Minor rant thread. Post your rants o' the day here!

In reply to eastsidemav:

I had the same problem and it wouldn't go away. I ended up going to an ENT and he sucked the wax out with a fancy vacuum. I could hear like a bat for a couple days after that. I could hear the air flowing inside ductwork in my office. It was simultaneously awesome and awful.

Point being, a little cash and time spent at an ENT would help you greatly. I had been having trouble with that ear and wax for a while and that cleared it right up. Two or three years later and I've not had a single bit of trouble since.

easy easy way to get wax out of your ear... Get one of those blue bulb things they sell for removing snot from babies. Fill a pan with warm (not HOT!) water.. fill bulb with water, lean head over sink with clogged ear down.. squirt warm water into ear... prepare to be disgusted with the amount of wax that comes out.

I have nearly perfect hearing. I at age 45 mine is better than an 18yos should be. So I know what you mean dculberson. I hear EVERYTHING to the point where it is hard to understand what people are saying.. it's quite maddening at time

If you are willing to pay a little more than the blue bulb... an electric water pick is a miracle device for clearing ear wax. Get one with a remote reservoir and adjustable output if you can.

My minor rant: I have gone to the "Food truck Friday" event for lunch four weeks in a row and no legit taco truck has shown up yet.

mad_machine wrote:

92dxman wrote: Why does everybody slow down in the rain and go 50 mph on the turnpike like they have never driven in the rain before?

I wish they would slow down around here.. rain seems like an invitation to go faster.. with the resulting wrecks involving cars off in the marshes to slow everyone to a crawl

It's a known psychological effect that people drive faster in rain or fog. I forget the mechanism.

dropstep wrote:

wearymicrobe wrote:

Knurled wrote: In reply to RossD: That is a blessing, IMO. Fault codes are not diagnoses, they are a vector.

Quoted for being the bloody truth. I need this on a T-Shirt. neighbor has a car that has been throwing P2107 code will not clear, reader says its a throttle position sensor. It never is that its the freaking coils. I tell him pull the coils and check them with a voltmeter. Nope goes out and pays 600$ for the part that the reader tells him it is. Does not work, guess what they don;t take that part as a return. So now he is angry. Tell him coils. Takes it dealership, 10 minutes with a real tech and coil 8 is intermittent. 53$ in aprts and its fixed.

My trucks throwing a generic MAF circut fault code, the guy at the parts store swears i just need too throw a new sensor on it. Theres so many people who just assume a code has the cure. Glad im not one of them. Makes the parts store money.

Well I just did the 'fuel funnel at a medium pace trick' again without even checking the code and I didn't notice the check engine light on the way to work so it must have worked... I just wonder how often this thing needs me to creep outside at 10pm to cycle the capless fuel filler mechanism while my family is inside the house not knowing what I'm doing? My Jeep is a dirty slut, I suppose.

dropstep wrote: My trucks throwing a generic MAF circut fault code, the guy at the parts store swears i just need too throw a new sensor on it. Theres so many people who just assume a code has the cure. Glad im not one of them. Makes the parts store money.

If it's a GM truck, it's probably relaxed pins on the connector. Probably 90% of GM MAF faults are bad connectors. They are technically only good for four disconnect/reconnect cycles but I've seen them fail in applications where you never actually need to disconnect to service anything.

KyAllroad wrote: In reply to wearymicrobe: Holy E36 M3!! What berkeleying car requires a $600 TPS???? The last one I bought was $12.

But today you can't just buy a TPS for many cars. You can only buy the complete throttle body.

Hal wrote:

KyAllroad wrote: In reply to wearymicrobe: Holy E36 M3!! What berkeleying car requires a $600 TPS???? The last one I bought was $12.

But today you can't just buy a TPS for many cars. You can only buy the complete throttle body.

Integrated throttle body on this one. Again codes are there to help not to tell you what to replace. I have had at least three or four repairs where the code check pointed to bad connectors and not the part itself.

FYI every single time I see something like this I check the coil packs. In fact I just had a single one go out on the TBird with nearly the same codes and sure enough number 8 was out of spec on the voltmeter.

Knurled wrote:

dropstep wrote: My trucks throwing a generic MAF circut fault code, the guy at the parts store swears i just need too throw a new sensor on it. Theres so many people who just assume a code has the cure. Glad im not one of them. Makes the parts store money.

If it's a GM truck, it's probably relaxed pins on the connector. Probably 90% of GM MAF faults are bad connectors. They are technically only good for four disconnect/reconnect cycles but I've seen them fail in applications where you never actually need to disconnect to service anything.

99 silverado with the 5.3, maybe ill check the connection. I havnt really messed with it honestly. I just know that way too many people assume a generic code scanner will tell them how too fix it.

In reply to dropstep:

If you can stomach the expense/can find a cheap source, a drop of Stabiliant on each pin will probably "fix" it well enough. Stabiliant is ungodly expensive. I think a tiny little tube of it is over a hundred bucks. There's probably cheaper ways of getting smaller amounts, though. We charge per drop for that stuff when we can justify using it

Whatever you do, on any vehicle, especially GM with the micro-Weatherpak (there is a correct name that escapes me because Well that didn't take long) don't unplug things just for the hell of it. The connectors are not rated for many cycles and the female pins lose tension easily. Although given how overhung the harness is to the MAF on one of those trucks, I'd give even odds that one of those little 26-30 gauge wires broke close to the connector, kinda like the infamous "yellow wire failure" with the DBW trucks. Either way the fix is a new pigtail, which almost all parts stores carry in quantity.

Heh. Even odds.

Why does every used Suburban have leather seats. Did no one order cloth seats or did Chevy realize that crap leather would make people replace their vehicles faster and stop producing cloth?

mtn wrote: I got an uncomfortable feeling in the back of my throat. A cold is on its way. This is not a good time to be sick. Well, there never is a good time. But this is really not a good time.

Went to bed with that same feeling in the back of my throat last night, and sure enough woke up this morning in full-on cold mode. My wife is out of town all weekend so I'm running solo with the kids, I had hoped to block off most of the weekend to finishing up the car, and most of next week and all of next weekend will be spent helping out with the church festival. So also a bad time to be getting sick.

Plus the garage door opener stopped working this morning. I would like very much to take the guy who thought using nylon gears attached to an electric motor was a good idea and push him through a wood chipper. Naturally, the part isn't stocked locally so I've got to wait for Amazon.

So frustrated with megasquirt I want to torch the car.

Took Friday off to make a four day weekend. Got more stuff done in one weekday than I could after workdays combined. Things were going so well I didn't wanna stop, it was a super day. Well, that's a good thing.

So berkeleying worn out today I don't even wanna move... at all.

berkeley you, self entitled Harley shiny happy people. You make us all look bad.

In reply to wae:

My bro works at a major opener company as an engineer. He told me they "could" probably fix that......but it's a big profit generator so why???

I'm in the beginning stages of redesigning, and eventually re launching my website. I know it can do better than it is, performance, looks, and income wise. I just don't know where to start. Google is effectively useless thanks to the same methods I'm trying to research. It might be time to accept that I know and understand far less in this field than I used to and just pay someone to do it properly. Which leads to the fun of finding a web designer that can turn things around while still leaving updates and new posts easily user serviceable. Which comes back to Google being useless because rank manipulation. It's a vicious cycle.

It's also not helping that I haven't posted a new recipe in 3 months, despite having a handful written up with photos ready to go, which is entirely my laziness and getting distracted when I should be working. I'm half tempted to pull all my content, begin hardcore social media campaigns, and start rolling out from the very beginning again, which may well wind up happening if I can get a better redesign. My biggest problem so far with recipe rollout was trying to push 3 a week,and when 2 would suffice, essentially wasting good posts.

I need to start keeping numbers in mind. 104 recipes/year, 52 pics of the week. Instead of just pushing as much content as possible and running into burn out like I did. At least the overhead costs are pretty negligible, so mistakes aren't costing an arm and a leg, and a revamp won't bankrupt me.

so there is a major storm parked off of the coast and wind gusts range from 10mph to 30.(I saw 32.5 on my meter) and people in big tall vehicles are still driving like idiots. I saw one Transit (tall one) almost lose it when a gust hit him sideways at 70+ mph.. while ABS may not let you leave skid marks on the road, it does nothing for your undies

Whoever owned my Miata before me must have never heard of solder or butt connectors, because all the wiring modifications that they made they just twisted together and taped. Turns out the radio stopped working because they extended the ground wire (Why? I have no clue) by taking the stock eyelet and twisting a new wire inside that and just taped it up. Also extended some wire under the dashboard in a similar manner, and it was apparently rather important because when I disconnected it, the car would crank but not fire.

The current voiceover guy for Mazda ads, I'd very much like to punch him.
How's that for minor?

A group of people online had planned a big get-together for aggressive quad skaters (parks, ramps, vert, etc - like on a skateboard, but on old school 4-wheel skates) next weekend. Communication wires got crossed with the big facility we were planning to go to, Woodward in Pennsylvania. Facility got the impression the event was cancelled and now won't have staff for their skate park facility. Fuuuuuuuu...

So, less than a week away, and we find out it's off. Everyone has planned vacation for this. Baroness and I are fortunate that we live 4 hours drive from the place, but there are people who have plane tickets who will be flying in from around the country.

NJ and the rest of the Mid-Atlantic got very lucky this time around with the hurricane.. after Sandy, everyone was very careful, I am afraid that next time they will go back to being blasé about storms..

What the berkeley? $31 for Chinese food take out. Didn't this stuff used to be a lot cheaper for a 3 meal dinner?

Sine_Qua_Non wrote: What the berkeley? $31 for Chinese food take out. Didn't this stuff used to be a lot cheaper for a 3 meal dinner?

$8.99 per entree plus tax? My rant is, "How much cheaper should they sell it and still make a profit?"

Wooden bleachers! Went too the local fair too watch the demo derby and 4 hours of that made my ass hurt! On a sad note even for someone who dislikes Chevys, some moron decided to derby a 55 chevy 2 door post.