I miss Dave O. and how he made detailing cars with paint problems appear easy when you knew it wasn’t.
I miss Dave O too. Very knowledgeable on any car related topic. It was a real shame he couldn't cool his jets & got banned.
Ah... I did think that it was a bit quiet around here. I tune out on drama threads, so I must have missed the fun. He was full of great recommendations on Rufus' rebuild.
I was thinking about David.0 just the other day when I placed my order for RedStuff front brake pads... "RedStuff" Tested and approved by David.0, for use on the Tail of the Dragon.....
Note: The adjustment extenders are brilliant! I dialed the suspension to a few clicks away from full soft for the 3-4 hour drive to the Dragon and then dialed them back to 5-6 clicks away from full stiff once I was there. It REALLY made that hightway ride much more pleasant. One more successful trip to MOTD, making it home in one piece with no known damage!
I didn't take a ton of photos this year. I ordered 2 from Killboy, but I haven't received the download link yet... should be soon. Friday morning Donut Run, taken from the Foothills Parkway. My thanks to Mike McGill for the drone photo! This beautiful shot was a surprise he captured after the panoramic photo, I think. He forwarded it via Facebook after he got home. Thursday morning Sunrise Drive... again on the Foothills Parkway, just a bit earlier than the top photo.
I also caught a video while leading the Sunrise Drive on Little River Road (north side of the Smoky Mountains). I flipped my phone camera on 'selfie mode' and held it up through the sunroof (while driving, but we had some slow traffic in front of us), so it's absolutely not pro-grade, but it's fun to see the snaking line of MINIs behind me https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=365267622289084
The list of work for Rufus is getting shorter and shorter. When I was at MOTD, I was having a problem with the driver's side floor mat (OEM carpet mats). I'm tall and have big feet. I'm also not as nimble as I once was and it takes a bit of shuffling to get in the car (especially when parked on an angle, as most cabins at Fontana require). The little velcro circles that anchor the driver's side floor mat to the carpet started peeling away and the mat was going crazy, shuffling around under my feet when on the twisty roads. I ordered a new floor mat anchoring system from Amazon earlier this week... I'm looking forward to trying it. Photos and a review to come soon. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06WP39VBM/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1
I forgot to report an interesting swap I made at MOTD this year. A couple who was on one of my drives reached out a few days before asking if I had a CD changer in the back of Rufus. Amazingly (it was a low-pickup option) I did. Apparently they had an R53 w/ a CD changer and upgraded unexpectedly to a gen 3 a few years back... I'm assuming that the R53 was in an accident and was totaled. They pulled the CD changer out of the boot before the car disappeared, but couldn't get their old CDs out of the changer. The cartridge that carries the CDs needs power to be ejected and they didn't have the car anymore! They brought the whole changer with them to MOTD and, in return for a bit of disassembly of my unit and connecting their old one to the power line & returning their long-trapped CDs to them, they gave me the spare CD changer and CD carrier! How nice! Now I've got 2 carriers (so I can load up an extra set of CDs for a road trip) and a spare CD changer should I ever need one.
It's not for Rufus right now, but I just got a Garmin MINI 2 Dash cam. I'll put it in my wife's Audi A6, but may get 1 or 2 more to expand to my daily driver and to the MINI. I wanted something simple and small. This one seems to suit the bill. I dropped a 256 GB card in there, so it should have plenty of storage room and, if it sits near my home wifi long enough, will upload any flagged recording to the cloud for a day (or longer if you pay a subscription charge). It will start recording when it gets power and will just start overwriting old files when it runs out of storage space. You can choose if you want interior audio recorded and even sync a pair of them to get forward/back facing cameras in one video (I'm just going to do forward view). I've just got to get power supplied to it now...