Category Archives: Brick-a-Brack

Volvo stink on his Italian beauty

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When I first skimmed this post documenting a grocery trip in a new Lambourghini Gallardo I thought the author was a pretentious douche. The Tarmac Philosopher, a writer for an auto magazine, takes the V10 monster to his local Whole Foods. When he exits the store he’s horrified to discover the car has attracted a mate:

Some ponce had moved the carts and spitefully parked a filthy, greasy, rusted Volvo 240 station wagon in Fungus Green Metallic right next to my shimmering Lamborghini. Thankfully, after close inspection, not a spot of Volvo stink had blemished the Italian beauty’s skin. I then examined the Volvo, and discovered that its finish had a substantial outer layer of bumper stickers advertising for Greenpeace, PETA, Humane Society, the Earth Liberation Front and few other vegetabalist and ecotage organizations. Not surprisingly, I also received a friendly brochure under the Lambo’s windscreen wiper condemning me forever to Hades for symbolically clubbing baby whales to death by driving an earth-warming beast-car that ran on The Man’s oilish excrement, also known as gasoline. I would have kept interestedly reading, but the whiff of cannabis wafting from the shit-Volvo’s open window started to irritate my nose, so I neatly crumbled up the brochure, and left the parking lot in a billow of CO2 emissions.

Joke was on me, though. The author is only a magazine writer in his own mind. Reality is he’s a kid living in Florida with dreams of big cars and low pay. Good luck, Joe.

More on GPM

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Sunday’s NY Times article “The Last of the Power Rangers” predicts the eventual disappearance of the 500+ horsepower luxury sedan. Now that Obama has unveiled new fuel economy standards of 35.5 MPG by 2016, the extinction seems inevitable.

It got me thinking again about the way we consider fuel economy in MPG vs. GPM. The article states that the thirstiest performance sedan is the 2009 Cadilac CTS-V, coming in at 11 MPG. If you look the cars gallons-per-mile, you see it burns 909 gallons of fuel for 10,000 miles of driving. With this perspective, you can see how truly bad low fuel economy vehicles are, and how the MPG standard hides the truth about how much fuel these cars burn.
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West Coast Brick Graveyard

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west_coast_dead

The pickings haven’t been too bad at the Pick-n-Pull I frequent on the east coast. I’ve managed to find mint tail lamps, a clean grill and the holy grail of 240 parts; intact door pockets. Most of the junked 240s I see are over 20 years old, so I hope we still have a few more years of parts to pick.

Jalopnik has a theory for the proliferation of junked bricks on the west coast:

Berkeley and its nearby East Bay cities… have long been inhabited by legions of folks who swear the Volvo 200 series was the Best Car Ever Made… that is, until the Prius arrived. Once a bulletproof hybrid Toyota enters the stable, paying Sven the Volvo Mechanic $1,800 every six months to fix a car that gets 18 MPG no longer seems like the bargain it once was… and thus begins the long tow-truck ride to the junkyards of Oakland and Hayward.

Thus begins their tragic photo essay of 240s decaying in the California sun.

NY Times doesn’t want you fixing your car

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tuber2With the title “Even to Save Cash, Don’t Try This Stuff at Home“, an article in Sunday’s NY Times reports that frugal consumers think they’ll save money doing their own repairs but wind up screwing things up worse. The photo above shows a jerry-rigged part a mechanic pulled from a car he had to correct.

“We open the hood and can tell the guy tried to do it himself with
cheap parts,” Mr. Tommasone said. “We see at least one a day like that.
At least. The No. 1 part replaced: the battery.”

I’m not sure how you can screw up the installation of a battery. Wrong polarization? Wrong size? Spilled acid? Sorry, but battery installation is one of the easiest things to do for car repair.

The articles comments are a great source of opposition against getting charged an arm and a leg for simple repairs, however:

I tend to have quite the opposite problem. Every time I pay to have
something done I wind up redoing it myself. New brakes squealed at
every stop. After three repeat visits to the shop failed to correct the
problem I did it myself – no more squeaks. The shop skimped on parts.
…

This is asinine. Plenty of people replace toilets or hang molding without doing serious damage to their homes.
…

The idea that only the professionals should handle simple jobs is what
is wrong with the USA (I am a flaming liberal, so no comments about me
being a right wing nut case). Yes, amateurs make mistakes, especially
the first time they try a job. They will get better at repairs as they
take on more jobs themselves. Even pros make mistakes, and some do
sloppy work.
…

Is this article proposing that we make money out of nothing “to do the
job right the first time?” We don’t have the money to spend on hair or
a handy-person anymore.

and

What is so difficult about replacing a car battery?

Indeed.

GPM vs MPG

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Good Magazine has an interesting article about how we’d think differently about fuel consumption if we referenced gallons-per-mile instead of miles-per-gallon. How much gas do you use to go a mile? 10 miles? 100 miles? It’s fractional on the level of a tank of gas, but when you scale the numbers up it becomes easier to comprehend. Professor Richard Larrick bases fuel consumption against 10,000 miles.

The key thing about 10,000 miles is that is the distance that many people drive in a year. In fact, they often drive more. It really gives you a sense of, Okay, a year’s worth of driving is going to use 400 gallons, or 700 gallons.

The math makes the change of reference interesting:

This helps us understand that pulling cars out of the teens [in terms
of miles per gallon] is so much more valuable than pushing an efficient
car even higher. That only becomes clear when you start thinking about
gallons per mile. That tiny increase from 10 mpg  to 11 mpg saves
essentially the same one gallon of gas every 100 miles as does
increasing 33 mpg to 50 mpg.

Paper Bricks

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I created these little paper models using templates from a site out of Sweden. I’ve searched for diecast metal 240s but Corgi and other European manufacturers stopped producing them a long time ago, and I don’t know if Matchbox ever did. These paper models are the next best thing, although they don’t roll, they’re 1:87 scale, and they blow away in a gust of wind.

Hokenstrom.com is self-described as

The official homepage for one of the oldest riding clubs with disabled riders in Sweden. And the only one with an own homepage!

There’s a huge range of models, from 100s, 200s, 300s, 700s and 850s, with variations of each by year, and different colors within each download. There are also alternative vehicles, like hearses, police cars and the odd El Camino-esque yellow 850 pictured above. If you’ve got tiny fingers they can be a fun little craft. My thick digits produced dented quarter panels, gaped seams and cars with only 3 tires touching the ground.