Most cold mornings there is frost on the inside of the glass, not only the outside. Scraping the outside is quick; the inside takes ten minutes of the blower and a lot of wiping, and it comes back within a day. Other…
Sequence over one morning: car would not start, meter across the battery read about 10V. Jump started it, and with the engine running the same meter read 14.5V. Switched the engine off, waited ten minutes, and it was…
Started a few weeks ago and is getting slightly longer. Turn the key to start, and instead of cranking immediately there is a dead pause: no click, no crank, nothing: then it catches and runs perfectly. Once running it…
Learner question that my instructor answered with "it just does", which I did not find satisfying. In a manual with the clutch up and no throttle the car stalls or slows. In an automatic, take your foot off everything…
Came out this morning and the engine was running. Best guess is it had been going since about six the previous evening, so somewhere around 14 hours. Petrol, five years old, nothing unusual about it. It was parked…
Battery went flat, got a jump, and the person helping told me to drive for at least an hour to charge it back up. I did, and it started fine the next morning, so it seemed to work. A friend says that is a myth and I…
Cleaned a fair amount of white green powder off a battery this weekend and the shop sold me a pack of red and green felt rings to put under the clamps. They cost almost nothing so I fitted them, but I have no idea…
I have heard that it is possible to change gear without pressing the clutch while driving, and that some drivers do it deliberately. I am not planning to make a habit of it. I would like to understand what is physically…
CAD 800 fitted is my ceiling for a set of four in a common 16 inch size, Ottawa, about 18,000 km a year with a mix of city and a weekly highway run. Last winter I ran a very cheap set that gripped fine on snow and felt…
Car lives on the street overnight and got scraped twice last year, both times with nobody leaving a note, which is the entire reason I am here. I have a cheap suction mount camera that runs off the cigarette socket and…
Rural road that is ice from December to March, then 25 km of highway that the province keeps clear. So my week is roughly a third genuinely icy and two thirds cold dry asphalt. Budget is not the constraint, tolerance…
Winters went on in November, the shake started in January. It only happens when the car has sat outside overnight, it is worst around 100 kilometres an hour, and by the time I am ten minutes into the commute it has…
Rear ended twice in four years, both times stationary at a light, and both times it came down to my word against theirs on how hard and how fast. So I am buying a two channel setup, budget around $300 fitted, and my…
Downtown, garage parking, maybe 8,000 km a year and almost all of it inside the city where the roads get cleared quickly. Two or three times a winter I drive north to visit family and that trip is a different world.…
I live at the top of a 200 metre residential hill that the council never salts and plows late. Right now it is a FWD Golf on all seasons and I got stuck twice last winter. I can either buy a set of winters on steels, or…
Delhi, car parked outside at work for eight hours a day, and summer cabin temperatures are brutal enough that my phone refuses to charge in there. My last camera lasted fourteen months before the mount adhesive let go…
Twenty five minute commute, mostly a plowed highway plus one residential street that is often unplowed until the afternoon. No garage, so it sits outside all winter. I have budget for winter tyres on a second set of…
Two wheel drive half ton, empty bed nine months of the year, and the back end is light enough that it steps out on packed snow at embarrassingly low speeds. Budget about USD 1,200 fitted for a set of four in a common…