New Purchases 2018

[spence]

   
yeah, then there's that mess @VinDSL ... all the "hidden fees" ... my tires are 225/40R18  ... what size are you wanting a price on @PCNetSpec

[PCNetSpec]

Okay we may have a winner for something we actually get cheaper....

https://www.oponeo.co.uk/tyre/michelin-primacy-alpin-pa3

I just called a tyre fitter mate of mine and he can do them fitted at £82 a piece (no hidden fee's over here, fitters are happy to dispose of the old ones for you and taxes are included in the quoted price .. though generally no 'rebates' either).

Current exchange rate £82.00 = $105.95

Sounds like this is about the only area that you guys may end up paying more 'taxes' than us .. pleasant change (from my perspective).

Marry that to the fact we probably do less miles may explain why you see more tyres from the 'bigger brands' over here.

[spence]

Okay we may have a winner for something we actually get cheaper....

https://www.oponeo.co.uk/tyre/michelin-primacy-alpin-pa3

One wonders why auto and tire/tyre manufacturers give you all different names for everything? Our old Mazda Protege line was called Mazda Familia over there... now the rubber they roll on needs new names too?

https://www.1010tires.com/Tires/Michelin/Pilot+Alpin+PA4

[murraymint]

I haven't looked at the tyre prices but isn't it something to do with the fact that American cars tend to look like they're on automotive growth hormone? In other words, are most of the tyres actually bigger?

[spence]

Talking about tires/tyres... and i stumble across this email about driving from my late great Uncle Eddie...

My father never drove a car. Well, that's not quite right.
I should say I never saw him drive a car.

He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.
 
'In those days,' he told me when he was in his 90s, 'to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it.'

At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in:
'Oh, bull----!' she said. 'He hit a horse.'

'Well,' my father said, 'there was that, too.'

So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car.
The neighbors all had cars -- the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford -- but we had none.

My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines, would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.

My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we'd ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none.
'No one in the family drives,' my mother would explain, and that was that.

But, sometimes, my father would say, 'But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we'll get one.' It was as if he wasn't sure which one of us would turn 16 first.

But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown.

It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn't drive, it more or less became my brother's car.

Having a car but not being able to drive didn't bother my father, but it didn't make sense to my mother.

So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive.
She learned in a near by cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving.  The cemetery probably was my father's idea. 'Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?' I remember him saying more than once.

For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps -- though they seldom left the city limits -- and appointed himself navigator.
It seemed to work.

Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn't seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage. (Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.)

He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustines  Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish's two priests was on duty that morning.
If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home.

If it was the assistant pastor, he'd take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests 'Father Fast' and 'Father Slow.'

After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along.
 
If she were going to the beauty parlor, he'd sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I'd stop by, he'd explain:  The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored.'

If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out -- and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream. As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me,
'Do you want to know the secret of a long life?'
'I guess so,' I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.

'No left turns,' he said.

'What?' I asked.

'No left turns,' he repeated. 'Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic.

As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn.'

'What?' I said again.

'No left turns,' he said. 'Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that's a lot safer. So we always make three rights.'

'You're kidding!' I said, and I turned to my mother for support 'No,' she said, 'your father is right. We make three rights. It works.' But then she added: 'Except when your father loses count.'

I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing.

'Loses count?' I asked.

'Yes,' my father admitted, 'that sometimes happens. But it's not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you're okay again.'

I couldn't resist. 'Do you ever go for 11?' I asked.

'No,' he said ' If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can't be put off another day or another week.'

My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90. She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102.

They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom -- the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.)

He continued to walk daily -- he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he'd fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising -- and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.

One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news.

A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, 'You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred.' At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, 'You know, I'm probably not going to live much longer.'

'You're probably right,' I said.
'Why would you say that?' He countered, somewhat irritated.

'Because you're 102 years old,' I said.

'Yes,' he said, 'you're right.' He stayed in bed all the next day.

That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night.

He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: 'I would like to make an announcement .. No one in this room is dead yet'

An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:

'I want you to know,' he said, clearly and lucidly, 'that I am in no pain.

I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have.'

A short time later, he died.

I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I've wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long.

I can't figure out if it was because he walked through life, or because he quit taking left turns. '

~ Michael Gartner, editor of newspapers large and small and president of NBC News (1988-1993).
-------------------------------------------------

[PCNetSpec]

I haven't looked at the tyre prices but isn't it something to do with the fact that American cars tend to look like they're on automotive growth hormone? In other words, are most of the tyres actually bigger?

I think it's been a while since that was the case murraymint.

[murraymint]

I've got a newcomer to Scotland telling me that the same models of car are smaller here and sit lower to the ground, so I'm still not sure.

[PCNetSpec]

Did you not see the size in the advert VinDSL posted ?

16", the same as my sons Fiat, and smaller than my missus Vitara.

Point is, I was comparing like for like .. so "average" tyre size is irrelevant.

Besides which, I'll leave you to ask "do Americans have bigger ones than Brits" .. I'm not gonna

[murraymint]

No, I thought I'd said I never clicked those links. They won't fit my feet anyway 

Couldn't there be an element of averaging the price over the sizes though?

[VinDSL]

16", the same as my sons Fiat, and smaller than my missus Vitara.

Yup. They're low-profile and wide. Kinda reminds me of go-kart tires, in both feel and handling.

I drove an identical car with 17s before buying mine. The ride was smoother, but I didn't like the understeer.

I hate mushy, unresponsive tires. I run 40 psi in these tires and they're schizo as fek 

Funny how much difference tires make...

[PCNetSpec]

I run 40 psi in these tires and they're schizo as fek 

LOL

[spence]

I used to run my Toyos at 40 or 42... but have deflated these Kumhos to 35 because the roads on our end of town are just too frakking falling apart and thus noisy... all is well whenever we hit fresh new pavement... but our local City Council Rep seems to be only repaving roads in neighborhoods that predominately vote for her... roads around her office have had work done several times, but our neighborhood hasn't seen roadwork in the entire 10 years we've lived here.

 

 

[Slim.Fatz]

I used to run my Toyos at 40 or 42... but have deflated these Kumhos to 35 because the roads on our end of town are just too frakking falling apart and thus noisy... all is well whenever we hit fresh new pavement... but our local City Council Rep seems to be only repaving roads in neighborhoods that predominately vote for her... roads around her office have had work done several times, but our neighborhood hasn't seen roadwork in the entire 10 years we've lived here.

 

Hi spence,

Isn't that what is called democracy in action ? 
Regards,

-- Slim

[spence]

Hi spence,
Isn't that what is called democracy in action ? 

I know it's a matter of semantics, and popular usage @Slim.Fatz... but I always take issue with the use of the word Democracy in the USA, since we don't live in one... We're a Constitutional Republic which is supposed to  represent each and everyone, and provide protection for the individual from mob rule. Our newscycle might well make the rest of the world think that is no longer the case though.... 


Be that as it may, this Councilmenperson acts as if her area of representation is a democracy... and yet she runs it as a crony petty fiefdom... as do all of the Tucson city Councilmenpersons... ... ...
 

Back on topic, we decided that our tires/tyres don't need immediate replacemet as they are nice and quiet on well paved roads... and we can save that money for other expenses. Retiree budgeting requires some give and take...
 

[VinDSL]

Well, I'm growing tired of playing with 32bit machines. Time to return to the mainstream.

I'm happy with Dell OptiPlex 7000 Series boxes, so I bought another one - a standard-size 7010 DT i7 model.

Seller was asking $189.00 or best offer, so...

I offered him/her $169.00 (declined) - $175.00 (declined) - and finally $179.00 (accepted).

This should be fun