What have you learned in your old age that you feel should be taught to high school students?

The thing is, a good scanner gives you the tools to figure out why. You can see all the input and output signals, you can watch exactly what is going on in realtime. (This on top of all the direct information that you could get before, by feeling and smelling and so forth... you don't lose any of that information in the new era.)

The code is really the least useful part of the scanner, and the Fisher-Price style scanners which really just display the OBD-II codes and do nothing else do more harm than good as far as helping people fix cars.

This is likely true, but unfortunately that is an awful lot of people.

--scott

My car doesn't have that feature.

This is the land of large pickups. I have an old F150 and it looks like a Ranger compared to the current F150 iterations. Anyway, a subcompact Toyota can hide easily. The bikes are just as bad. I always try to park so I'm not backing out of the space, but I'm still blind as I gently ease the nose out. The bikes are actually better. I'm high enough that I can see over pickup beds or peek through SUV windows.

Been there, done that with a multi-level lot under a hotel. At least the plate number was on the key as I humped my suitcase up and down. I'll admit to not being exactly sober when I parked the thing so I wasn't taking notes.

I try to use the same three or four slots at CostCo. They're the farthest from the door so at least one is usually open. Nothing around here has acres of parking, which helps.

That's probably what their readers want to buy. Every year they survey their readers. The stated purpose is to gather reliability data on various things including cars. They're also collecting information about what their readers like.

Cindy Hamilton

I've been preparing for "senior moments" all my life. Drive the car down the aisle nearest the door until I find an open parking space. Done.

Cindy Hamilton

I have learned that you cannot reasonably deal with Leftists/Communists any more than you can do so with cockroaches. All you can do is eradicate as many as you can.

Confirmation bias at work. One of the few publications I trusted was Motorcycle Consumer News. It never had advertising of any kind. If X sucked it said so. If Y was great, it said so. They didn't purchase the bikes they tested anonymously like CR supposedly does but they didn't pull any punches.

Then they were gone. They were published by BowTie Press, which I assumed was a reference to the Chevy emblem, but most of their publications were pet stuff like Catster, Dogster, and Ferrets Magazine. In early February 2020 they sent a letter saying the January issue was the last one and they were done. Magazines come and go but they usually wither away. I have the impression the writers found out they were unemployed about the same time as the subscribers.

You must be like all the other idiots that ignore their spare when checking their other tires.

(Go ahead...lie and give us some other excuse as to why the spare was flat.)

Drivers door takes a double twist to unlock all, including the hatch. Passenger door takes one turn to unlock all in mine.

I hate alarm systems, and I'd disable that if it were mine.

That sounds like a mess! Fortunately, my cars stand out like a sore thumb ;)

I need to figure out of those out if I can't fix the automatic choke on that old Galaxie that I own. You have to keep revving the car for a minute, especially on a cold day, or it just stalls out.

Oy, I've never dealt with vacuum wipers, but they don't sound fun up a hill. Grandma owned one of the last cars with factory vacuum wipers. IIRC, circa 1970 AMC Gremlin.

I've used a bicycle gear shifter mounted just under the dash, stainless cable and lined casing. You need to add a return spring of some type. The old manual kits used a push-pull solid wire in bare steel casing; no spring.

Amazon has kits but I don't know how applicable they are. On the carb end you need some sort of bracket to clamp the end of the cable and point the inside wire at a lever on the choke shaft. Then you need some sort of bracket inside the car.

It used to be relatively easy since the automatic choke was just a bimetallic coil spring inside a housing that actuated the shaft.

Some cars had a dual action fuel pump that was a vacuum assist, but I don't know what brands or years or when everybody went to electric. Vacuum wipers were a step up from hand cranked.

Even if I believed you, which I don't, you're still an idiot.

If you had a quite a few flats, "mostly" caused by the same issue, you were an idiot for not ensuring you had a good spare at all times.

(Yeah, construction vehicles are known for throwing *screws* on the road on a consistent basis.)

My 1958 Rambler came with vacuum wipers with a plastic pouch and 'squirtgun' hand pump for the washer.