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Spotters... are they the ones I see on Speed Channel who stand alongside the curves and go running for cover every time a Subaru fishtails and flips over, then run over and help tip it right-side up?

Forget pulling over CR stickers. Actually, I don't much mind if folks going 80 don't get pulled over, either. My pet peeve is folks with cell phones plastered to their ears cutting across four lanes of traffic at that excuse of an interchange called 270/23/315.

No worries over the work, Andy. Just took me by surprise when I saw the difference between the Pinnacle and Meguiar areas, especially since every other wax I've seen did the bead thing, and both waxes had carnauba in them. Since my car does spend its entire life outside, hopefully we'll have a nice cloudy day where I can do another wash/wax just before the annual family trek to PA over memorial weekend. That would be right around the 6-8 week time slot

Thanks, Rico. If beading is just a myth, then, how to tell when a new layer is really needed?

Hopefully a kind admin will move then, then. The soap I've been using is Meguiar's Deep Crystal, purple tint to the plastic jug, pours clear.

'Cause it's the classroom. Doesn't really fit in 'Tech help' since it's not a mechanical problem. Maybe 'passing lane', but this seems too much a newb question for that area.

Had Andy do a detail on my car just about a month ago, and while washing it today, I noticed that in quite a number of spots, even though he used the carnauba paste on it, much of the water just kind of sat there in a haze, while in the one area where I had stripped it off to work on a pair of paint chips, then rewaxed, it was beading up real tight. Is this normal for a car that doesn't have a garage and spends its days in an open parking lot, or do I need to be adding extra coats?

Well, like I put back in #10, unless you know what to look for (the 'hybrid' badge and pie-plate hubcaps being the most obvious), you can't tell the difference between my Civic and an EX without the moonroof. The Insight? That comes from the fashion warp area I theorized about in #22. Maybe we can send them Mesteno's Ford redhead as a tutor

Because it took the Japanese to come up with them, and their cars live in some sort of strange fashion warp. That's my theory, anyway.

That's if you intend to run SVO (Straight Vegetable Oil). I'm talking biodiesel. With just a little bit of time and practice, you can make it safely at home (http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_make.html), and interchangeably with the diesel you get at gas stations.

You realize, of course, that the tree huggers will find something wrong with that plan, right?

Thought we already had that problem licked. Well, at least diesel made from waste deep-fry grease doesn't have the sulfur problem, you just smell like a fast food joint going down the street A fair conclusion, though again, I know someone who bought one for reasons similar to mine. Only he's got the advantage of being about 6" shorter than I, so he was able to fit in the thing. As long as they don't tune for performance instead of mileage like Honda did, the Camry ought to do fine. The guy at Tansky's was trying to get me to hold off on my Civic to see if I'd fit in it, but I just couldn't stand the crate any longer. Heh, decidedly not. Why do you think the Cali types are submitting their HOV stickers before they even get the car delivered? South Park... Holding a mirror to the world and showing everyone just how stupid and hypocritical they are. Isaac Hayes (Chef) in particular... you can make fun of any religion you want, but you dare not touch Scientology, because we really ARE decendents of UFO visitors (or something... loonies).

Novaman: You're right about the diesel hybrid. I'd be all over that in a cold minute. Well, ok, maybe not, since I've got no place for a block heater, the fuel would gel in winter, and I can't get diesel from the pumps at work. Though I could just raid the local McDonald's and make my own Anyways, I think the reason we're not seeing them in the US is that some of the clean air states (Cali being the most obvious) banned diesel in passenger cars because back in the 70's, they were louder, noisier, and a hell of a lot dirtier than they are now. Just a case of the laws not keeping up with the times, I guess. Mallard: If you didn't notice, I generally take a dim view of analysts (especially stock market ones). The only way you could tell my hybrid Civic from a regular one if you didn't know about the paint color was the hybrid badge on the trunk and the pie-plate hub caps. If you don't know what to look for, it's indistinguishable from the non-hybrid, and I rather like it that way. It keeps people from badgering me with all sorts of stupid questions. Not sure where you'll find a Civic on the lot (I had to wait three extra months for mine cause I couldn't stand the cloudy-sky paint with cream seats, which would still have been a two-week delivery), but you're right about the Accords. From what I've heard, they're selling like a sick dog because instead of jacking up the mileage like they did with Civic, Honda tuned the electrics for performance. The enviro-snobs take a pass because of that, while the suburbanite family with 2.3 children gets the Odyssey instead. It's a great proof-of-concept, but a bad marketing call. As for Toyota... I dunno how they can make the Prius look much more different than it already is. Thing sticks out even more than the H3 I saw this afternoon.

I'm callin BS on this too, and I've got a hybrid, but plugins do have their place (in super-crowded Japan where commutes are all of 3 miles). Mallard's right that on a one-to-one fight, gas is going to beat coal every time for small engines (just like diesel is better for locomotives), but there's an economy of scale thing to consider... If you had a piddly little coal-fired generator trying to charge a plugin's batteries, the wasted energy would be enormous. But when it's a power company's multi-megawatt boiler and turbines we're talking, a plugin becomes the better choice (nevermind that storing enough energy to make it meaningful is a problem even Toyota hasn't really solved with their plug-in Prius). Most of us also live in Ohio, so we can choose to go with an (overpriced) electric supplier that uses wind/tidal/solar/cowdung if it suits us. So far, battery disposal has been pretty much a non-issue. While they're warranted for 8/80k in most cases (the Cali hippies get something like 10/150k), the first ones put out there are still working, because they're kept within a very tight charge band that doesn't really exercise them the way normal 12V car batteries are. They're not as easy to recycle as normal lead-acid battery, but it can be done. So why did I pick one over a regular car? Well, the US makers were out because I need something that doesn't break every other week (Mensan can attest to my old crate), the new tax credit makes the price differential pretty much meaningless after three or four years (I plan to keep mine about ten), and the color I liked only came in a hybrid version (AudiOn19s did a very nice detail on it soon after I got it... pic when I get the roll finished off). No tree-hugging hippiness involved in the decision, just my usual practicality. I will admit, though, that hitting the pump only half as often is nice, and flipping Dick Cheney and Halliburton the bird is icing on the cake

Portable lightning's been around every since Tesla started doing that weird shit out in Colorado just after the turn of the 20th.

I was just about to say something to the effect of "How are you getting rid of the heat" when morabu chimed in. Heat is *by far* the number one enemy of a good overclock. That's why I switched to watercooling in the first place.

Fair nuff... A new system like (with all the pieces I've got) would probably run about $300 or so. Prices as asking (estimated retail): Eheim 1046 pump: $40 (55) CPU block: $15 (30) Video blocks: $10 ea (40) (cheaper 'cause most folks have moved on to newer cards) Radiator and fan: $50 (80) Reservoir: $40 (70)

Just tore off all the water cooling gear for my old AMD Athlon XP 2100+ system before I give it to the old man (He doesn't understand fish pumps hanging off computers), and since my new system was built with new stuff, I've got gear to unload. Fortunately, [H]ardOCP has a picture of most of what I've got: pic here This kit I've only has the Socket A bracket (the silver thing on the left), not the Pentium 4 one (the retention bracket between the first bracket and the radiator). Everything else is just as you see it, including the Eheim 1046 pump. I've also got water blocks for both GeForce 3 and GeForce 4 video cards, as well as a large (2x 5.25" bay) acrylic reservoir and a whole crapload of tubes and fittings. Assistance putting it all together in your system can be provided if necessary.

Here's a potential for value add... I just stripped the watercooling gear from my old Palomino 2100+ system before I give it to the old man, see "WTS: Innovatek Watercooling", being posted in about two minutes

Just thought I'd point out that over on the Motley Fool's discussion boards, another gent posted this, and was greeted with a most evil script that folks could run with BSD or Linux that would continually hit that website, until either the person intentionally killed the program, or it ate up the user's entire hard drive if they weren't smart enough to edit the script.

Have you taken a look at Hyundai? From what I gather, they pilfered some of the best engineers at both Toyota and Honda, then set them to work on some pretty decent kit at a price well below T&H. My folks just picked up a fully decked Sonata LX for somewhere in the low 20's. Given that you're probably not looking for heated leather seats, XM-ready radio, and all those other glam things, I could see getting an Accent or Elantra for under 15.

Going to give this a +0.3 for the moment (I'm still looking for the kit DarkFormula tuned me on to), here's what happened: The two chips were quite deep. Don't think they dug metal, but they were definitely down into the primer. Area-wise, the one was a pair of dings a little larger than your tyipcal #2 pencil, the other a full-sized pea. Weekend before Easter, started on the fix with a washing of the hood, followed by a cleaning of just that spot (the chips were about half an inch apart) with alcohol, as per instructions. Filled in the spots with the touch-up paint and let it sit most of the afternoon. Went back to it after dinner, and built the blobs up above hood level. Dried overnight. Sunday morning, went out with the bottle, a torn up t-shirt, and their plastic credit card looking thing, and proceeded to buff the bumps. As the goop started working into the paint, it turned a bright silverish color as it worked into the blob, but quickly started to melt into it (and the blob melted onto the tshirt scrap), leaving the chips still there, but not quite as deep. Got some water, washed it out, and added the next layer of paint. Since then, I think I've gone through this process maybe a dozen times, until Monday evening I noticed the area between the two chips started to get cloudy, and stopped. At this point, the chips are nowhere near their original size or depth, and the area that is totally filled is nearly indistinguishable from the original paint. *HOWEVER* this cloudy area is telling me to stop and wait. Once the rain lets up, I plan on doing another paint fill, but after reading several posts on other message boards via Google, it seems this is a common occurance with this stuff and dark-colored cars. Nothing a claying and some polish won't fix, apparently, but I don't want to make it any worse than it already is. For now, I'd say stay away from this stuff if you have a dark colored car. If you have something light, you might be ok.

Finding that it's more useful as a tool to get back in touch with HS classmates now that my 10-yr reunion is approaching than anything else.

Tell that to the fuckers up in Linndale. Their measely 300some yard length of I-71 near Cleveland doen't have a single exit in their piddly ass town, yet they write more speeding tickets than anyone else in the state for that length of freeway.

Do a google search for "HERF gun"