Time for "Historic" plates

The VIN plate on the door of my first-year Miata says that it was built in May 1989.

Which means that it's now over 25 years old.

NYS DMV says that I can get "Historic" plates for it in the next calendar year: so, January 2015.  But it's already registered through March of 2016. (And "Historic" plates cost more.)

A quick Google doesn't turn up a VIN-decoder that will tell me the exact day it rolled off the line; but it seems to be around #4,0000 in the run.  (The last I knew, production-to-date was in the 900,000 ballpark.)

Cupholder Optional

Back in the fall of 'ought two, my family outgrew our '91 Civic Wagon, and I was forced to buy a minivan.

Horrible a prospect as this was, it meant that I could finally retire my sixteen-year-old '87 Civic, the 'Death Car' of its day.

As it happened, that same season a college chum of mine came back from several years of working in Germany with no family, no job, and no real base for American operations. He cheerfully took the Death Car off my hands (...and would soon drive it to Mexico, but that's another story...), which solved both of our problems.

It was a 4-door sedan, which he converted to a sleeper by ripping out the passenger seats, and building in a plywood sleeping platform. The conversion took place in my driveway (...with my tools...), so he drove off into the sunset and left me the passenger-side bucket seat.

The seat has lived in my storage shed ever since - nearly a decade now - until I finally got around to putting it to use.

This year, in preparing for the transit of Venus, I went to NEAF
http://www.rocklandastronomy.com/neaf/index.html
and was inspired to FINALLY convert my old car seat to an astronomical viewing chair. It was seeing a $350 observing chair that sparked me into motion. (I have a picture somewhere.)
 Just binocular holders ran into three digits:
e.g., http://www.company7.com/ua/graphics/unimountrear623750.jpg is $300
 here's a homebrew version:
http://www.shoestringastronomy.com/diy/images/binoc_mount.jpg

Anyway, see: http://www.gillcouto.com/cloudynights/binochair/binochair03.jpg
 or http://www.whiteoaks.com/gcsp2001/800/Dscn0661.jpg
or http://www.astrogizmos.com/images/LED/chair%201.jpg
 for examples of what I'm working toward.

 $5 in PVC pipe, $5 PVC fittings, a $13 Lazy-Susan bearing, $7 of SAE seat-mounting hardware, and I'm on my way. I probably have enough lumber on hand for most of this.

 (It should probably get some sort of feet to lift it off the damp ground, though adding an azimuth circle and GPS is probably overkill. (GoTo drive! Selsyn motors!) Come to think of it, red LED running lights might be needed.) So maybe another $20 for more fittings and hardware - cupholder optional - and then it'll be time for a decent pair of astro binoculars. (I have my eye on the Chinese-made Celestron 20x80s, $100.)

Dammit, back in 2002 I should have kept the seatbelt.....

I feel so ...used

(Or: Wow, I'm Dumb.)

My new 2012 Civic takes 21st century motor oil.
OK, it IS the 21st century, I can adjust my thinking to this.

Nowhere in the owner's manual does it talk about a change interval.
But the car gives you a dashboard meter that tells you "Percentage of oil life left".

OK, "Everything's up to date in Kansas City" -
maybe there's some modern trick at work here.
Maybe they measure the viscosity, and the car calculates the oil life remaining.
Maybe they optically sense the opacity of the oil and calculate how dirty it is.
Maybe there's some modern µ-proc trick I'm not even thinking of.
Who knows where they get this "percentage life" number from?
We're living in the 21st century.

OK, I decide to TRUST the dashboard meter. Extrapolating,
it's telling me that the break-in oil is good for 10,000 miles.
Wow. It's great, living in the future.

So, the car rolls over 7000 miles, and soon after,
the dashboard meter decrements and says I've got 20%-of-oil-life left.

But I absolutely can't stand it, and go get an oil change.
Afterward, the kid tells me that he reset the meter for me:
which implies that it's simply odometer-driven.
The "Oil Life" meter may not actually be "measuring" ANYTHING.
Maybe it's just a reminder of your mileage since the last oil change.

*So maybe there's NO high-tech real-time measurement of the state of the oil, no, nothing at all.* [Whoops - see UPDATE, below]

Wow, am I an idiot. [This remains a distinct possibility, however.]

On the other hand: the car specifies snythetic 0w-20 oil:
which IS better than dead-dinosaur oil,
and which does have nominally twice the lifespan.
(And: which costs fully twice as much.)

So:
Even if they tell you there's no break-in required, and even if it's
not actually overdue for an oil change - the interval still FEELS over-long.

UPDATE: Hey, I was right the first time. Looking into the question, it seems that the car's CPU really DOES monitor some combination of oil temp, engine revs, time, mileage, etc. - - and really DOES calculate "oil life remaining". What it can't do is know that you've changed the oil - thus the need for the manual reset.

Our Story Thus Far V

V. Gas mileage.

The EPA SAYS their numbers are for the median driver: some will do better, some will do worse.
I can and already have gotten 40mpg out of this car. It's only rated 28city/36 highway/ 31 overall.
("Lightfoot Bob", they call me....)

The EPA says the automatic-transmission version actually gets slightly better mileage, which I find hard to believe. But the AT would be about $14.27 more per monthly payment; not enough to offset the theoretically lower gas bill, not until gas goes to $10/gallon or so. (Or unless I keep it another twenty years, which is now demographically unlikely. (I've already outlived my mother....))

The recent visit to Utica was definitely over 40-mpg, for 200+ miles. I need to keep "Leadfoot Maggie" away from the car if I hope to turn in a >40mpg tankful, though.

Oh, and the thing with "How can you live without A/C?"
It was 84F over Labor Day weekend, and we did fine with it. It won't be that warm again until April or May.
Hypothetical A/C would be nothing but useless dead weight - and probably close to $200 in car payments - until then.
For what I'm not spending on A/C, I could rent an air-conditioned car for the worst week of the summer.

Our Story Thus Far IV

IV. The Radio

Being the stripped version, the car arrives with speakers - but no radio. I laughed when the salesman offered to sell me an $800 dealer-installed radio. I checked with the dealer's parts department: I could buy the factory radio over-the-counter myself for $430 + tax, install it in myself, and save over $330. They'd have to order the thing, but that should take only a few days. Or I could install my own after-market radio and save something over $600.

But, for a while there, it looked like I might have outwitted myself: neither Crutchfield nor Scoche, (nor the other brand whose name escapes me) has an installation kit available just yet for the brand-new Civic. (Oops.) I even called Crutchfield; they said they'd have a kit by the summer of 2012, nine months from now. Three local installers said they didn't have those parts. Best Buy said they'd certainly be able to do something - I even made an appointment with them - but when I went in, they wanted me to buy my own harness connector kits first. (Best Buy graciously gave me the Scoche parts numbers, which helped me figure out what I needed.)

My pal Aaron ran down an on-line forum where a guy posted pictures of his radio installation: by looking at those, I was able to confirm that the parts numbers that Best Buy provided me were correct. (The wiring harness is available because it's the very same as the one in a 2008 Accord - which makes it a perfect example of how these options move down-market after a few years.) I ordered the wiring harness and the antenna connector on-line; went to Walmart and bought a Sony head-end with radio/cd/ usb connector.

- Sony receiver: $79 + tax = $85.32.
(Which is sort of astonishingly cheap: 4ch x 50W, AM/FM/CD/ USB/aux)
- Wiring harness: $16 delivered
- Ant. connector: $22 delivered
- A bit of heatshrink and solder
...for a total of just about $125 - say, about $675 less than letting the dealer do it, a saving of fully $11/month on the car payment. That's a total saving of more than two car payments, 1/27 of the entire cost of the car.

I spent a very pleasant hour one recent Saturday afternoon (Oct. 8) soldering up the new wiring harness. So it took me 38 days to assemble the elements for this job, mostly because I couldn't believe that parts for such a common car weren't yet for sale SOMEWHERE, o I kept looking in ever-more-improbable places. (It also took me a few minutes to locate the right toolbox, the one with the soldering gear....)

Now I have a car stereo that's at least electrically connected - I'll mechanically finish the installation when those parts are available in the spring. (Probably another $25-40.) Right now, it's rattling around loose in the dash, propped up on some scrap wood. The Youngest Member and I took a lovely Sunday drive up to Curtis Lumber to shop their 'exotic wood' department, and came home with a $1 scrap of cherry to mask the opening in the dash.

The stock speakers aren't bad at all. The 21st century receiver has a basket full of annoyances - multiple menus, unlabeled controls, arbitrary and unmute-able beeps, etc. But despite that, it's a joy having a CD player / iPod player in the car. My family minivan has had a CD player since 2002; but my commuter cars haven't, not until now, in the year 2011.

Our Story Thus Far III

III. Buying the Car

Was relatively painless. It had taken me a month or so of shopping to get serious, a while longer to email Honda to ask for their help in finding a stripper, and then a couple weeks for it to come in.

For the first time in my life, I didn't even bother to drive the thing beforehand, figuring that the ninth-generation Civic could offer me no surprises, certainly no surprises that would be a dealbreaker. As the Death Car shows, I'm reasonably accepting in what I can accommodate myself to driving. So, why even bother with the test-drive ritual?

The salesman was somewhat bemused by my car and by my deal: he noted that the CUSTOMER is allowed to call Honda and request a specific configuration of car, but the dealership is supposed to take what they're allocated.

They DID try to sell me a dealer-installed radio: $730, plus sales tax, plus financing. That was nearly 5% of the price of the car. I passed on that chance.

(ProTip: you can spot the DX at a hundred paces because the cheap version comes only in silver, and it has cheap black-plastic doorhandles; every other Civic on the road has door handles that match the paint job. And we quickly learned that a "four-door compact sedan in silver gray" is just about the most anonymous car on the road. It's like every tenth car matches this description.)

The deal itself was only a nominal 2% off sticker - but the sticker price was just about 15% below the MSRP of the standard LX version that they wanted me to buy, so I'm happy enough. Honda offered 0.9% / 60-month financing: a total cost of ~$410 for the loan, spread over five years. That's only about 27¢/day for the loan. Even my Credit Union was at 2.75%, fully a thousand bucks more. My payment is only $303.51. I see 4-year-old used Civics being sold for more than I paid. (Just for the record, I should look up the sticker prices of the top-end Civic, and of the hybrid Civic. Later: The top Civic (EX-L with Sat. Nav.) is a remarkable $24,225; the Hybrid is $24,050, and comes only with a CVT, and gets 44/44/44 mpg. Oh, and there's a 4dr Si for $24,675.)

Now I'm trying to think of something interesting to do with the money I saved. (Something more interesting than buying fuel oil for the winter, anyway....)

Our Story Thus Far II

Part II. The email to Honda

In a flight of optimism, back in early July I had filled out Honda's "on-line quote generator", and asked the five local Honda dealers for a price on a stripped Civic. I learned that using the online quote requestor does nothing except to give their sales weasels your contact information and an excuse to annoy you.

Four of them ignored my request and tried to up-sell me on the standard-issue Civic. The stripper is $16750; the standard LX is $18,625 - but you'd have to special-order even that, as they all come through as $19,425 AT versions. That's fully $2675 more - $2889 with tax.

As in: "Pretty soon, you're talking real money."

Keeler Motors actually quoted me a price on the car I wanted. $16,275 on a $16,575 5-sp 4-door DX.

So I went in to talk to them - and they said that they could ORDER me one for fall delivery, call it three months: but only IF I gave them a $500 deposit. (And I would want to do this, why, exactly?)

So I went home somewhat dissatisfied; and, after a few days, I emailed Honda's VP of North American Sales and asked if HE could find me a Civic DX.
I was stunned when he replied almost immediately, asking for details. He basically told me "we're putting our best men on it. Our best men."

And somewhat to my surprise, twelve days later, he came up with a car: I got a somewhat bemused call from Keeler, that they had a car arrive with MY name on it. Built in Indiana, and re-directed from a Honda dealer in New Hampshire. By bypassing the local dealers, I got the car I wanted.

Our Story Thus Far (Adventures with the New Car)

0. The End of The Death Car (see previous post). We came back from Cape Cod in time to give away the old Civic and turn in the plates.

I. Shopping for the new Civic
So, back in the spring of 2011 - recognizing that my 1991 Civic was becoming untenable - I started tuning in to the new-car market, and noticed that the 2012 Civic was already for sale, spotting it up at Mohawk Honda as early as April. By the time I was seriously shopping in the summertime, their initial allotment of 30-40 Civics was already gone.

I looked at the Smart Car, drove the new Fiat 500, drove a Mazda 3 (and Mazda PAID me $25 to do so...); considered the Fit, the Verso, a few others - including a 2006 $9000 Scion B - but determined that what I really wanted was the stripped Honda Civic.

Only to find that nobody would sell one to me. Rensselaer Honda explicitly told me that "We CANNOT sell a car in this market without air conditioning." Which makes me wonder: exactly how far north do you have to go before A/C isn't considered mandatory? Yes, we get a bit of hot and muggy weather here, but It hits 90F here on all of eight afternoons a year. Eight days, and that calls for A/C? Americans are wimps.

I don't much like or need A/C - and, at least until my Miata finally dies - this car is meant to be primarily a winter beater. In theory, at least, a winter beater should NEVER need A/C.

And the step from the stripped DX to the standard-equipment LX is at least $2000.
Honda asks $800 for an automatic transmission, too.
So the step up to go from from a stripped 5-speed DX to the standard-issue LX with A/C and an automatic transmission is fully $3000. (Maggie's first Civic was only $3400.) And as my father pointed out: "The parts you don't buy will never fail."

On its 20th birthday, the Death Car's registration expired -
and so rather than renew it - and buy new plates - instead, I took it off the road.
Which left us without a spare car. Which isn't a real problem, except my Miata is now solely a fair-weather driver, and the family minivan is the least reliable car I've ever owned. It was time to buy a replacement for the Death Car.

The End of an Era

New York State is switching license plates (again).

I've already blogged at length about my adventures with my current Death Car.*

Its registration expired yesterday (on its 20th birthday) - so, rather than go to the trouble of
- getting it inspected (...almost certainly not a trivial undertaking...),
- renewing the registration for the next two years,
and
- paying for and attaching new license plates
(which would involve the non-trivial question "Will the old plates come off?")

instead I gave it to my mechanic, turned in the plates, and canceled the insurance.

Gone. Twenty years of service.

It was the 2nd-best car we ever owned, but I was getting scared to drive it, and even more scared to carry my family around in it.

(Reference point for "What scares Bob in a car?": over the decades, I've driven at least four cars without brakes. (At least five, if you count the time I ripped the handbrake out of the floor in Maggie's first Civic.) But the Death Car scares me.)

For two? grand or so (a gas tank (no longer easily available), some exhaust work, the BUMPER), I could have kept it going in its current 'reserve' status for another year or two, but really, enough is enough: twenty years was not a bad run. It's been hard to calculate the mileage lately because the fill pipe had rusted free of the gas tank and so it leaked very badly (pints? quarts?) when you filled it - but it was still getting in the 35mpg ballpark right up to the end.

I guess the lesson here is that "Once MAJOR PARTS start falling off, a car's days are numbered." (The rear bumper rusted off 18 months ago...)

January 2010:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/asyouknow_bob/4415154886/

* This iteration of my "Death Car" (which is an Anne Beattie reference, you really should read Chilly Scenes of Winter) was the last (1991, fourth-generation) Honda Civic Wagon, purchased new in July of 1991 when my wife got shy of our previous Death Car, our high-mileage '87 Civic.

Annals of DIY

All physical labor is now a realm that's entirely owned by The Three Stooges.

Over my lifetime, I've changed the oil on a car somewhere around 100 times.
(Keep in mind that, in the bad old days, the standard change interval was 3,000 miles.)

I finally changed the oil on our Mazda MPV, and managed to do basically EVERYTHING wrong.

OK, I'm now old enough to not much enjoy crawling under cars, so, for the past eight years I've been paying people to change the oil on my wife's minivan. It's irked me, but

1) There's a shroud that needs to be removed to reach the oil filter (and then replaced)
2) The drain is far enough back that it needs car ramps to reach comfortably - and my ramps are too steep to drive the MPV up
3) It's a 5-quart system, which is a lot more mess to dispose of
than my usual 3-qt-cars.
And (needless to say)
4) I hate that car with every fiber of my being, and don't WANT to work on it.

Tracking down the MPV's current gas leak, I had occasion to look under the engine room, and discovered that, at some point, the chimps at Jiffy Lube have snapped off the part of the shroud that covers the oil filter.

Which is actually a GOOD thing.

OK, the "underneath" portion of an oil change for the MPV used to consist of ten or twelve steps, depending upon what you count as a discrete therblig:
a) Remove THREE bolts, remove shroud
b) remove drain bolt
c) remove filter
d) replace drain bolt
e) replace filter
f) replace shroud, run home THREE shroud bolts.

With the shroud now pre-broken for me, the task now reduces to the same four steps (b-e) as any other oil change. So I went out and got myself a set of MPV-compliant car ramps and changed the oil. (And now I'm the owner of TWO cheap sets of car ramps...)

My oil-change kit is small enough to fit in a hand box in the trunk of the Miata.
The drain bolt on the MPV is 15mm, not the 17mm that I keep in the car (...er, space being at a premium in the Miata trunk, I don't keep a full socket set there...) - so I had to go inside and rustle around my tool chest until I came up with a 15mm socket. ("Spread out, spread out!")

OK, climb back under and remove the crankcase drain plug - and there was enough oil in the crankcase (and shooting out through a smaller hole...) to send the stream several inches further than I usually see, so it missed the drain pan entirely, and splashed on the driveway.
("Hey, FELLAS!")

Five quarts is a lot more than 3 quarts - so the drain pan I've been using for at least 20 years of Miata changes FOLDED under the weight, splashing a cup of hot used motor oil on my shoes, on the driveway, etc. ("Nyuck nyuck nyuck")

(Note to self: buy a bigger, stronger, more rigid drain pan.)
And then the drain pan was full enough to overflow its pouring spout, spilling more used oil down the outside of the Used Oil jugs.... ("Hrrr-RUFF!")

Oh, and I dropped the drain bolt into the drain pan. Which I've done before, of course; but this time I managed to pour the bolt INTO the 'used oil' jug, and had to decant the oil back and forth until I could fish the thing out.
("Woooo wooooo wooooo wooooo wooooo wooooo....")

If I had been deep enough under the car to require the use of my garage creeper, I would have done my version of the "Curley-spinning-on-the-floor" dance move.



Jiffy Lube is now something like $36?, $26? with coupons? Something like that. Even NAPA is $27, with sales tax.

DIY cost me something like $13, so I saved at least ten bucks, maybe twenty.
I'll put that toward replacing my oil-splashed shoes....

Addendum: On the walk-around, I spotted a bubble on the front-right tire, something that I would NOT have caught had I simply gone to Jiffy Lube. So, it's entirely possible that a DIY oil change saved our lives.

Tomorrow's Thrilling Installment: On to BJ's to buy new tires.

Update: I TRIED to put a pair of tires on it - but the shop REFUSED to let it in when it's dripping gas. So the new tires have to wait until the gas leak is fixed, probably Thursday.

You might think that I would know better by now.....

I went out for lunch on Monday and, on a whim, got an oil change.

Aaron once used a mechanic - a Russian immigrant - whose reaction was "Jiffy Lu-be?!? Feh!!!" Now I remember why.

Ok, the '91 Civic has the oil filter on the back side of the block, pretty much inaccessible unless you get 'way under the car. I'm too big and too old to bother, so I've always paid to have somebody change the oil for me.

Similarly for the minivan - the filter is somewhat more accessible, but requires removing a shroud each time, AND crawling under the car.

The Miata, though, has the filter right on the side of the block, ready-to-hand from above.

So I need to get several oil changes per year, but I almost always do the Miata myself.

I was driving past JiffyLube on Monday, and they still had their "buy-one-get-another-free" deal.

Hmmm... my arithmetic brain immediately went to work on the problem.... let's see, Jiffy Lube is $35, NAPA is $25... doing it myself is about eight bucks, plus an hour of my time. Hmm, TWO oil changes for $35 is still a couple bucks high - and I really enjoy changing the oil on the Miata, as it's still about the most butch thing I do.

However, the Miata was Right Now, This Minute badly overdue for a change. I got it running a month ago, but it's rained so much that I hadn't yet gotten around to its vernal oil change.

While I could do it myself on Wednesday and save the out-of-pocket expense, is an hour of my time really worth the three bucks or so I would save?

I went to JiffyLube.

We did their little Kabuki ritual where they bow and show me the air filter, and I bow back and politely rebuff their advances; this time, they also tried to sell me on $15 of Special Old Car Oil, too. I made them give me the standard 10w-30.

And of course
a) they disturbed the wire from the Oil Pressure sender - which killed the OP meter reading;
b) they denied it was their fault. We played "Uh - it was like that when it came in." "No it wasn't" "Yes, it musta been. You can change out the sender pretty easily",(etc.) for a while, much like a Python routine; eventually,
c) they played with it for a minute, but had very little interest in getting it to work.

So after paying somebody to change my oil, there I was, under the hood anyway, tweaking the wire off the oil pressure sender.

Had I done it myself, I would have had the foresight to wear old clothes. As it was, there I was in a dress shirt and tie, up to the elbow in Miata. At least they let me wash up before I went back to work.