"Kit 'Haddy' Iwamatsu" (Haddy)
10/27/2015 at 12:09 • Filed to: None
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"Kit 'Haddy' Iwamatsu" (Haddy)
10/27/2015 at 12:09 • Filed to: None | 3
| 28 |
Maybe dudes in lifted trucks zip past like assholes because their speedometers are reading low. Just realized I did the same thing earlier today in the rain.
I have also officially named the trailblazer ‘Jiggy.’ Just seems right given how annoying it’s been to get the tire balance and alignment back in spec.
New Wipers were acquired, at least.
CalzoneGolem
> Kit 'Haddy' Iwamatsu
10/27/2015 at 12:12 |
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Ah, that new wiper feeling. That’s good stuff!
RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
> Kit 'Haddy' Iwamatsu
10/27/2015 at 12:14 |
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Speedos reading low, and the fact that the higher you are, the slower you subjectively seem to be going.
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Kit 'Haddy' Iwamatsu
> CalzoneGolem
10/27/2015 at 12:15 |
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So many choices, ya know? I was there behind 2 other people getting wipers, and cringed when the 8 dollar a pop store brand wipers were picked by both. I know they’ll have those wipers on there for 6-12 months too, until they fall apart. I went ahead and grabbed myself some Bosch Micro Edge wipers. The truck doesnt really need the ultra high end beam wipers, like the Icons. These get the job done well for the relatively flat windshield. Rear got a new wiper too.
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Kit 'Haddy' Iwamatsu
> RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
10/27/2015 at 12:18 |
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I suspect there may also be the BMW thing going on. The more lifted your truck, the more asshole you become.
“It’s raining? I have mud tires and 4x4 with a lift kit, push bumper, and illegal badly fitted HIDs! I’M IMMORTAL!”
Then they spraypaint their mouth with Ford Blue and yell witness me before flipping it in a ditch.
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CalzoneGolem
> Kit 'Haddy' Iwamatsu
10/27/2015 at 12:19 |
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I like the Rain X latitudes myself.
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Kit 'Haddy' Iwamatsu
> CalzoneGolem
10/27/2015 at 12:20 |
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Excellent wiper, but the store was out of them in 22 and they didnt have a matching 16 for the rear.
HammerheadFistpunch
> Kit 'Haddy' Iwamatsu
10/27/2015 at 12:23 |
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no, I think most of them are just assholes. my speedo reads slow but I drive the speed I should be going regardless.
TheOnelectronic
> Kit 'Haddy' Iwamatsu
10/27/2015 at 12:24 |
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My favorite is the bro truckers who think they’re invincible in the snow because they have mud tires.
Mud tires are awful in snow. Much worse than an AT or even just a standard road tire.
BigBlock440
> Kit 'Haddy' Iwamatsu
10/27/2015 at 12:35 |
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I sprung for the $25 a piece Rain-X wipers this time, never again. They’re just as crappy as the $6 Autozone ones. You say the Boschs work? How long do they last?
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BigBlock440
> TheOnelectronic
10/27/2015 at 12:38 |
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That’s not true, at mud tires that aren’t worn. I put a generic set on my truck 2 years ago, they’re awesome in the snow, especially deep stuff. I was worried about slush until I got a chance to drive in it, didn’t even use 4wd to get up my hill and the tires didn’t spin. I was pleasantly surprised. So much better traction than an all-season road tire.
TheRealBicycleBuck
> RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
10/27/2015 at 12:54 |
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I don’t the height is the independent variable. It was raining this morning and I was in the slow lane. I was cut off twice - once by an Optima, once by a Challenger. The general traffic flow was slightly above the speed limit and these two jokers were going well above that.
MontegoMan562 is a Capri RS Owner
> BigBlock440
10/27/2015 at 12:59 |
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Bosch Icon’s are the best out there.
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RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
> TheRealBicycleBuck
10/27/2015 at 13:05 |
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Height is *a* factor to speeding. Not the only one. I don’t know if you’re trying to say lifted truck = asshole, asshole = questionable driving, therefore the height of the truck is unrelated? Even if that were intrinsically true and not circular, it seems wrong to discount the effect of height on subjective speed sense.
M54B30
> Kit 'Haddy' Iwamatsu
10/27/2015 at 13:07 |
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If you’re weaving in and out of traffic passing everyone I doubt the speedometer is the test threshold for assholeness
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BigBlock440
> MontegoMan562 is a Capri RS Owner
10/27/2015 at 13:09 |
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It seems wipers have been getting shittier and shittier, that I don’t even want to spend the money to try the more expensive ones. I replace the set on my truck on the side of the road a year or two ago while it was sort of raining because I got tired of listening to the squeaking of the 5-year old wipers that were on there. The brand new wipers were worse than the ones I just took off. To the point that I almost pulled over again to put the old ones back on. I’ll have to try the Bosch next, but I am skeptical after hearing good things about the Rain-X ones and being left very disappointed. Is it really that hard to find a wiper that lasts a few months and doesn’t make noise the first time you put it on?
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TheRealBicycleBuck
> RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
10/27/2015 at 13:28 |
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No need to get all defensive!
What I am saying is that there are a-holes driving all sorts of vehicles. In Louisiana and Texas, there are LOTS of lifted trucks. A few drive like jackasses, but most do not. I think it is simply because of the platform - the extra height makes them tippy, so most of the ones I see drive a little slower and a little more sensibly.
I’m also not discounting the distance from the ground as one potential variable, but I don’t think it is the independent variable.
I’m not sure which variable is independent, but most of the people I see driving like jackasses are young guys. Sometimes they are in the “bro” crowd, sometimes in the stunting crowd, sometimes they are rednecks. The common factor seems to be young and male.
One notable exception was my old boss. It didn’t matter what she was in, she drove like a mad woman.
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RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
> TheRealBicycleBuck
10/27/2015 at 13:40 |
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Valid points all, I just wasn’t sure if you were one step away from a LAFTD TRUKS R TEH DEBIL screed, because those things come out of nowhere, when you least expect them, and are very irritating. I’m glad you clarified. To be sure, the young and invincible drive bro-trucks disproportionately as well as drive fast. Haddy was, however, bringing up the interesting idea that people in tall vehicles sometimes don’t really know how fast they’re going, and I felt I’d reinforce that. Absolutely not the *only* reason for speeding, but one that’s often overlooked, so I wasn’t sure why you thought you needed to offer a counterpoint. “People who are inattentive sometimes drive unsafely fast due to subjective factors AND ALSO ASSHOLES DRIVE FAST” seems like it can leave the second part unsaid.
Young and male has strong correlation in general, but even my 62 year old mother drives a Suburban faster than a Corolla.
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TheRealBicycleBuck
> RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
10/27/2015 at 14:55 |
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I’m still not convinced it has much to do with the height. Setting aside young idiotic drivers, I think it would have more to do with the creature comforts - those things that make the vehicle quieter and the ride smoother. I think these are key to a person judging their speed.
Try this. Play any driving game. Play it again without any sound. A tangible indicator of speed is immediately lost. One way games tell you how fast you are going is by changing the type and volume of the noise. Drive slow and there is no wind noise. As you drive faster, the wind noise increases both in pitch and volume. Without that noise, it’s much harder to figure out how fast you are going.
Another tangible indicator of speed is vibration. A well-sorted but soft suspension isolates the driver from the road, making them lose the sensation of speed. It’s not uncommon to hear someone say that they didn’t know how fast they were going when driving a luxury car. It’s the reason that my in-laws got rid of their Jaguar. They were constantly speeding when they didn’t mean to.
I’ll wrap this up with an anecdote. My wife and I rented a Chevy Traverse for a long trip. It was one of the noisiest vehicles I’ve driven. My wife was constantly chiding me about going too fast, even when I was going the speed limit. A few months later, we test drove a Buick Enclave, the luxury version of the Traverse. It was one of the quietest vehicles I have driven. On our test drive, I didn’t realize that I was well above the freeway speed limit until I looked at the speedometer. My wife didn’t notice it either. :)
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MontegoMan562 is a Capri RS Owner
> BigBlock440
10/27/2015 at 15:14 |
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hahaha I hear you man.
There was a deal on Trico Platinum or diamond or whatever marketing crap they put on their top tier wiper at advance. I bought em for my car after having just put the Bosch Icon’s on my wife’s Jeep. The Bosch’s are better.
The trico’s aren’t BAD I’ve actually had decent lock with them, but the Bosch’s are better. They’re my go to brand for wipers. If the Trico’s were half the cost of the Bosch I’d buy them. But only being a couple bucks difference the Bosch is the way to go.
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RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
> TheRealBicycleBuck
10/27/2015 at 15:28 |
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You’re right on smoothness/NVH having a lot to do with perceived speed. I knew an elderly man who routinely pushed 80 and wasn’t too aware, because his Ford Five Hundred was simply not obvious in that respect. A lot of people don’t realize that the ride in an SUV tends to be smooth as well, at least compared to an economy car. With all that being said, I can only offer that it probably varies a lot based on the driver and how they acclimatize to NVH. I’ve played driving games without sound numerous times, and I’m affected much more driving fast cars than slower class ones, because a switch from dependence on visual scan to other factors takes place once the road is moving too fast to relate to.
Height is absolute in its effects on visual scan - but based on sight angle, and drivers’ dependence on visual scan will depend on the driver, the type of road, and other factors. Because I was curious, I just calculated something, and for someone looking 12’ down the road, the actual relative speed to the eye is ~10% faster for a position half as high for a given piece of ground at that distance. Also, with vehicles that have a lot of hood height, it moves the reference area of scan further down the road, so the percent of visual area being allocated to each yard driven gets smaller and smaller. Further, the distance seen in total increases with height. In short, it takes more and more speed to move 20% of the seen road per second (or whatever).
Anyway, what I’m saying is that anybody who depends on any sense of “how fast is the pavement passing” will be affected by their seating position, profoundly. At such a point as it’s impossible to tell, other factors take over, but the taller the vehicle, the higher the speed at which the sense of speed over pavement necessarily disappears. Rural speeding is probably more likely to see effect from pavement sense, and highway speeding due to smoothness.
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TheOnelectronic
> BigBlock440
10/27/2015 at 15:56 |
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To be effective in snow, a tire requires three basic attributes; small grooves known as sipes to carry away the surface moisture that makes ice slippery, a rubber compound that remains soft and pliable in cold weather, and cosely-spaced tread blocks to hold on to snow and keep it in the tread.
Mud tires, at least the KM2’s I have on my truck, have large, distantly spaced tread blocks as they are designed to eject mud from the tread- the opposite aim of a snow tire. Those tread blocks are also solid, possessing no siping.
Mud tires do start to have an advantage in truly deep snow, when traction is less about the friction between the tire and the surface as it is about digging through the snow as an obstacle, but for domestic driving you will rarely encounter snow that deep on a road.
Subjectively, while going down some snowy trails, I had a much easier time with Duratracs (a hybrid AT/Mud tire) than I did with the KM2’s.
As with anything, it can vary depending on what two tires you’re comparing. I’ve used some snow tires that I think were less effective than just bare wheels, and had All-seasons that did a marvelous job in the snow.
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BigBlock440
> MontegoMan562 is a Capri RS Owner
10/27/2015 at 16:23 |
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Trico’s used to be my go-to, but since they moved to Mexico, I’ve noticed a huge decline in quality. Whether it was related or not, I don’t know, could have been a material change, but it was around the same time period. Since then, I’ve been brandless just hoping to get lucky. I’ll have to give Bosch a try next.
Oddly though, I’ve got a pair of Michelins I put on my Charger back in 2005 and they’re still good. They hardly get used and I tuck them under my hood when I don’t need them (it looks better) so they’re out of the sun, but I turn them on and they’re silent and will clear the windshield like new.
Birddog
> Kit 'Haddy' Iwamatsu
10/27/2015 at 21:55 |
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Yeah.. Probably not.
When I went from 265/70/15s (roughly 29’ tall) to 35x12.50x15s on my old Xterra my speedo was only off by roughly 7 mph.
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Kit 'Haddy' Iwamatsu
> Birddog
10/28/2015 at 00:03 |
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There was a hint of sarcasm in there on my part :P
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BigBlock440
> TheOnelectronic
10/28/2015 at 08:00 |
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I was just very impressed with the snow and slush traction of my mud tires. Something like this:
Even in the slush and light snow there was no wheel spin. Snow tires may be better, and will almost certainly be better on ice, but somehow these ended up doing very well in every snow situation I’ve encountered since putting them on. I’ve also heard good things about other brands of mud tires, though they may not be purely “mud tires” so much as “tires that do good in mud”.
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Birddog
> Kit 'Haddy' Iwamatsu
10/28/2015 at 10:04 |
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I should have spotted that.
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MontegoMan562 is a Capri RS Owner
> BigBlock440
10/28/2015 at 10:29 |
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Awesome, if the Michelins are working.....maybe stick with them. I know the Bosch Icon’s are pretty sweet tho
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BigBlock440
> MontegoMan562 is a Capri RS Owner
10/28/2015 at 10:38 |
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TBH, I’m not confident that I’d have any better luck with a new pair. At least they were cheap.
I just have a very strong opinion on wipers right now because I literally bought a pair of Rain-Xs a month ago and they’re already crap, though they were never that good to begin with. The Rain-X itself (the wipers were coated in it and applied it to the windshield), I’m a believer and will definitely use again. Just not in wiper form.