Recent content by MRC01

Indeed. I just rotated the tires on my Mazda 3 and at 65,000 miles the original brake pads are still almost as thick as new and nowhere near needing replacement - even in the front! Rotors are like new with no measurable wear at all, still factory new thickness.

Lots of pilots and car racing enthusiasts use Blackstone. Many people post their results here at BITOG so you can study the kind of analysis report you'll get.

Cutting open the filter and inspecting the pleats is good practice and always done with aviation piston engines. I also recommend sending an oil sample for analysis, instead of changing the oil. This will tell you its viscosity, contamination and TBN, which will help you determine how much life...

Another reason some plug makers might recommend against anti-seize is because ham-fisted mechanics may apply too much and get it into the combustion chamber? For aviation engines, Lycoming's guidance (SI 1042AH) is to use anti-seize or engine oil on the spark plug threads, but be careful to...

If that is an intake valve (as it appears to be), there is no problem and nothing to do. If it's an exhaust valve (unlikely if the picture is accurate), then it may be developing a hot spot. The general point and take-away tip is to look for asymmetric patterns on the valves. Even if they look...

This is an asymmetric wear/heat pattern: Asymmetric wear/heat patterns often indicate a valve that has a hot spot and is in trouble. Yet the photo appears to be on the big valves, which would be intake, not exhaust - thus not a problem. I say "appears" because camera perspective can be misleading.

Yep, UV is also bad for tires, at least as much as it is for paint.

I ran the V700 tires all the time even on the street so I didn't have to buy another set of wheels and swap just for autox events. They typically lasted about 5,000 miles overall, but both of those cars were light. FWIW, when the OEM tires on my Mazda 3 wore out I installed Conti PureContact...

About 25-30 years ago, racing in SCCA, everyone ran either BFG R1 or Hoosier tires. Then Kumho came out with the V700, which had comparable traction. Great for racing, street legal, lasted longer than either BFGs or Hoosiers, and less expensive. I ran them on a 3rd Gen RX-7 and a Panoz Roadster...

This gun wasn't on the streets, it was in the glove box. ;) Seriously, best advice given here is to drive the car back to where you got it, drop it off and tell them why. It's their problem, not yours.

I didn't say that I cared whether people use medication. I said that medication is not needed to make a lifestyle change, which is a simple fact. If some people are unwilling or unable to make those lifestyle changes, then medication may help them. However, medication leads to the question: Is...

The video got at least 2 simple changes right. Since the 1970s, people are more sedentary, and they eat more junk/prepared/processed/packaged food. Whatever other causal influences may be at work, these two are sufficient to explain most of the increase in obesity. And fixing these two is a...

Fast-forward a few years, the car still had this issue. It never got worse, and since it never happened after warming up, I knew it couldn't be anything serious like wear or bent parts. I began to wonder whether the root cause was the engine, rather than the clutch or mounts. After a cold start...

A few observations from the discussion: I don't care whether we use standard or daylight time. Just pick one and stop switching it twice per year. The closer to the equator you are, the less difference it makes since the days are closer to equal length year round. The US Constitution gives...

Glad to see some places stopping this ridiculous outdated practice. One strange aspect of DST is that on 3/8/2026, 2:30am never happens. And on 11/1/2026, 1:30am happens twice. This can create problems for data processing of streaming event data. Of course that kind of processing usually...