• 4 Posts
  • 67 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 5th, 2023

help-circle




  • that’s what it looked like before the weed killer and fence drag right after we finished building it. Unfortunately I don’t have any videos, the host has an iPhone and I have an android so when he sent them to me they came through as potato quality to the point where it’s not even worth watching.

    It’s a big oval/rectangle mostly, with an inner section we can add if we want to. Sometimes we have the whole race go through the inner, or sometimes we require a “joker lap” like rallycross


  • A combination of things, the first being weed and grass killer. The second, he’s got this rig with his riding lawnmower where he has a 4ft section of chain link fence. He weights the section of fence down with bricks, and then just keeps dragging it around the track using the lawnmower. That actually served multiple purposes - it turns over the dirt a little, pulls up the smaller grass blades that escaped the killer, flattens out most of the bumps, and kicks up any rocks so they are easy to find and toss aside.





  • The Wydah Pirate Museum in Cape Cod MA - it’s a smaller museum but it’s packed full of artifacts recovered from the wreck of an actual golden age of piracy ship (the Wydah, Black Sam Belamy’s ship which wrecked in Cape Cod). They have multiple weapons, cannons, and the only confirmed pirate treasure ever recovered. All the artifacts were just super cool, very few recreations of things almost everything is really from the actual wreck. The excavation of the wreck site is ongoing too, the last room in the museum is dedicated to showing how they recover items that have been encased in “concretions” and has lots of items actively being recovered so you can see the process happening.

    Idk, I’m a golden age of piracy nerd for sure so this was super cool to me.


  • GM W-body and GMT platform cars from around 2002-2008 I’ve found to be decent. The GM 3800 V6 engine and 5.3L Vortec V8 are extremely reliable and easy to maintain yourself if you’re into that kind of thing. You can very easily replace the stock radio with an aftermarket unit that has Android auto/Apple Car play and won’t spy on you. Since it’s an American car and so many were sold in America, both new and used parts are pretty easy to find and pretty cheap. The biggest thing that kills these cars is rust, especially if you live in the salt belt, so just make sure you look underneath the car before buying.

    Look for: Pontiac Grand Prix, Chevy Monte Carlo, Chevy Tahoe, Buick Regal, Chevy Avalanche/Silverado. A good example of these can be found for under $10k easily and if you look a little harder you can usually find good ones or ones that need minimal work for less than $5k.

    Personally I plan on driving these cars until it becomes impossible to find them anymore. There’s a junkyard near me that specializes in GM cars where I can get parts for DIRT cheap.

    Currently I have an 05 Avalanche (140k miles) and an 07 Grand Prix (165k miles). Before those I had an 05 Grand Prix which died only due to rust, engine and transmission still strong at 160k miles. They hardly ever have issues, and when they do they are typically cheap issues or issues I can easily fix myself.

    Sure - they’re nothing flashy, but the cost of purchase + repairs is almost certainly less than the cost of a new or lightly used car alone. Also, minimal complicated computer systems, and no corporate spying.



  • I miss craigslist, but unfortunately just nobody uses it anymore. Everyone is using Facebook marketplace and for this type of thing you kind of have to sell where the buyers are. It sucks because the quality of people is so much worse, but at least there are actually people there. I can’t even count the number of times I’m selling something and get a “Is tHIs sTILl aVaiLAble??!!?!;;??!”, which I answer “yes, if you see the ad it’s available” and then never hear from them again. Very frustrating. On the flip side, BUYING things is actually easier because if you prove that you’re intelligent enough to reply to a message then you basically are guaranteed to be able to buy the item





  • My dads car was actually damaged by a touch car wash. One of the brushes caught on the edge of his hood and folded over the hood metal. It was a huge pain, had to fight the car wash company to pay for the damage (they eventually did) and even still you can tell where it was repaired. Plus they wouldnt pay for color matching so he had to pay out of pocket for that.

    Between that and the possibility of some tiny rock or grain of sand being caught in a brush and scratching the heck out of my car, I now only ever use touchless or wash it myself if the weather is warm. Im in upstate NY where we get pretty cold winters, so whenever it dips above freezing ill run through the touchless just for the underbody spray to get the road salt off