Tonight I would like to explain how you can get rid of the engine squeak that usually gets even worse in wet and humid weather. If the engine of your car is squeaking annoyingly, especially when idling and running up to 2000 RPM, then you probably have some similar issue that I had. First of all, there are generally three most common things that may cause the squeak:

• Alternator (generator) bearings
• A/C Compressor Clutch bearing
• Serpentine belt

I don’t like when my car makes unusual noises and I do get really pissed off about those things. Therefore, I had to try everything possible to get rid of the noise. First of all I had the generator looked at – one of the bearings was in really bad shape and could have caused noise when running. That was replaced by a mechanic. That didn’t get rid of the squeak and we found another noise source which was the A/C compressor clutch. Keep in mind that you can replace the bearing yourself but you need some special tools for that. In USA those tools can be ordered from most of the auto parts stores.

Since I couldn’t get those tools quick enough anywhere, I had a mechanic do this as well. When I almost thought that my squeaks were over, the humid weather came and there I was again sitting in my squealing piece of truck wondering what else to try. I didn’t suspect the belt in my case since I had that replaced like 2 years ago and this shouldn’t finish up a belt yet. They are supposed to last 5-10 years just fine. However, here comes a tip for you! When you have a squeak in the belt line and want to diagnose where it is, DO NOT spray WD-40 or any other oil onto the belt. That will kill the belt and it will never stop squeaking anymore. If you want to spray something, use a silicone spray or water. Those will also tell you what you need.

I bought a PRO 1 belt yesterday and today we replaced the belt. If you were as stupid as I was and sprayed oil onto the belt before, make sure you clean all the rollers before putting the new belt on. Otherwise the new belt could get “fried” too. You can use brake cleaner for this process but if you have any plastic rollers, do not spray brake cleaner directly onto those since it could melt the roller. Clean it with a tissue instead where you spray brake cleaner beforehand. In my case one plastic roller was present and that was the automatic belt tensioner:

DO NOT SPRAY BRAKE CLEANER DIRECTLY ONTO A PLASTIC ROLLER!

So we replaced the belt and now it seems to be OK. You should also pay attention which belt you buy – PRO 1, Gates, Dayco and some others are known as fine belts. Do not buy anything too cheap or you will get your squeaks back in no time.

Winter was a very busy time for me and I didn’t have much time to write in my blog. I’m so sorry about this. It’s still good to see you’ve been visiting me and plenty of e-mails have popped in during this time despite the lack of new posts.

But finally, Spring is here! We are all just SO happy about this since this Winter was extremely painful. There was so much snow, a lot of cold and that means a lot of pain in the a** for just about everyone living here. Cars don’t work too well in such conditions, on newer cars it’s easy to break the bottom frame protection plastic with the snow and so on. Those of you who don’t see Winter very often and are jealous at us – don’t be! Really, it’s not as good as you might think. Yes, there is snow. I think I can still find it from somewhere and I can send it over to Abu Dhabi in a box if you wanna see it so much :) Everyone should experience snow in their life just to see what it’s like and experience the winter “pleasures” like skiing and such. But having all that junk for almost half a year is NO GOOD. Alright, enough of this snow talk.

So, how did our cars live through the Winter? Well, first of all the Vette was ofcourse in the garage so she didn’t really mind. It was cold, yes, but what harm does that really do… However, the Audi and also Suburban were in constant use (especially Audi) and these did experience a few issues.  I can remember that in the beginning of Winter Audi showed its battery light and after some while the systems began messing up and everything died quite suddenly. All the electronic systems inside began to switch off one by one like in a crashing jetliner (yea, it was night in my case, too!) and soon even the transmission and engine began acting real weird. They are completely electronically controlled so what else would you expect… Anyway, I recharged the 110 Amp battery and drove it to service the next day. I first thought that the battery had finally died down in the cold and the systems didn’t want to charge it anymore. However, it wasn’t the case. In fact, the alternator brushes were gone so they had to replace those.

We also cracked the bottom protection a bit and managed to hit an ice ball so hard that a bit of the front bumper paint came off from one place. Should have it fixed soon I guess…  Although that didn’t break anything, I once drove off the road into the snow on a street simply because it was a curve, suddenly such a huge cloud of snow came at night during snowstorm that it just blocked my view completely and since I saw lights of another car coming towards me, I decided to keep to the right and that’s when I hit the snow wall. And there was no help of the Quattro there! We were so stuck that I asked a plow truck driving by to pull us out and he broke his towing rope. Then soon a Dodge RAM passed by who was gladly willing to help us and pulled us out with no big effort. The next time (well, 20 minutes later) I got stuck while just driving in the middle of the country road. The snow had blowed onto the road so much that it got really tough there. Ofcourse I didn’t push the ESP OFF button soon enough so the traction control didn’t let me push gas anymore which brought the situation to a stuck end. There was absolutely no way to get out of there by ourselves since the Audi was sitting completely on its bottom. Soon enough a tractor drove by and although we didn’t have a rope, he drove to the next fuel station, bought a rope for us and came back to pull us out. There are some nice people left in this world, huh?

We didn’t get stuck much more but it was just a lot of pain all the time trying to live your life normally.

But anyway, the spring!!! It’s here, just like I said. As you see, I can’t be happy enough about this fact. It’s a very important milestone this year, I’d say :)

The Corvette is out of the garage and just before I took it out, I installed the high quality LED daytime running light bars to the front. They are invisible when they are off and nicely glow under the grilles in the nose during the daytime. Although the law requires them to switch on and off automatically depending on the headlight switch setting, I decided to wire them through a separate switch in the “cockpit” so I can always decide myself when I want them on. Interestingly, there is a feature on these lights which automatically dims the lights by about 50% if you shoot 12 Volts to one of the additional wires. S

o, I decided to configure them in an interesting manner somewhat resembling the new Audis. Whenever the turn signal is blinking, the LED light dims to 50% while the turn signal lamp is glowing. It’s a really nice effect and probably also adds a lot to safety. I’ll try

to get a video of that for you in a short while.

The Vette passed the technical inspection without issues and we’ve been driving it around for a couple of weeks now. The radiator was leaking from last Autumn so I had that repaired and the driver’s side electrical window had lost the last teeth from the moving mechanism so it wouldn’t move totally up and instead made terrible noises. The teeth were repaired and now everything is OK. Ofcourse I’ve been also configuring the carburetor but seems like I can never get it perfect…

The Suburban decided to fail big time… Driving it a week ago we noticed there was something dripping to the asphalt all the way behind our route and I figured out it was coolant. Firstly I thought that it could be the rear heating system pipes since the leak seemed to be near that area. However, it happened to be the typical Vortec engine issue instead – the intake manifold gasket. G

ot it from the shop yesterday and now it’s OK.

A year ago I had the starter and flywheel replaced on the Chevy. However, where I had that job done the guys apparently didn’t know how to properly install the starter on this car and by now the flywheel looks a bit like an elderly grandma with not much left of her teeth anymore. That was found out yesterday in the shop, as well. I was really mad about this because now I need to replace the flywheel AGAIN. And probably from my own pocket. At least I won’t take any of my cars to that shop from now, that’s a FACT. It was close to my home so it was always comfortable to take the cars there, but their job quality is now beginning to show itself. When fixing the starter a year ago they also managed to mess up the distributor clamps which hold the distributor cap in place. They had fixed that with a pair of cable straints and called it done. Now the distributor housing probably needs replacing, too. How can someone work like this? And how could I be so stupid not to act on these things earlier? Should have complained about their distributor solution at least!

Anyway, a  couple of photos from weeks ago of the Vette with the new lights installed :)

Oh, and a little Winter memory from a couple of months ago…

Woohoo – I finally finished with the new look for my blog. I was just so tired of that white blog and decided that I needed a change. I hope you like what I have now. Yes, it is our Suburban in the background and this photo was taking this morning when we already had a bunch of snow. We really got into the winter overnight and we are having just huge snowfalls from last night and still going on. At the moment it’s so heavy that I’m really scared, but also curious to see what we will have on the ground the  next morning. The local time at this moment is 23:32 in the evening and watching out of the window it’s just a lot of snowflakes playing around behind the window and the visibility is pretty poor thanks to that.

Today’s photos for you to see first hand… Even our horses were having a lot of fun!

First of all I’m so glad to report that the visit statistics to my blog have been rising since day one and it keeps going up each month. I’m very happy about it because this here is something that I created purely for my own fun and for your pleasure without any business ideas in mind unlike most of my projects that I start. But enough about this, I’m sure this is something you don’t want to hear very much about! Let’s show you some pictures, then:

That’s what we had to cope with about a week ago… We had such snow basically out of nowhere because it was constantly around +7 C during daytime and no snow could survive on the ground with such temperature for long. That day the temperature stayed below zero even during daytime and it created some serious winter conditions on the roads. Since I drive the Audi A6 on daily basis now and the Suburban stays in the countryside, I decided to take the Chevy out and experience the “awesomeness” again that it so easily provides in slippery conditions. If you want some adrenaline, get a rear wheel drive Chevy with mid-aged M+S tires and have a ride in winter on roads which have not been plowed/melted. I guarantee you a lot of fun or your money back :) Driving the Suburban in such conditions is challenging to say the least. Especially if you come from a near perfectly engineered 4WD german automobile. The first thing you notice is that it’s really complicated to get going without spinning the rear wheels + having the rear end turning either left or right due to slightly banking road, differential behaviour or whatever else the physics can come up with. I’d say that if you try to accelerate to cruising speed at such throttle that you’re used to on a dry road, the steering experience will be similar to that of a speed-boat. Alright now, you’re at cruising speed on a straight road and everything seems alright. But there’s a curve, or even worse, a roundabout ahead! You brake and it could easily be that nothing really happens except under your foot where the pedal begins vibrating thanks to ABS. You really need to plan the braking with this vehicle or you will cause trouble. I rear ended a guy last Winter in the morning on a little slope downhill. It had snowed all night and all the critical roads were not properly maintained yet. The speed was just around 15-20 km/h and I saw that there’s an Opel Zafira waiting on the stoplight ahead at the end of the slope. I began braking soon but there was just no chance of stopping in time. I heard a collision noise a million feet in front of me where the bumper guard happens to be :) I didn’t feel anything and once I stopped I had pushed the Zafira a couple of meters forward. His tail was nicely smashed in and the insurance paid a nice 1200 EUR fee to fix his car. I just caught some of his paint on my bumper guard. It ruined my color setup though since the bumper guard was supposed to be ALL BLACK and now it had purple on it!

It’s especially embarrassing with the Chevy here in Estonia during winter time since everybody thinks that it’s an offroad vehicle and is not supposed to get stuck. Last winter I was stuck absolutely everywhere you can possibly get stuck in a vehicle with more than 3 wheels. It was a nightmare. Every morning I had to go to work I woke up an hour earlier just to see what had happened outside over the night and to prepare for any contingency. We lived one period of winter in a flat with my girlfriend and you have to park the car outside. In addition to the fact that I had always taken the space of two normal cars, I often needed to shovel a hole somewhere in the snow for my Chevy and oh God it took time… Imagine that you work for at least an hour to make a spot for your car and the next day some idiot has parked his Corolla there. Oh you would have seen some swearing from my end these moments… I had thoughts from speeding into that spot “without noticing” the Corolla there to installing a CRIME SCENE tape around that spot or placing a sign saying “CHEVY PARKING ONLY – All others will be towed and sold for scrap”. I didn’t do any of that though since in the end I’ve still got a good person somewhere inside me.

So, the Suburban is a nice little car but lately it began causing problems to us. I don’t know why – it just has to mess with our minds periodically. Over the winter it’s just plain easy to get stuck in the snow with no big effort but right now when there’s not much chance for that yet, it has to find some other way to get on our nerves. One day I refueled it with 98 Octane instead of 95 which shouldn’t really cause any issues. But somehow it did. Right after that I got the Check Engine light and when starting up the engine next time, it started real rough. I put 95 on top of it and that then made things even worse. I’m not saying that there’s any connection between the refueling and engine issues but somehow they happened at the same time. A few days ago I wanted to have a ride in the Chevy and it didn’t start at all. There was like no ignition… The starter kept rotating very nicely but no chance of starting it. I finally managed to fire it up by removing the air filter, having my girlfriend crank the starter and me spraying some brake cleaner spray to the air intake at the same time. I can start it without doing this once the engine is warm although I really need to give some throttle with my foot and it shoots some black smoke out from the exhaust. It acts like an old diesel although it’s actually gasoline! Will see about this, don’t really have time to mess with it all my free time. I’m letting the Suburban feel a bit guilty before doing anything myself. Maybe that will help?

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.

I hope you will find this new segment interesting and enjoyable.

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: