I Think I Got All The Life Out Of These Pads

Last week I did a brake job on The Old Lady's car. Here is pictures of the rotors and pads. What's funny is I thought I'd hear something when the pads were worn to the point of needing replacement. There was a little metal tab that would make contact with the rotor when the pad was worn to a certain point, but we never heard any noise from them. Instead they got worn down with the pads. I replaced the pads and rotors and now it should be good for a few more years. The original ones lasted 5 years. I think the rotors were worn to the point where turning them wouldn't have been an option. They were close to the minimum thickness and were grooved pretty much.

The week before I rotated the tires and in the process discovered that the lugnuts were fucked up. There was a metal shell on the lugnuts and after having the tires replaced several times using impact wrenches the lugnuts were to the point where on several of them I had to drive the socket on the lugnut with a hammer in order to remove it.

This is what the lugnuts looked like when I got them off. They were pretty fucked up.

This is what I did with them. I took the outer shell off the lugnuts. It took some time to remove the outer shell from all of them (the shell had come off a few of them already), but now I have solid nuts to work with. I need a smaller socket to turn the nuts, but at least now I can put the socket on by hand and not have to use a hammer to drive it on. The lug wrench in the trunk is for the lugnuts with the shell on them, so I will need to put something in the trunk to remove the smaller size nuts.  They are now 18mm and they were 19mm.

I have a bunch of lugnuts off other vehicles, maybe I'll look and see if I have ones I can use to replace these.

Ford definitely didn't have a better idea with these lugnuts!!

Looking At New Cars

For several months now The Old Lady and I have been kicking the idea of getting another vehicle around. At one time we thought about trading in the truck for another truck, one with a diesel engine. That was back when we were buying a travel trailer for bumming around when we retire. That deal fell thru so then we thought about just getting some econo-box car and keeping the truck we have as it is handy to have a truck to haul stuff. (In a couple weeks I will be heading UP on the tundra and will be working on The Kid's cabin, so will need the truck to haul materials for the cabin.)

Anywho, recently we had been checking out cars on-line. We liked the idea of getting a Ford Focus as it gets decent gas mileage and doesn't cost an arm and a leg to buy. (And GM cars just don't seem to fit right.) The Old Lady did an internet search on them and filled in a page to get a price on one. Within the hour the phone was ringing with a call from a local dealer asking if we want to come look at some cars. She set up an appointment for Friday afternoon, saying we'll just go look, we don't have to buy, we'll shop around.

Well, we'll be looking at this car for a long time. The payments will be for 72 months (Six Years!!) which at our stage in life can be a helluva long time!! Hell, I try not to buy green bananas!!They had several Foci on the lot and we took one for a test drive. After the test drive the salesperson asked how we liked it. The Old Lady said she liked it, but wouldn't want that particular car as it was red and would consider any other car as long as it wasn't red. (I concur.) Long story short, this is what we came home with, never having driven or even sat in it before making the deal.

One bright note, now I can finally listen to Oldies music (The Old Lady likes Classic Rock and I like Classic Country in addition to Oldies, modern country sucks because they sound like they are whining all the time usually about god) because the car has Sirius satellite radio which is free for 6 months to sucker you into paying for it every month. The on-air radio here in Hot-Lanta sucks big time!!