Geeto67

LI still has a high cost of living unless you get deep into Suffolk county territory (e.g. mastic beach). $120K a year out there is just middle middle class. As a long island native (2 years of high school in nassau county and technically Queens is part of the island even if it is NYC) I can tell you it is a lot of fun and way more culture. Plus Englishtown and Atco drag strips are close enough (westhampton was my home track but it's long gone now). Scott Schafiroff and Jack Merkel's shops are on long island so it isn't like there is no drag racing community. If you are single, don't have kids, and have no ties - go live on the island for a year and see if you can swing it. Might just be fun. Sometimes you have to be flexible with your living arrangements to get ahead (says the native NYer who came to Columbus just for a job and a foot in the door at a company that is primarily based in NY).

FWIW emissions testing in NY had to be done with a dyno for years. Any certified shop could do the test as long as they had the dyno. It was a specific map that you drove. Many shops got really good at cheating cars past the NY emissions tests by tuning for the test. As far as I know nobody ever got caught doing this and there were some carb'ed cars that would have never passed without some work. You tune for the test, you pass the test, you reset the tune, and charge the customer 1 hour labor plus the state fee. But VW does it at a mfg level - and it's $18B. Lolz. This country has no idea how to handle vehicle emissions at a federal or state level. At least we can blame the republicans for creating the clusterfuck at the federal level.

What's your commute like right now? I had a friend make a compelling argument for leasing a nissan leaf last week. He pays $218 for a leaf lease. It costs him almost nothing (maybe $20?) to charge it for a month at home with 220 volt hookup. his commute is less than the leaf's range and there is a charge station at work. His focus St was $300 a month plus $220 per month to fill with gas. The way he looks at it leasing the leaf is like pre-paying all his monthly transportation costs up front instead of over time at gas stations and the cost of owning the car is almost free. for anything else beyond the leaf's travel distance he takes his wife's car or his project car. says it only happens once or twice a month. it really only makes financial sense if your gas cost is close to or more than the price of the leaf monthly payment. people don't always factor the operating cost into car ownership. sometimes reducing that makes the payment a little more palatable. at the end of the day though, you still get stuck driving a leaf. If you want to keep it in the GM family, I am sure you see used volts at the dealership - same principle - as long as your commute is within the electric range and you can charge at work and home it's basically a giant golf cart.

part the thing out of whatever is left that is good, take the money and put it into a new beater, and then set the rest of the carcass on fire so some dumbshit doesn't try to fix the thing down the road. The structural frame rust is really the deal killer that drops the value of the truck to 0 - so any money you put into the thing is solely paying for your use, and how long do you expect to go before the thing needs more money? second Generation S-10s aren't really expensive trucks - the nicest ones below 100K miles are like $5K. Why not find another one (maybe a ZR5 or something) and transfer whatever is good off your existing one to that one and call it a day? here's an extended cab ZR2 that could probably use some parts off your rig and it's $1800: http://columbus.craigslist.org/cto/5232029597.html and here is another one: http://columbus.craigslist.org/cto/5225946108.html normally I am all for saying fix it and see how long you can keep it going but once you get into unsound frame where the car is on borrowed time against nature and even if you welded it the value drops to zero anyway it isn't worth it. Find one that is structurally sound and fix that one instead.

you could just pick one. I get the general shotgun approach is a nice way to start but why not follow up on that if you have a general interest? the only way to enlightenment is through discourse. It's a shame but it's your loss. being selective in your information rarely works out well. I don't know what "over baring" means. If you mean overbearing again not sure if you just mean that it is too much volume for you to read or that it is too complex? That is the nature of conversation. if two people agree on something then there really isn't much to talk about. Even conversations about two people agreeing on something are often each person "fishing" a little for how far they agree in detail. subject to interpretation but that would require you to abandon a narrow world view for a broader one. usually people who try to reconcile this will ask questions in furtherance of understanding. Those for whom it challenges their world view dismiss it as inconsistent and move on. I mean that's kind of what the internet is for right? honestly the level of conversation here isn't exactly high - most posts are 1 liners of somebody stating something and 20 people agreeing with them. So sue me if I want to get people talking. It's better than 30 pages of: "Nice day" "yep" "yup" "yes sir" etc.... I was just hoping to see something more lively out of this. I looked like it had potential for real legs and just fizzled out.

college is starting to be a distant memory to me sunny jim. I expected the general level of mis-information, was kind of surprised it died out so quickly.

who wants to guess which way the resale value on these cars is going to go? On the one hand they could get cheap because social outcast and the market dries up for used ones and the resale tanks as the eco-chasers go find something else to drive that isn't a prius. On the other hand they could get more expensive because they are not being sold anymore and they already have a dedicated loyalist following who use the car like a capri sun juice packet sucking every inch of 300+K miles out of it before depositing it in the recycling bin to become a beer can or something. personally I am hoping for the former so I can snag a lower mile TDI jetta wagon with a stick for what a jetta wagon should appropriately sell for without paying the Diesel VW fanboi tax.

anybody else kind of disappointed with this thread?

Both those cars hooked extremely well for the skinny tires they were running.

I just wish they would find a new name for it.

Are there lenders that do kit cars? I thought most won't touch them.

To be fair, GM will put a manual in things where people sometimes go WTF like the Buick Verano and Regal (although dropped for 2015), and they put them in kind of obvious cars like the Camaro 6 cyl models and the spark, sonic, cruise, the SS, the CTS-V, etc... Dodge doesn't even put a manual in the 6cyl Challenger which should tell you something. And then GM will forget to put the manual in some of the more obvious ones like the 6cyl and v8 colorado 4x4s or any of the full size trucks. But yeah, the Big three seem to be behind on the DCT ballgame. Not that I like automatics, even ones that internally resemble manual transmissions and shift better than I do.

you agree with me on lots of things, you just don't know it

http://jalopnik.com/the-new-audi-s4-no-longer-has-a-dual-clutch-transmissio-1730778195 Fuck Audi. Fuck them right in each of those 4 rings.

I don't think everyone is afraid to ride, but I think if you are the kind of person who thinks they are up for a 10 hour motorcycle ride you aren't asking about trailering or not you are just asking the best route. Not everyone is up for 10+ hours in the saddle, that's a lot if a person doesn't already have some long distance riding experience.

anybody have a timing light I can borrow? preferably an adjustable one so I can check advance? I have a bike I just got running and the ignition components are questionable so I want to check them out. The bike is not ride-able at the moment. I only need to borrow it for a few hours on the weekend. Let me know.

Really? have you ridden one of those BMWs? They will practically knock you over if you are sitting at a traffic light and rev the engine. I mean they don't shake like a paint mixer or harley but they are not a smooth as the jap inline fours. At highway speed you don't feel it but rotational force on air/oilheads still transmits through the chassis. I've ridden quite a few air and oil head bmws and the R1200C is by far the worst for this, my 86 R80 is probably the least offensive. I've ridden that route in July - truckers are a non issue as long as you are not daydreaming in your helmet. As everyone has said weather is the biggest factor. The bigger rationale for trailering it however is the bike is an unknown variable to you. When I rode my 1978 cb750F from NY to Mid-Ohio it was a well known bike to me and I still had fiddling little tech issues (the headlight bolts backed out half way through and I had to cobble it together to finish the journey). The bike could be well maintained and ready to go or it could be 150 miles from an engine seizure - you don't really know what's up with it and if something broke do you have a plan to deal with it on the side of the road? my back up plan was a number of different people I knew heading out who could pick me (including my dad) up if something catastrophic happened.

When I moved here from NY, I went to the BMV by the kart place (Alum creek drive?). They have a title and a registration office in the same complex. I had to go back and forth between the two offices but they were able to inspect, title, and register my vehicles in about an hour. Make sure you get a bill of sale if the value is under book value. otherwise they will try to get you to pay tax on the book value which may be more than what you actually paid.

I have had hagerty on the GTO for 15+ years now. Policy has been around $380 a year and that was for New York City, may be cheaper in ohio. $16,000 agreed value policy (under $20K or less than book value they don't need an appraisal). Limited to 2500 miles a year but any time I was running over, wanted to take the car on a trip, or I wanted to use the car as a daily for a short period I would call them and let them know and they were fine with it. Never had to make a claim but if I did I don't see it being a problem, a friend of mine had an accident with a car insured by Hagerty and she told me they were great to deal with.

Riverside drive seems to be ferrari central. I travel it almost every morning and I have seen an FF, a 599, and an f12 berlinetta all in the last 6 months along that same corridor in the morning. There is also a guy with a 4 door defender 110 and another with a brown jaguar v12 XKE vert I see regularly. I also spotted my first hellcat in a snowstorm along that same section.

I say V all the things. All it does it put more high HP engines in the used and salvage market. There really is no downside. I hope lots of people buy these because it increases the chances that in 15 years I'll find one in a junkyard when i am looking for an engine for whatever 60's-80's bad ideamobile I will be working on then. Maybe a V powered fleetwood....

Thanks, it was meant to be funny. If you are having fun who cares. Personally I love having a child because it means I get to buy a whole bunch of toys I miss playing with without the wife being too judgmental. 100mph? Not even trying: http://jalopnik.com/worlds-fastest-r-c-car-breaks-record-at-196-mph-1599762393 The traxxas xo-1 can hit 100mph (in theory) straight out of the box. That's impressive. R/C drag cars were hitting that number 20 years ago, but they aren't nearly as much fun to play with.

Everybody shits on nitro but it isn't that bad. For a tourist in the hobby I wouldn't recommend it because it takes a commitment and a proper setup. Everything is expensive, noisy, and environmentally unfriendly. It used to be an advantage for racing but now the electrics have caught up that it is now a personal preference thing. I have run nitro powered control line airplanes, R/C airplanes, and cars. When I was active I was setup with fuel in locked cabinets (as per fire code), a recovery system, cleanup equipment, and a set routine. With the car the hardest part about it and the thing that made me stop using it was that I got to the point where I was tearing up major drivetrain components regularly and when replacements became no longer available I didn't want to dump another $1000 in a new car to prep for what was essentially local parking lot races. Breakage was always expensive, replacement engines were more than half the cost of the car. It made a little more sense for the planes when I lived in NYC because I lived in the same town as a flying field and electrics were only good for 10min a shot at most where as I could fly for 30min on a tank of nitro in a large 4 channel airplane. Now park flyers are pushing 20-30 minutes and with some park flyers you don't need a dedicated flying field like you do with gas. For someone dicking around in their backyard nitro doesn't make a lot of sense. Your wife will hate the way you stink, the neighbors will hate the smoke, smell, and noise, and your kids will think it isn't fun and slightly scary. It used to be the only way to get a really fast car but the electrics have leveled the playing field there. so yeah, based on what you said you wanted, don't get nitro.

from personal experience - in the early 1990's I used to race R/C pro-stock style drag cars. The fun was in tuning them wasn't in driving in them. I also ran a koysho gas R/C car on local outdoor road courses, and even did a year racing R/c motorcycles. Without the competition the fun wasn't really there. I played with a few friends Traxxas rigs when they first came out and were advertising 65mph. Here are my thoughts. If you like the crash as much as you like actually playing with the thing it's fun. It's really fun to launch it off something without thinking this is going to be "expensive", even though it is. I couldn't really use 65mph because I never had the room to get up to speed there and even at that speed the damn thing is twitchy and you are past the limits of traction. basically launching the thing was the most fun part of the experience. I can pretty much guarantee they are vagina repellant if your wife/girlfriend/significant other/any female you remotely had an interest in sees you playing with it in the park. I got out some of my old R/C kit 2 years ago before we moved and the wife caught me playing with them. I don't even think she used the term "man-child" but skipped right to "fucking child". CL is fill of people for whom this was a flash in the pan for - just buy their used rig for 1/3 what they paid and beat the crap out of it and see if you like it. This guy spent $800 on it and he'll be luck to get $350 for it: http://columbus.craigslist.org/for/5212294566.html here is $100 for a nitro one: http://columbus.craigslist.org/tag/5210120303.html To be honest if you like RC, I still have plenty of fun with my old clodbuster and grasshoppers/hornets. outright speed doesn't really add to the experience as long as they are faster than the old 7.2v tyco ones they used to sell at Toys R Us. once you are going faster than 30mph you are going to have that moment of "oh shit" what if I hit another person with this thing which kinda makes it less fun.

provided the infamous toyota frame rot hasn't eaten the ass out of that truck to the point where the exhaust is holding it together. http://img834.imageshack.us/img834/1576/q96p.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v197/panzersergeant/toybent_zps4e051b43.jpg