iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

The Virgin Music Festival was an amazing experience. The acts Lindz & I saw (while not in Markham helping plan a wedding) were:

• K-OS – Good, but I think he was a little overwhelmed by the crowd when he was try to freestyle (that or hung over and in 30′ heat)
• M.I.A. – As crazy and high energy as promised. If you like electronica or dance you have to start listening to M.I.A. At one point Miya invited everyone up to dance on stage – at which point I think every gay man on the island was on stage. My favourite part was 20 dollar with the chorus from the Pixies’ “Where is my mind?”
• Bjork – Big time sensuality
• Metric – Good times, even demo’ed new stuff
• Killers – I thought they were good and as always, the Killers thought it was good too
• The Smashing Pumpkins – SOOOOOO Good! I’ve never heard Billy sing so well. Everything sounded great, and the even played what I was hopping for, Siamese Dream’s “Hummer”. Highlights also included a “Tonight, Tonight”, “Tarantula”, a Billy-only acoustic of “1979”, and a “Today” as an encore.
  

I was disappointed with the organization. If I want a beer why do I have to line up, have my ID checked, as bartender where I buy the beer, leave the beer area, line up at the cashier tent, have my ID checked, buy tickets, line up again a the beer area, order a beer. Could have those steps by eliminated if someone wrote somewhere “1 Beer requires 1 beer ticket from cashier tent”. For the record, my famous Belgian Waffle (I turned around to a guy filming it and me) didn’t require a ticket.

Lastly, I have to share my witticism. Throughout the event there was a scrolling screen on either side of the stage that you could text at $0.50 per text. I thought I got my money’s worth while we were waiting for the Pumpkins to go on when everyone got to read “Would james and d’arcy please report to the stage” (not sure what that means, google it). The guy to my South-West congratulated the guy to my West and said that he saw him text it and that it was really funny, it was when he said he had no idea what he was talking about that I took credit.

The Challenge

You may recall that in April I changed the rear rotors on my Acura 1.7 (“The Super Civic”). The Acura 1.7 EL and the American Civic Si are the only two version of this world Honda platform that use rear disc brakes over the not-so-sporty drumb brakes found in the regular Civic. The front disc brakes set up on all of these cars are the same. This summer my front left rotor started to warp as one would expect with its age and I figured that the front rotors need an improvement of quality for the vehicle to meet it’s ultimate potential — and now it does! The best news is if you read this article the whole way you can learn how your Civic 2.0 SI 2002-2003, Civic/EL 1.7 2001-2005, Civic 1.6/EL 1989-2000 or Del Sol VTEC can have the same part cheap!

I did some relatively extensive research on the best option. I wanted brakes that would give good feel, stop hard and look cool but at the same time be street-able and cost-effective. This ruled out bigger rotors, as I didn’t want to change the calibers that clamp down on the rotors. Additionally, I had purchased carbon pads for all of the calibers back in April , I wanted to re-use those. Ultimately this meant increasing the efficiency of the current rotor dimensions. The part I needed turned out to be Magnum Original Cross-Drilled Rotors.

The Solution

Magnum Cross-Drilled Rotors are Canadian made rotors that have holes in them that allow the gas created by the extreme heat of breaking to escape into the venting between the two surfaces of the rotor. This keeps the rotor cooler and prevents the “float” effect of gasses or water building up between the rotor and the pad. An other technology is slotting, which is an actual grove that pushes hot gasses away – that level of venting is really only needed for racing and not my street car.

Installation

Installing the front rotors proved easier than the rear rotors because I had my impact screwdriver for when the going got rough. I don’t want to detail the whole process, for interest and liability sake, but here’s the highlights:

• My Impact Screwdriver came in handy for loosening the rotor screws.
  
• Getting that warped rotors off – five minutes of hammer clanging!
• I scuffed up the rotors with a wire brush to remove the anti-corrosion finish, and some of the black powder coat — oh well.
  
• Those front brake rotors were sanded vertically in order to remove the linear wear from the previous pads.
  

Conclusion

Everything worked out well and I’m very happy with the current brake system. One concern, after all the research for the right part I was only looking for the best shipping rate on E-Bay. I very quickly while at work bought 2 items listed as “Drilled Rotor Civic 1.3 1.6 1.7 2.0 Si Hybird Del Sol F” — when they showed up I learnt they meant rotorS and I now had 4 of them. It meant I spent/saved $40 US more than I had to.

In life one encounters challenges, sometimes even full-on problems. My experience is that these challenges often face individuals inside of a large organization and organizations themselves. There are 6 distinct types of responses and characters that I’ve encountered in these situations and I like to express them in the metaphor of a sinking ship that has sprung a leak.

1. Fix the leak: The most rarified group is those who believe that the solution is to patch the hole. This may not be the easiest solution, the quickest, or something that can done by an individual alone, but this never daunts those who want to fix the leak — more often they’re stymied by the following individuals.
2. More buckets! Though misguided I have a soft spot for these types naiveté. These people are certain that the answer to keeping this ship with a leak from sinking is to bring on more people with more buckets! These people see water on the ship deck, won’t stand for it, and know exactly how it can be fixed: get more people with buckets!
3. Technology Solution: These individuals assess the situation for you and recommend that what your ship needs is a brand new bilge pump that only they can provide one of the sophistication that your ship requires. These technologies can be leveraged to affect a new cutting edge solution – often a brand new nuclear powered super bilge-pump is recommended. It is worth noting that the pump often arrives late and in the form of a small, unreliable gasoline-powered sump-pump and our technologist isn’t sure where you can get gasoline but knows that he/she doesn’t have any. At this point the suggesting of a new boat tends to appear.
4. What leak? These individuals are not slaves to a challenge, they do not let its existence force them to acknowledge reality. They control their own reality and are able to remove the problem from it. This solution of achieves its goal the quickest.
5. Lowering expectations to meet the water line: The ship used to deliver 100 tons of green bananas from Morocco to Miami. Now it delivers 10 tons of wet brown bananas to Madrid. Those who have lowered their expectations can apparently swallow anything.
6. The passengers: Some fill the lifeboats, some demand answers and accountability, and some just rearrange the deck chairs. In any case control over their fate has been put in the hands of those above them.

My Acura has it headlights pushed out the the top corners of the front end. Like many other cars with a similar design and price-point (the Ford Modeo/Contour comes to mind) the streams of dust and what not they are exposed to with all the highway travel my car sees have obscured the headlight bulbs with a foggy kind of scratching.

What follows is how I fixed this problem to my, ah…. adequate standards. It’s no show worthy solution, but its better than replacing the headlights at over $100 a piece.

Steps:

1. Clean the lens with Windex
2. Rub and kinda-and-kinda-buff the lens with Brasso. This should start to clear the lens up, but will not fix everything. There’s lots of guides out there on how to use Brasso to restore your iPod, I figured this was similar. Google Brasso and ipod to learn more
3. Buff the lens with some wax and a lot of effort — I used a polishing disk on a regular old drill (not a random orbit polisher – again not show quality). The wax I used was MIBRO’s high gloss metal polish. After a good 15 minutes of applying the wax in one direction, polishing, then applying in another, I finally was happy with the results and was almost ready to call it done.
4. The final step for me was applying and buffing with BlueMagic’s Liquid Metal Polish as it promised to remove scratches and leave protective finish (and was cheap)

That’s it.

You can see from the picture below from the overcast Saturday I did this on, the lens on the left is nice and clear and the one on the right has yet to be worked on and is all dull and “fogged”. I’ve since noticed an improvement in the headlights intensity at short distances (but no over-all increase in distance).

That’s my solution, and your welcome to save a few hundred with it — but I’m no scientist, metalologist, chemist or body-work specialist. I’m just convinced a little hard work can make a Honda last a long time for little money.

It’s a phenomenon that needed a name: E-Mail that you want, but is likely automated and arriving in your inbox and getting in the way of the E-Mail you actually want to deal with right now.

More at bacn2.com.