mufflers. That was before my gas welding days.
With a gas welder, removing mufflers would have been a *lot* easier.
Not gonna disagree. It's like replacing "just" the water pump. Once you rip all that stuff off, you may as well do the thermostat, hoses, radiator, cap, overflow tank, etc.
My bimmer is approaching 20 years on the same exhaust system.
Not so. There is a BIG difference between some good rotors and some cheap one - bad metalurfy will cause hard spotting, and glazing and pitting and warping. The trick is finding the good ones -
Or retractor tools for rear disc brakes with integral e-brakes.
No, some rotors DO warp. So do some drums. Most "warped" rotors, however, are either pitted or hard spotted.
The kind of stuff you learn working on hundreds of cars a year for 1/4 century, and supervizing a shopfull of mechanics for a decade.
I have not changed an exhaust system or a muffler in about 20 years - and my current vehicles are 16 and 22 years old. But then I buy REAL cars that come with stainless exhausts from the factory.
The last system I had to replace I put on stainless for only a few bucks more than OEM (Ford Aerostar). Lasted another 140,000 km before the truck was scrapped.
Gotta be true because rust buckets don't seem to exist anymore.
See above. No rust buckets anymore so there is truth in there somewhere.
Yeah. I forgot. It has been, oh, how long since we adjusted timing? Decades at the very least.
Maybe. I still see lots and lots of buna o-rings that should be viton.
Gotta agree with you. Wires don't even exist much at all but those that do exist, seem to last a long time nowadays. We used to replace ignition wires with every second or third tuneup, as I recall.
I even bought the set where you cut them and made them to fit. Dumb idea because they stunk the most.
I don't know enough to disagree. Detergents (polyetheramines) probably helped too, Techron be known.
Must be the platinum because a plug is a simple thing. I'm sure engineers fret about every little thing, but pretty much you buy the right one and put it in. I never found anything useful about changing the heat ratings. It's amazing to me that we don't gap them anymore though.
You'd wonder why the gap mattered in the days of yore and now it doesn't matter. I don't get that.
Yeah. I forgot about my "Z" cars (Datsun days). They were rust buckets.
Yep. 10 years was about it. Now it's 20 years. Double.
Not gonna take you up on this one. There's no such thing as 'working harder'. Just not gonna fly with me. The torque curve is the torque curve and the gears do the fixing of that for me.
The SIZE is physically different. I'm not gonna believe a small engine has to 'work harder' than a big engine and so it won't last as long.
Nope. That's the one thing you're going to have to prove to me. (The rest I believe you on.)
Yeah. But I don't think she even remembers my name anymore. :)
That's another thing. My kids have been flying to other countries since they were born. When did YOU first leave the country? I think I did when I was in my thirties. Maybe late twenties. Boy oh boy though, did the airplanes have service!
But that's another difference in the days of yore!
Ltad oxide and lead sulfide conduct. Lead sulfide is a semiconductor (galena?) formed by reaction of lead and sulphur in gasoline.
The lead sulfide cannot be blasted off (it is yellow/green) and causes severe misfires
The platinum is NOT plating - it is a platinum chip welded to the (usually copper cored) steel electrode. Many have plat chips on the ground electrode now too.
I do it all the time. Cut off the flanges and fit a pipe over the joint. Clamp or weld the sleave. Use stainless pipe and stainless clamps. The flanges rust off because they are welded with mild steel amd/or are not passivated after welding.
What crap are you driving??? Most have been stainless steel for over
I'm confused by what you wrote, especially in context with the words "warp" when rotors never warp (or almost never, and never in terms of mattering).
So anyone who *thinks* rotors warp, is an idiot.
The replacing of rotors is also determined by idiots most of the time because people don't have the concept of measuring the thickness because many people don't have the concept of owning a micrometer.
I can't count the number of times I've heard someone say to replace the rotors on the second pad change, where the real answer is to replace the rotors when they are worn down to the minimum thickness (everything else being ok).
In general, the rotors are ok except for pad deposition which is solely a driver-caused problem (long story later if people ask).
Sure, grooves can be there but gouges have to be the size of the Grand Canyon to matter (just look up the specs, you'll see) so grooves are, in reality, not what makes rotors into paperweights.
Sure cracks can happen, glazed hard spots can happen, and yes, even warpage can happen but realistically it's not gonna happen. So it's thickness that matters. (Excess runout is usually something else and that's what the dial gauge is for anyway.)
In practice, the way you determine when/if to replace rotors is so simple that it's not funny. If they're thinner than the stamping says on the edge, then you replace them. If they have one thousandth of an inch more than the stamping says, you keep them (they'll certainly lose that thousandth of an inch but the stamping takes that into account).
I get about a thousandth of an inch per thousand miles roughly.
Pads? I wear them down to the metal backing. Well, just one moment before it reaches the pad backing. Although that means replacing the $15 sensor sometimes, if I'm lazy.
The beauty of doing your own brakes is that they don't ever worry you. You do them when you do them. You can wear them down to the bone. And then you just do them.
The only rule is that if anyone tells you their rotors warped, run (do not walk) run away fast. Don't look back. Run.
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