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I appreciate the sanity here

GaryGruber

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Just wanted to say thanks to everyone here for presenting themselves with integrity. I have several interests (pro photographer, gunsmith) and other forums are full of hotheads that cannot have a civil discussion.

This is a breath of fresh air and I am grateful.
 
Well you get the bad apple every once in a while here but we try to keep it civil, its supposed to be a place of information. I just got my FFL couple years ago and some of the forums and sites I am on I just cant believe how some people talk to others just wanting simple answers. Some of the gun forum I just shake my head at.
 
I can sometimes be the bad apple but this site is turning out to not be one with some self modification on my part. I quit once over it.

I frequent several car repair sites and have never paid ever for a car repair as well as lots of Japanese motorcycle experience. It can get old posting to those who have decided to do DIY without the skills to even begin to, and I tend to give up when I see they are fighting a losing battle and the end can be pretty terse. I look at it like the cars AND the drivers as well often need work having done my stint of garage work to plenty of people who didn't have a clue as to what they are talking about and then direct you to repair things that have literally nothing wrong with them. Same in my parts store experience, I often told people 'that choice' was not going to fix the problem and then you get it the second time too when they have to come back and admit they were wrong. It's mad cats.

The inability to grasp how things work is often hard linked with the tendency to fly off the handle double quick, it comes with the frustration of not being able to easily do things right to last. Some can do DIY and others have no business going there and doing so is a disaster. Most of the success there has to do with critical thinking, if you cannot critique your own work you are sunk.

I for sure do not know everything, so many others can't possibly as well. Trying to get around that can be a minefield. I can argue with success with almost anybody but why, there is no payoff, I simply unhook now and let the other sink since that if often what they choose to do anyway.

Gun sites? I have several guns but going on those would not be a first choice for me. The people I have known personally there scared me off that.
 
While I have been working on cars and bikes since the 60's, a seminal event in the late 70's changed me forever. Needed to have a distributor changed out on my wife's 69 Camaro. Easy job. I pick the car up and drive 30 miles down the road and see smoke coming from under the hood. I pop the hood and there is a 2x4 laying across the intake manifold on top of the spark plugs.

Plug wires are melted by the wood that caught fire. I rip out the plug wires and hitchhike to the next town. I find the correct set of plug wires and hitch back. 5 minutes and the car is up and running. two days later when I return home I go to the repair shop and throw the 2x4 (five feet long) on the floor and let them know I'm pissed, but felt like I should return their 'tool' in case they needed to swap out another distributor for someone else.

Never let anyone work on any of our cars after that.
 
I bought a '93 Mercury Topaz with 9K miles on it, a rental program car. 3 days later the driver side window quit. After years of doing for myself I got stupid and let Ford have it thinking the warranty covered all. Oh, it did all right...............over the course of the next 2 weeks, where they kept saying they were finding things wrong all over the car I got madder and madder. It started off with them 'finding a short under the seat' to create the window issue, wrong as the seat wiring never goes to windows. Then it went to dash removed and finally windshield to 'fix a leak that shorted wires at the PCM', again, nothing wrong with that and windows did not utilize it at all. Finally after phone calls that had different people responding without a clue as to what previous ones had said I took wife up to get the car. She says when she gets back, the car drives horribly, this on a car that was super silky smooth at 80 mph before they got it. I drove car and it is now shaking so hard at 50 mph you can hardly hold the wheel ???!!? Got out and looked at the wheels. They had evidently rebalanced the wheels and never even removed the original weights doing it, which were a different type due to the custom wheels on it. I angrily went around the car and yanked all new weights I saw (scarring the wheels up) and then drove it again. Now it's back to utterly perfectly smooth driving.???!!? So now I'm taking car apart mentally, the d-mn window STILL doesn't work either. Looked at the receipt for work and it claims all things plus removing all 4 doors for wind noise as complained about by customer. I had never made any such remarks. Same with the balancing thing, customer complained. Not me. The doors were never actually touched, the paint was still perfect on the hinges. Same with windshield and dash, never touched. I called them up and cussed them long enough I'm surprised nobody dropped the phone. Then I went to Ford corporate and figured out the dealers were milking Ford of warranty charges with any fairly new cars and corporate basically acted like they didn't even care. The receipt claimed $5200 worth of work done there, the car only sold for $9500. NEVER AGAIN.

Oh, the window? It turned out to just be the fuse, I regret thinking that before all the mess and not doing it myself. Stupid me. Car blew that one fuse and then never had any more trouble with windows.

King Charlie Hilliard Ford back in the mid '90s. One of the first buy ALL makes super car dealerships.

We used to have a family garage across the street from the local GM dealership, and commonly fixed the cars the GM guys couldn't, at various times the owner of that dealer tried to hire us there and Dad finally bought some land out in the country from the guy to retire on later. We used to stomp the living crap out of the 454 Camaros that came out of that dealership using our 390 inch AMX cars. We had one street AMX that would pump out 10.80s 1/4 mile @ 130 and still capped up at the headers. After a time of trying, the GM racing nuts then began to bring their engines to us to build, it was fatblock city there for a while. In the mid-late '70s.
 
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