Summer is a busy time and in addition to personal life I also have to do multiple jobs. However, I thought I’d give you an update on how all the 3 cars are currently doing.

Corvette:

This must be my most reliable car of them all. I can say that after the new brakes were installed in Spring, we’ve driven this car around whole summer without any need for maintenance. Well, ofcourse I do the oil changes and filter changes as necessary, but nothing has broken or worn out. Somehow everything just works. Recently though the starter began to demand a bit too much energy and is rotating the engine slower than it did. Just need to take it off some time and send to rebuild. Nothing serious anyway. The retractable lights are having some vibrations when going over bumpy roads and this is a rather usual thing with such lights on any car. The construction and retraction mechanism wears out and causes a play to some degree in the whole construction. We tried to tighten the light systems and had some luck but to make them perfect I have to remove the front bumper assembly and disassemble the lights a bit for better access underneath. This car is certainly turning heads around the city every time we drive it. Some people want to race and the others just want me to spin the tires from traffic lights. The exhaust is really loud now and in the combination with manual gearbox you really get the greatest bang for the buck. All I have to do is take the foot from the gas pedal when the RPM is somewhere around 4500 RPM and the rumble which then comes from the engine is absolutely stunning. I must record it one day for you to hear.

We also attended the end of July American car cruise in Tallinn and we took some nice photos, too. It was rather enjoyable, although I really prefer driving the Vette a bit stronger than just idling in the convoy :)

1979 Corvette C3 in front of Estonian Parliament Building

See more photos of the cruise…

Audi A6:

Our newest family member the year 2005 Audi A6 is behaving nicely. It’s a really economical car with around 31 MPG (7.5 liters per 100 km) average from my experience. Sometimes in the pure city driving it rises a bit but not significantly if you don’t utilize all the 165 kilowatts. I did find out an issue with the car shortly after purchase and it was in the transmission – apparently the torque converter lock was worn out and therefore began causing RPM jump and later really noticeable torque jump at constant speed. Fortunately there are still some nice car stores around – they agreed to fix that issue themselves no questions asked and some time ago I got the car back from the repair. Now everything is perfect. By the way, the torque converter issue seems to be a typical problem on these vehicles when I made a quick search in Google.

All in all, I am VERY glad that I decided to buy the Audi. It’s a very good car in every aspect – nice looking and elegant, very well made interior, great handling, 4 wheel drive, economical yet powerful diesel engine, perfect factory audio system etc. I really recommend it!

Chevy Suburban:

When the Audi came the Suburban was replaced as my daily driver. Since I moved a bit away from the city we have a lot more driving and the fuel economy of the Audi is about 3 times less. At the moment the truck is certainly the least driven of all our cars and sometimes we just take it out for fun. It’s a cool vehicle to drive but I must say that if I just want to go around and drive for pleasure, I prefer the Vette and for all the other needs I use the Audi because it’s just so comfortable and also cheap to drive. We also use the Suburban to tow a trailer when we need to. Sometimes just around the horse farm.

The car itself runs fine and the only issue with it is the steering pump which is leaking. It’s a new (refurbished) pump and it basically began leaking after just a few months from installation. Quite sad, really…

First of all I need to apologize for not posting anything new for a long time. Things have been really busy and in addition to my main job I have been working on pushing up the car stickers brand Red Rock Decals and we are also going to start a horse supplies and services business with my girlfriend which I will write about sometime later perhaps. Anyway, I promise I will be writing here a lot more often now and will keep you updated on what’s going on over here.

About the Corvette – what I haven’t told you about yet is that I I was somehow able to mess up both of the rear brake supports after rebuilding them. I simply over-tightened the ventilation screws on both calipers and they broke so easily nobody still believes me… So, I needed new brakes. I decided to buy the SSBC full brake package from Summit Racing and it was a good decision. The car works nicely now and I have no more issues with brakes. We have driven it for several hundred miles this Spring without any large issues. Just the Q-Jet carb needs a bit of tuning and perhaps a rebuild. I’ll try to do it within a month or so. Oh, and I need new front tires! Will be probably 235 width Cooper Cobras which I will order from Germany. They have good prices there compared to our local suppliers.

Suburban has been a bit of a tricky lady for us over the past few months. First of all, somebody decided to rob my laptop from the back seat when I was parking in front of a suburb house and it happened at about 10.30 AM!! What a stupid time to steal anything, but they managed to do it. They broke the left side middle row door window and got my laptop with ease. I know, I know… I was stupid to leave it there in the first place. But I’ve learned my lesson now as I’m typing this message from my brand new Dell Latitude E6400 series ;) The Suburban has got a state of the art alarm system now which lets me know of anything happening with the car on the alarm remote LCD. Then I can at least run out if I park in front of somebody’s house and some moron tries to steal the audio/video system.

I travelled to Israel for a week in March with my girlfriend and left the Suburban parked in my yard. When we came back and wanted to drive it, the starter just rotated the motor and the bendix didn’t hook to the engine at all. I removed the starter and cleaned the bendix which was simply a bit rusted and when I put the starter back, nothing worked properly. It did a horrible noise, didn’t rotate the engine and finally I had to pull the truck to service where they spent 3 days on it. After about 3 starters and a new flywheel, they also had to replace the distributor head and rotor. Somehow those were also dead. Now the truck is working perfectly and I just noticed an oil leak from some place near the steering wheel pump. Damn it! :)

I must tell you all about our Red Rock Decals stickers business which is now really becoming more and more popular both here locally in Estonia and also internationally.

For those who don’t know, here’s what they look like:

Then I went to a radio equipment shop because I’ve been wanting to replace the current FM CB radio transceiver in my truck with a new AM/FM radio – mainly because I wanted to hear the truckers on the motorways and they are speaking on AM. So, in the store I was and funnily they had the one I wanted in stock, most probably because I had the necessary money on the bank card (which I wasn’t initially planning to spend on the radio, ofcourse) and such things always know how to pull my wallet empty at the right time, it’s almost like a miracle. I talked 10% off the price and walked away with the transceiver.

I was now eager to get the truck into the yard and begin retro-fitting the new toys. Firstly I installed the frames. It meant removing the old plate housing in the front, measuring the exact screw holes of the frame to drill holes into the truck’s number plate carrier block and finally also drill holes to the right places on the license plate itself since our plates don’t have the standard holes which the US’ have. The end result is very nice, although I believe I need to tilt the plate just a tiny bit cause I was able to notice a slight offset of the frame’s angle against the rest of the vehicle’s nose. Installing the rear frame was easy – just drilling holes to the license plate and screwing the piece on.

Here are some photos for you:

Here are some photos:

After fixing the moonvisor, I went to the car electrician to weather-seal the wire connections of the visor lights and there we ended up fixing most of the things wrong with the car :) Firstly, he re-wired the CB radio to take power directly from the battery instead of the cigarette lighter socket. Ofcourse he added a circuit breaker, too. Now I have a constantly ready radio transceiver that I can turn on from the switch just like the car stereo. Then there was a problem with the temperature sensor plug under the hood which connects to the thermostat housing. We cleaned and “refurbished” it and it’s now rather perfect. It used to have bad connection and sometimes gave me rough idle when engine was cold and also the Check Engine light came on. One of my Hella high-beams wasn’t working and I couldn’t find the problem myself. There was a bad negative connection and we got it solved. Now it all works nicely and it’s AMAZING what kind of light all the four lamps together are able to produce.

Finally we went to the issue I had with the windscreen wipers – they made very annoying squeeking noise whenever turned on and before I thought that perhaps the new wipers are somehow screeching against the windscreen. However, it still turned out to be the moving mechanism located under the plastic grille in front of the window. It needed some grease and it’s now totally quiet. As we already had the wiper hands taken off, we also re-painted those in black since one of them had paint partly worn out.

Currently most of the things on the Suburban are fixed and I’m enjoying the truck more and more every day. For a car-guy like me it’s the perfect daily driver.