E63 Wagon. You’ll have to go a bit older, but M-B’s CPO program is solid, and here’s one at a tick under $55k... in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Dealer says they’ll ship anywhere, but here’s an opportunity for an Epic Road Trip With Mom.

2nd Gear comment:

Ford had a fling with direct sales in the US by owning controlling stakes in dealerships back in the early 2000s: under Jac Nasser they bought up all the Ford and Lincoln Mercury stores in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, consolidating parts operations, and calling the whole mess “The Ford Collection”.

Hi. Car guy here. In certain vehicles (pickup trucks without an adequate-for-child-seat-back seat and other 2-seaters), there is indeed a means to disable the front passenger side airbag, either automatically or via a key switch or other manual process. My new truck is a crew cab, and while it disables the front…

There are indeed some problems we can solve by throwing sufficient quantities of money at them. :D

There’s this whole series of threads on Tumblr about how Earth is Space Australia and how aliens would view humans are bizarrely reckless and the early days of aviation and space feature prominently in some of these. Poor, confused Alien Steve. Human Steve finds Alien Steve’s race needlessly cautious and wonders how…

Update: I bought it.

And in a shocking turn of events, I found “my” truck about 3 hrs away. As in exactly what I want down to the colors. :D I may be buying this weekend.

To a certain extent, I can understand this. Hell, I’ll be special-ordering the F150 I’m buying soon because the configuration & option combo I want is apparently unobtanium any other way (seriously, folks: I’m in Houston and 99.999% of in-stock trucks have the bloody giant passive solar collector, aka “panoramic…

A few years ago, I was at the local motorsports country club where I regularly marshal while a guy who made his money putting evangelical churches on satellite & cable TV and running a temp staffing agency had a video crew filming the club’s tame racing driver running a handful of semi- to exotic cars around the track…

That’s often a good idea, if you don’t have some ins to play. I have some ins to play. I’m still going to wait, by necessity, for the initial hype to die down. It’ll take that long to line up the financial ducks anyway.

Because my health isn’t awesome, though I’m not at the “bring me a rasher of bacon with every meal” level of “fuck it” yet, I *am* at the “I’m going to enjoy everything I can while I can” level of “fuck it”. To that end:

950A 2020 Mustang Shelby GT500 $70,300
D&D $1095
L59 Gas Guzzler Tax $2600
L6 Kona Blue (closest to…

That makes sense. If it blew the shutoff off the compressor inlet, yeah, that would be a big honkin’ problem. Kerblammo.

Most racing sanctions (including pulling sanctions) running diesels require a remotely-operated shut-off plate on the air inlet. I’m kinda surprised this one didn’t have one or it wasn’t deployed.

Junior’s the opposite of his dad in many ways. I recall a story about Senior seeing Junior’s full-face helmet in the shop or garage and throwing it across the room — open-face or nothing for Senior — saying something about how only candy-asses wear full-face helmets.

Yep, “after-boil” is indeed the term of the trade. All that residual heat in the metal and nothing beyond natural convection to move the coolant around -- and a steam pocket forming in Just The Right Spot will serve as a block to that small amount of flow.

Water Wetter and the similar Purple Ice from Royal Purple are basically some corrosion inhibitors (good), surfactants (essentially dishwasher detergent), and anti-foaming agents (to counter the detergent’s tendency to foam when agitated). The theory is that the surfactants lower surface tension of the water and let it…

In terms of heat capacity, water is better than EG/W, propylene glycol (which is what Evans waterless coolant is), or just about anything else you can think of. Realistically, though, a typical 50/50 EG/W mix is close enough as to make no nevermind in most circumstances. PG is enough different that increased…

The main reason is safety. EG is slicker than oil if spilled on a track. There are precious few racing sanctioning bodies that allow EG in the cooling systems for this reason. Clean-up is a bitch.

In a series that bans DAQ systems during racing, only adopted fuel injection some 20 years after the last carbureted road car was available in the US, and finally allowed composite containment seats for its drivers and head/neck restraints after its marquee star was killed because of rules that allowed safety belts to…

Back in my days in the cooling system trenches, one of the most frightening things I ever witnessed was a deep thermal shock test on an engine.