December 29, 2008

Fit Vs. Snowstorm 08 = Fail

Time sure flies. It is now the 3rd Winter I've had my little Fit. The last couple of winters, the car wasn't great in the white stuff, but it handled it ok, even with the factory all-season 175 width Dunlop SP31 tires.

This year, unfortunately, the Fit was defeated. A number of factor contributed to this defeat. One, I am now running on wider 195 width tires since the upgrade to the Civic SIR wheels. Second, the tires that came with those wheels are worn out Bridgestone Potenza RE92s in the rear, which are summer only tires that are terrible even in the wet. These were actually in the front before my last service, at which time I moved them to the rear and rotated the also crappy Kumho Powermax, (yeah, they don't even make this anymore) tires with slightly better threads, and a just for show M+S rating on the sidewall.

Third, Vancouver is currently 2cm shy of resetting it's own December snowfall record. 88cm have already fallen this month, and the record is 89.7cm set in 1964. The whole Metro Vancouver area is not used to this kind of snow, and thus do not budget much for snow removal. This compounded with my crappy tires made the Fit a fun little sled, and nothing more; You need to push it to get it moving, then when it does, it doesn't have much control. Of course parking on the street and having to crawl over a snowbank just to get out doesn't help either. I'm just glad I was too lazy to get the Progress Rear Anti-Sway Bar installed before the snowstorms.

... I miss my Audi.

December 05, 2008

Oil Change #6 (30985km)

Just looking back at my previous maintenance posts, and noticed that January 31, when I had my recall done, I was at 14,480km. Today, I just had my 30,000km oil change done. So I'm did a bit over 15,000km in 10 months or so.

Anyway, I noticed right away when I picked up those Civic SIR wheels that one of the rears was a bit off balance at above 110km/h. So I had all 4 tires checked for balance while I had the car in for the oil change. Sure enough, one of the rear was out of balance and fixed. Living across from a construction site sucks 'cause apparently there was another nail in my tire. but this time it was not near the sidewall so it should seal with the plug. We also rotated the tires front and back just because the rear Khumos were at least all-seasons, while the front front Bridgestones were not.

Also took the opportunity to put on polished closed factory lug nuts and wheel locks on the wheels in place of the open ended ones that came with my original stock steelies. Thanks to "Doc" for letting me borrow them off his car since they won't work with his custom polished Volk TE-37's anyways. *jealous*

Otherwise, just your standard oil and filter change every 5000km. Oil still looked pretty clean when it came out, but that's a good thing.