"Kanaric" (Kanaric1)
11/19/2016 at 12:25 • Filed to: None
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"Kanaric" (Kanaric1)
11/19/2016 at 12:25 • Filed to: None | 0
| 19 |
I am originally from Chicago which it a deceptively populataed area if all you know is google and you see it has 2.7 million people living there vs NY’s 8.5 million. Outside of the city you basically have continuous habitation from near Wisconsin all the way under south of Lake Michigan well into Indiana. As a result there are tuners, tracks, mechanics, and things like that all over the place.
Las Vegas had 600,000 people. There are a couple of “suburbs” connected directly to it. Outside of that there is quite literally nothing. A 5 minute walk north of my house leads to open desert like out of a western. A 5 minute drive leads me to a reservation. I am not exaggerating. As a result all of that here is SHIT compared to a real metro area.
Tuners
: I have shopped around for someone to tune my cars after putting the appropriate mods on them. The first was a WRX I owned.
The only people in this city that tune have terrible reputations or they tune motorcycles. There is whispers in the wind of a Ford tuner at the Las Vegas speedway. There is this guy whose “company” is named Dyno Dan who MAYBE tunes any car? His website looks like it’s from 2002. Nobody at import meets talks about him. The other one is “Doug’s Dyno”. If you try to search for information on these guys, like results or comments, you get nothing.
The go-to guy here is Shawn Church however “here” isn’t exactly an accurate description. He owns Church Automotive in the LA area and comes up here occasionally to tune cars. I also had a very hard time getting ahold of him to tune my Skyline in the past.
Mechanics
: All the known places that work on specific cars and can do things like build an engine for your Subaru for example are shady as fuck. I have had nothing but substandard work aside from Uerhara Motowerks SO FAR they have been great. However I am giving them a task right now of doing 9/10 of the work in preparing my Skyline for a turbo upgrade which includes head work. The Subaru shop here worked on my WRX and didn’t connect things properly, a Nissan import shop here fucked up the electricals in my Skyline and couldn’t diagnose overheating issues, another Nissan shop couldn’t diagnose the MAF was why my 350Z (3 cars ago) was going into limp mode (that was before I knew much about cars and Nissans). Every place here has been SHIT aside this one. And that’s not counting what my ex-roommate had been searching for work on his Miata, Ford Ranger, and later Porsche Cayman. In the Chicago area there is a lot of information around of who is good and known people have been around for YEARS and have maybe even 1000 reviews on like Yelp or google. In Vegas you will find maybe 20? That is IF you find information at all. When you have answers I find they never are accurate in determining who is good or not.
Tracks: You would think a desolate desert might be a prime candidate for some excellent tracks all around you with year round track day potential. You would be wrong. You see, that is PHOENIX. They have at least 3 that i’m aware of all minutes from where people actually live. You would also think that the speedway here would have track days often, I mean it’s a large facility that wants income right? You would be wrong again. They have events like Import Faceoff, however that’s just drag racing and a car show. Then Midnight Mayhem another 1/4 mile event. The options for actual track time are tourist nonsense like rent a Lambo for 100s of dollars and have someone hold your hand.
That site is motorsportsreg. A site you use to find events. Note 120miles and Las Vegas has only one result for the entire year for open track. Pahrump is within 60 miles actually. If you click time trial (a more serious event), driver school, and “fun run” you get nothing. I then expand the search to 180 miles and you get TONS of events at Chuckwalla. In California.
You have ONE place if you want track time. Spring Mountain. It’s almost 2 hours from where I live as well. On top of that they maybe have FEW open track days a year unless you want to drive a Corvette and pay obscene amounts of money. Meanwhile my friend who is moving to denver about 15 minutes from his house there is a place that has them almost every weekend. Spring Mountain also changes often, there is no “classic” setup or known setup or anything like that. So if you go there and learn the track you have to relearn it depending on the whims of the owners.
If I want to do anything like that I pretty much have to leave the state. Go to like Willow Springs for example which is quite the drive. A drive where I would need to get a motel after a long day. I would probably have to make a weekend of it. Or I could drive down to my parents house 9 hours away. I have driver the Skyline down there, it is not pleasant with a normal car but with aftermarket suspension it is worse. Also the fact that the main road down there goes to single lane in one direction and lots of slow vehicles and trucks who drive well below the speed limit. Can I pass them? No. Why? I can’t see around them because the right-hand drive. Cars behind me on occasion realize that and will flash their headlights for me signaling it’s time to pass. I mostly trust strangers. Mostly.
You have good autocross here. Anything else are major events that require a racing license and are not something you can just jump in to.
Events
: Seed 9 rally, NASCAR, NHRA, SCCA racing, etc. Every kind of spectator event in motorsport happens here. There has even been talk of a Vegas Grand Prix for Formula 1 on occasion.
Hope?:
This is a rapidly growing city and I am surprised to learn of new things coming here on occasion. I mean aside Hockey and possibly Football. However the car scene has been stagnant since i’ve been here.
However I am into things aside cars, like tabletop gaming, and those “scenes” have been rapidly expanding since i’ve lived here for 8 years. Now only if the car-stuff would.
If you are aware of anything interesting in the Vegas area I should know about please inform me of it.
Eric @ opposite-lock.com
> Kanaric
11/19/2016 at 12:37 |
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If you wanted to live somewhere there was a real car scene, why didn’t you just bite the bullet and move to Los Angeles or a distant suburb?
Frenchlicker
> Kanaric
11/19/2016 at 12:39 |
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I’m from Southern Indiana, middle of nowhere and the thought of the car scene being terrible in a city amazes me. However like you said stuff exists everywhere here in the Midwest.
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Kanaric
> Eric @ opposite-lock.com
11/19/2016 at 12:40 |
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lol true but it’s not worth it.
I mean I literally have to ship my cars out to get any proper work done, which is what I mean by “on a budget” but LA’s other expenses are insane compared to living in Nevada. On top of it the car i’m building wouldn’t be legal in California unless I modded it to pass smog. Then on top of that one of my other hobbies is target shooting. I own a few military surplus rifles like a FAL.
Outside of car stuff this actually is quite a good place to live. It’s just the car scene is abysmal.
I would consider Phoenix, however. It’s Vegas but with stuff and more ignorant old people (who vote no for marijuana legalization, lmao).
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Kanaric
> Frenchlicker
11/19/2016 at 12:42 |
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Ya I know there are worse places but like you said in the Midwest everything is much closer. I would never consider living at like Minot or anything like that. I feel sorry for the Air Force people I knew that got stationed there.
DipodomysDeserti
> Kanaric
11/19/2016 at 12:49 |
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I don’t think the olds are solely to blame for marijuana getting voted down here. Sherrif Joe getting the boot is what leads me to believe this. We have a lot of people who belong to a religion that diesn’t believe in putting mind altering substances into you body. I think it was them and the olds together.
Also, Vegas isn’t Phoenix, it is Glendale. Glendale is a suburb of Phoenix occupied by flat brimmed hats, tribal tattoos, vape smoke, monster energy drink stickers, and lifted trucks.
shop-teacher
> Kanaric
11/19/2016 at 13:03 |
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Sounds like you need to start wrenching yourself ;)
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Eric @ opposite-lock.com
> DipodomysDeserti
11/19/2016 at 13:13 |
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Oh, Glendale, AZ. How I hated my work trips out there to you.
Phoenix always seemed to lack local culture much like Vegas, but Glendale was worse, which seems hard to do. It makes the 909 in the LA area look downright vibrant with local culture (this is, in fact, a joke).
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Frenchlicker
> Kanaric
11/19/2016 at 13:31 |
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I would feel like I was gypped if I was sent there. However where I’m from Louisville is slightly over an hour as well as drag strips and ovals and the like. Also many trustable people to work on cars.
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Eric @ opposite-lock.com
> Kanaric
11/19/2016 at 13:36 |
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It’s true, CA is expensive. I lived there most of my life. The intangibles make it hard to put a price on the privilege; until you live there you wouldn’t fully understand.
If it’s a true race car, smog doesn’t apply, and you’d be trailering it anyhow. People that mod cars have tricks to get around smog, but it can be a real pain in the butt (vehicles that are old, but young enough to need smog checks, have near-zero value if they’ve suffered any modifications, while everything before the cut has unusually-high value (those titles are like solid gold for project cars) and stuff that isn’t brand new but will pass smog is dirt cheap).
Vegas is definitely an oddball place. I usually feel sorry for the people that end up there because everything outside the tourism areas is quite depressing. It never seemed like a place with much of an economy outside of tourism, but at least it had a fair number of local businesses out there beyond the casinos.
thebigbossyboss
> Kanaric
11/19/2016 at 14:22 |
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I lived in Prince George BC for a while.
Someone on here advised I go to my nearest big city for something sort of specialized. Which big city would that be? The one that’s 8 hours away (Vancouver?) or the one that’s 7.5 hours away in Alberta? LOL.
Really isolated up there, driving between Mcbride and Prince George first of all there are no gas stations (it’s 130 miles). The only thing in between is a road maintenance station.
One day over than 130 mile stretch I passed only 9 cars going the other way. 7 in the first hour, and only two in the last hour. I did not encounter any traffic going my direction.
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DipodomysDeserti
> Eric @ opposite-lock.com
11/19/2016 at 15:55 |
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There’s quite a bit of local culture in Phoenix, you just have to know where to look. Same with Glendale, but it’s hard to look past the bro culture.
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Kanaric
> shop-teacher
11/19/2016 at 19:52 |
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I can mostly. However there are some things I don’t feel I have the skills to do myself correctly. On top of it I am needing a dyno tune for my Skyline which I can’t do lol
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shop-teacher
> Kanaric
11/19/2016 at 19:59 |
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No you definitely can’t dyno tune it without a dyno. I certainly don’t do all my own work, but to my mind making some mistakes and figuring out what I did wrong, beats paying someone else to do it wrong.
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Kanaric
> Eric @ opposite-lock.com
11/19/2016 at 20:02 |
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One thing with Vegas local culture is we have a decent chinatown that has some of the most amazing restaurants i’ve eaten at. However as someone called it “bro culture” is the most prevalent thing here. Aside of like Cars and Coffee and classic car shows all car related events are basically exclusive to flat brim vaping machines.
There are some things that are local cultural events like the greek festival, that first friday art fair, etc. However i’ve been to anime and gaming conventions here and things like that all of those are shit. It’s surprising since this city is otherwise a convention mecca. They do have some big events here like I remember the DOTA nationals and that EVO fighting game tournament. Some of my friends are into that stuff but I am not. A lot of bands make this a stop, especially smaller bands if you like independent music. I used to be big into metal and the smaller time music scene and that was actually decent. All of this is of course vastly superior in the Chicago or LA area.
Outdoors stuff here is quite good but it was also good in Illinois. It is nice being 20 mintues from a decent mountain for winter sports though.
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Kanaric
> DipodomysDeserti
11/19/2016 at 20:03 |
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Ah ya the mormon factor lmao. Forgot about that, about 10 minutes from my parents they erected a massive gaudy temple looking like it’s out of Game of Thrones.
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Kanaric
> Eric @ opposite-lock.com
11/19/2016 at 20:05 |
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I understand what you mean about the intangibles because that is how I feel about the Chicago area.
I have mixed feelings of here vs there though. If I really thought Chicago was absolutely superior to live at I wouldn’t be living here. However there are many things I miss.
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Eric @ opposite-lock.com
> Kanaric
11/20/2016 at 10:43 |
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I forgot that Mt Charleston was so close...definitely a bonus. The nearest ski slopes to LA are constantly crowded and a longer drive. You could easily do a snow to surf day in Vegas, provided your surf was wind surfing.
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Eric @ opposite-lock.com
> Kanaric
11/20/2016 at 10:56 |
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Similar with LA. The closest I got to returning after moving away was San Diego, which is superior from a lifestyle perspective, but suffers the same problems with insufficient people to have local subcultures and support. If you really needed something or wanted to attend stuff, you got used to that long drive up the coast as not much happened south of Irvine.
It could be worse - you could be in SLC, Cheyenne, or Helena
Brian G
> Kanaric
11/20/2016 at 15:00 |
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One thing about the MotorsportReg calendar - this time of the year, clubs haven’t posted their events for next year. You’ll see more stuff at Spring Mountain come Jan/Feb/March as organizers get their dates booked.