Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Just a little winter photo! As you can see, we’ve got our first snow! Quite late for Estonia, isn’t it? Last year it was like 2 months earlier.

So I decided to sell the Audi. The contract became effective officially on Friday. Me and my girlfriend loved the A6, so why did we sell it? Well, it was indeed a very good car. Saying good, I mean good to drive and with great performance. It wasn’t as reliable as I expected, though. I had never owned a German car before and didn’t really know what to expect. I probably spent around 1500 EUR on its repairs over the one and a half years I drove it. Even before selling it to the new owner, I fixed all the important things that had come up and he got a nicely running car without remarkable flaws. I wanted to make the deal so that I knew I was selling a working car and that I could sleep well after giving the car over to the new owner. We had a 14 day return period which ended on Friday and if I had left some issues unfixed, they certainly would have come up sooner or later.

Reliability wasn’t the main selling reason. I’ve had the Chevy Suburban for several years and altough I have tried selling it once, I finished that process before it really went to a deal. I’ve decided that this Suburban is a car I want to own for years to come since it’s a car with good history and it sure is remarkably reliable. However, when I had the Audi I was always missing the driving experience of the Chevy which I do love. It just has its own specialities which attach me to this car so strong. It doesn’t have full time 4×4, it doesn’t have all the electronics, it doesn’t have the same fuel economy FOR SURE, but it’s still awesome. It is one of those cars which has a soul and it felt like the Audi didn’t. The Audi messed with my nerves a lot of times in situations where you just didn’t want any trouble. I don’t even want to get to the details cause I’m not sure how many of you are interested in them, but well, I hadn’t had any other car behaving like this. The Chevy has had its problems which have always been fixed but none of its issues have been so urgent to fix that I couldn’t even drive the truck and most of the things have always been an easy repair. The engine was messing up last winter by not starting up properly and consuming too much fuel with Check Engine light on also. I remember I thought that it might be something serious with the electronics. However, it ended up being the water temp. sensor located on the thermostat housing. Disconnect the single cable, take the wheel wrench, screw the old sensor off, install the new one and that’s it. 13 EUR well spent. The truck ran a bit rough right after and then stabilized shortly. The check engine light later went off and haven’t seen it ever since. I think the only very serious issue with the truck was this Summer when the intake manifold started to leak coolant quite rapidly and I had to drive it to the service shop where it was fixed for 200 EUR.

Don’t get me wrong – I loved the Audi and it served us well during the period we had it. Basically, I decided that since I already owned the Suburban, the Audi didn’t really have a proper status in our fleet of cars anymore as we are now living in town again and the distances driven are not so long. Good luck for the new owner and happy new kilometres!

Things going on with my cars these days:

The Suburban is working nicely and we serviced it a couple of days ago which included oil change and replacement of air, oil and fuel filters. The usual stuff.

Today I bought new tires for the Suburban. Since the winter is coming, it was about time to find a good replacement for the current Cooper Discoverer M+S tires which don’t have much tread left. So I was able to acquire four little used BF Goodrich All Terrains! They are basically like new and I got them for like half the price of new ones. What a nice deal, really. Will be installed next week and I will then post pictures, too.

The Suburban is still lacking some fine audio equipment. Tomorrow I will be testing an Alpine subwoofer with a friend and I will probably buy it to improve the bass effect in the car. It will certainly improve it a lot, that’s for sure.

The Corvette is in its garage and the yearly inspection has expired. I won’t inspect it this year anymore, it’s put away for Winter and waiting for next Spring. Meanwhile I am planning some engine work during winter since the engine is sometimes puffing out some blue smoke and I will check other items as well. I will work on the interior and try to fix some paint issues. I will be updating you fellas here on my blog.

So, that’s it for now. Enjoy a memorable picture of the Audi taken last winter. It looked nice:

A week ago a nice event took place in Southern part of Estonia which is more than 200 kilometres away from the capital where we live. Ofcourse we wanted to go. However, the weather was not good enough to take the Corvette because I never drive it intentionally into rainy weather. And since it’s Autumn, you can NEVER know where some rain might show up and ruin your day. So, since we have only one more American car left in our “fleet”, the other option was the Suburban.

It wasn’t too easy to make it, though! The Suburban had been messing up the whole Summer and since we didn’t drive it very much and had a busy Summer by all means, we didn’t take it to repair. One of the big issues was starter and everything related – it often made terrible noise when cranking and the bendix didn’t want to retract automatically when engine started so that caused an even worse noise. I had the whole starting system fail on me several times during Summer and I fixed it by re-aligning the starter myself and retightening the bolts. I knew it was just a very temporary solution anyway.

The other thing was rear differential – I knew there was something wrong because it made gear noise when coming to a halt and especially in right turns. We first thought that a bearing could be worn, but that wasn’t it.

A week before the event I finally took the Suburban to repair. Pretty soon the problem with the starter was diagnosed – the flywheel was out of alignment and was therefore floating up and down by about 2 millimetres. That’s quite a lot. So, the transmission had to be removed and then they could figure out whether the flywheel itself was bad or perhaps the crankshaft out of center instead…

Once everything was apart, the fault was found to be in the flywheel. Since I already replaced that about one and a half years ago, it must have been simply a faulty part from the beginning and finally messed up the starter and ate its teeth so it couldn’t start properly anymore. The flywheel was sent to Finland for warranty and a new one was installed on the Suburban. That was fine, thank god. The bendix on the starter was also destroyed so a new one had to be installed as well. That pretty much concluded the starting system repairs. Everything was put back together and worked flawlessly.

Now the rear differential was much more painful. The differential case was somehow broken! Don’t ask how – the only heavier job I did with this truck was towing some slightly heavier than normal trailers but that could have only finished up an already messed up differential, not destroy a well working thing. Anyway, we had to find a new rear diff. Brand new GM parts are too expensive to order here and therefore we had to find a good used part. In fact, we found a rear end from a K1500 Tahoe which was a 4×4 and wanted to replace the whole rear end to eliminate any possibilities that my Suburban’s rear end could have been faulty somewhere. However, it just didn’t fit properly. Strange that the 4×4 rear end is just a tiny bit wider than the 2WD.  Fortunately, the differential itself was a perfect fit. The diff was found to be in good shape and therefore we replaced just that. The diff is a G80 with Auburn full locking system. Rear end was assembled back together and the oil with special LSD oil additive was poured in.

That repair really made a huge difference to this vehicle. The engine starts up like new, the drive is very smooth and there is no gear noise whatsoever. I’m very happy that it worked out like this.

So, we got the car just a day before the Southern Estonia event and were able to drive it there the next day. The event was nice but I wouldn’t consider it anything too special. Just a lot of such cars we don’t see very often in Tallinn and ofcourse a nice long cruise on the hilly roads. The weather was nice, too. We stopped at a barn where one of the Estonian Cadillac Club members keeps his cars collection. It was quite a nice set of cars, really.

So, a nice day all in all and certainly well worth the money spent :)

Hey,

As you probably know, I live in Estonia which is a rather northern country of Europe and we certainly have our own little weirdnesses… Here are some facts which in some way really are true! :)

You know you are from Estonia when…

• You know that going to the sauna is 80% about networking and 20% about washing
• Words like “veoauto”, “täieõiguslik” or “jää-äär” sound perfectly pronouncable to you
• … You think that any beverage below 20% is non-alcoholic
• You don’t think that terviSEKS is a funny word
• A language should have at least 14 cases
• You are so proud of every Estonian that you correct foreigners who say that the population is 1 million, not 1.3 million as it actually is
• You presume that all other countries also have ubiquitous Internet access.
• You know the names of all three black people living in Estonia.
• A person that speaks three languages isn’t the slightest bit impressive.
• If it takes more than 10 minutes to drive somewhere within the city, you are mildly annoyed because it is too far.
• People who type slowly and carefully using only their index fingers are subconsciously considered to be foreigners.
• You’re proud that Ernst Hemingway wrote that you can find at least one Estonian in every harbour in the world
• Ten months of the year it is too dark to be up and two months it is too light to go to bed.
• You check the thermometer before going out
• You are nationalistic about Skype (it is actually an Estonian company)

As with all things in our lives, when it comes to choosing between one thing or the other to tackle first, we must learn to prioritize and focus on that which needs the most attention.  When it comes to car repairs and upgrading, that can mean choosing between new tires and installing that brand new stereo system you’ve been hoping to hook up.  In an ideal world, we may be able to accomplish all of those things we’re looking to do, but thanks to time constraints and limits on the amount we can afford to spend on extraneous pursuits, we sometimes have to choose between those new tires and that upgraded stereo.  Below, we’ll go over areas on your car that should be of primary concern to you when upgrading, so you don’t waste time on areas that can be overlooked until another date.

Lighting

It’s hard to argue against lighting repairs.  Even if you only drive during daylight, there are always incidents (highway construction, tunnel entry, the sudden appearance of rain) that may require you to turn on your car’s headlights, so you can’t just go without them.  Besides, good lighting is essential to your safety, so you want to make sure both your car’s headlight and tail light arrays are in great working order.  If you need to replace both with brighter, more effective automotive lighting technologies, try using customizable HID headlights and super modern LED tail lights.

The Engine

The engine is the heart of your car, and without its continued optimal operation, your car will be a sitting duck before long.  If you discover any problem with your car’s engine, or have noticed a warning light go off on your car’s dash display, make sure to get the engine checked out right away.  After all, your car won’t do you much good if it won’t run, no matter how many other nice upgrades you’ve given to it.

Interior Space

This may be a bit of a shocker, but it’s a hard one for many car enthusiasts to follow.  For many people who love their cars, they want their vehicles to look their best and perform their best, so they focus all of their efforts on exterior design fixes and performance part upgrades.  The problem with that approach is that it ignores the needs of the driver and his passengers.  Smelly interior upholstery and broken dash gauges make for easy problems to fix, and they shouldn’t be overlooked just so you can add a new rear spoiler on to the back of your car.