Ride report.

Those crazy Japanese…

More car maintenance.

I figure since Dave gave me this car, I might as well maintain it properly. In this particular case, that meant new spark plugs and drive belts. $30 down the toilet, or so I thought.

The drive belts, which took all of 10 minutes to change, solved the squishy belt noise. This was a given, but still nice to not hear.

No belts! Ahhh!

On to the plugs. Since I do not own a service manual for Butch, I scoured the internets and found a couple of DIY tutorials on how to change the plugs. Each cautioned that it was a total pain in the ass… ok, sure, but it isn’t possible to be more of a pain in the ass than the Boxster plug change. It wasn’t. Turns out that their pain-in-the-assness was totally unfounded when working with even a 2-year-old dog’s worth of common sense. Junebug can vouch, but Bear cannot. Move the crap that is in your way out of your way (battery, airbox) and use proper tools (extensions, spark plug socket, and torque wrench). Easy, takes 30 minutes. 16 ft-lbs. Done.

Interestingly, the OE plugs were platinum “high-mileage”, but the manual stated 30k change intervals. For $6 and 30 minutes, it wasn’t really a big deal. A nice side bonus is much smoother running, and the odd off-throttle lurching and hanging is greatly reduced. I guess copper plugs really are better, at least for Butches.

Oh, since this place is supposed to be about bikes, here:

I rode the titaniumy one a couple few times last week. It was awesome. Unfortunately, you get no ride report.

Magic.

Eric’s magic trick of the day: How to turn $19,300 into $9,100: Buy an IS300, wait five years, and sell! (Kinda hurts when I think about it that way…)

Yes, the IS300 has skipped town to head back east to South Carolina. Sad, but good. But sad… I’ll probably buy another one.

So now we’ll see how Eric does with owning only two cars… it’ll be tough.

(for you car nerds, it’s like having a flat-10, and that’s just awesome. It’s almost like I have a Leopard 1 Tank in the garage.)

Schnell Porsche.

I did what I said I wouldn’t do: I bought something that I didn’t need for the Boxster. What did I buy, you ask? This:

See the difference? Yeah you do. It’s a Schnell upper strut brace. Why’d I buy it? To stiffen the car, obviously. Not to say that the Boxster isn’t a stiff roadster on it’s own, but anything with no roof is going to be a slight bit floppy. How’s it work? By pairing up with the factory-installed-but-different strut brace in an attempt to keep the tops of the strut towers from flexing ever so slightly inward under compression. Why is this important? Well, when the strut tops flex, they’re bending everything around them. This makes noises, and I don’t like those kind of noises. There is also a theoretical handling improvement, but that’s debatable.

It seems to be built well and gets good reviews, so why not? Plus I low-balled the maker on eBay and got it for 33% off.

Oh yeah – beer kit numero three came today!

Elephant Rock.

We took a drive down to Elephant Rock and a Johnson’s Shut-Ins last weekend. Have a look:

Looks like a lot has changed over at Elephant Rocks since I was six or seven… not that I remember. Johnson’s Shut-Ins? Not so much going on there.

You might also notice that I decided to finally enlarge the photos around here. Um, yes, yes I did.

Per Craig’s comment… yeah, of course Jeni did this: