#SaveEddie, Part II: The Consequence of Inertia

This is the second part in a series of articles chronicling my illogical attempts to repair and restore my long-time owned Pontiac Sunfire, affectionately dubbed "Eddie." Do not anticipate expert repair advice. Trust me, an actual mechanic would have sorted this all out years ago.

Previous entry:
Part I: The Coefficient of Friction

I’ve been in traffic collisions before. Never at high speed, only ever in stop-and-go traffic. That’s when you’re paying less attention, because there’s less at risk.

Nearly ten years ago, I failed to stop my hand-me-down ’93 Dodge Caravan. Normally, a 10mph collision would be nothing. But I drive in an area with pickup trucks, which just happens to be what I hit. And this pickup just happened to have a trailer hitch mounted perfectly level with the Caravan’s front grill.

A trailer hitch needs to be strong, so they tend to be forged from substantial steel and either bolted or welded directly to the vehicle’s frame. This makes them very immobile compared to the rest of the car or truck, which is why there is no flex in them when you whack one with your shin. It also makes it much stronger than the ABS plastic that makes up the crosshair grill of the early-nineties Chrysler AS platform minivan. And the air conditioning coil behind it. And the radiator behind that. So much stronger, in fact, that it pushes said radiator far back enough to punch a hole in the battery.

Nowadays, I might have tried to salvage my Caravan. It might have been easier then, given automotive engineering at the time of its manufacture. Instead, we, the insured, accepted the insurer’s verdict of a total loss and surrendered the minivan to the wrecker. Some time and a Craigslist search later, we found Eddie.

Flash forward to today’s age on that slick road in Arlington. Friction has failed to overcome momentum, and carnage is the result.

Time doesn’t really slow down like in the movies. Instead, it’s just over. Expletives are uttered and on go the hazard flashers as I step out to check on the other driver. In hindsight, it’s curious the other driver was on his phone before even opening his door, but Eddie is my primary concern now, as it was then. He’s up and moving around, not complaining of any injury, and I’m fine, so I get on the phone to my insurer.

While I’m describing the event and damage in triplicate to the claims agent, a county cop pulls up behind us, confirms we’re okay, and instructs us to turn onto a side street, out of the way of traffic. He takes our information, writes it up on an incident report, gives us copies, and goes on his way. I’m on the phone another twenty minutes, if feels like, before the agent asks if I need a tow truck.

Eddie isn’t leaking any fluid and there’s no apparent suspension damage or misalignment, so Eddie is drivable, even with only one headlight properly aligned. I drive him the remaining two miles to my apartment’s garage, where I take multiple pictures with my phone for an initial damage assessment.

Immediately noticeable is the driver’s side headlight lens, broken free from its mounting points, is tucked up underneath the hood, which has crumpled under the stress of impact. Paint flicks off the bumper in spiderweb patterns at the whim of a slight breeze. The left fender is creased at the leading edge and bows out above the front wheel, and the black plastic inner fender is in two pieces.

These are all relatively easy fixes, and good news is the windshield washer reservoir and the battery, both in close proximity to the impact, are untouched. However, some measuring shows the subframe is bent back, so new parts may not fit properly if we attempted to install them.

Two things worked as advertised, however: the bumper reinforcement, a tube of steel protecting the radiator from damage in all but high-speed crashes, and the front absorber, which is a grid of plastic designed to collapse before any structural metal takes damage.

All signs show relatively minor damage, save for the bending in the subframe. I’m not a professional mechanic by any means, so I suspect I won’t be able to fix that by myself. Doesn’t mean I won’t try.

#SaveEddie, Part I: The Coefficient of Friction

Summer tires are a fine thing for driving. When I talk about my seasonal tire strategy, I’m often confronted with the inquiry, “Why don’t you just use all-season tires?”A part of me wants to tell them they’ll never understand. However, years of working in the service industry has trained me to temper my snippiness. Instead, I’ll illustrate that four-season tires are a compromise that results from convergence.

I’ve observed for many years that when the features of two products are converged into a single unit, the merits of these features always become compromised. The most successful convergence to my mind is none other than the Clock Radio: take a standard tabletop radio, glue on a digital clock, and interconnect the two such that the radio can be turned on at a specified time. Low and behold, it works! You set the trigger to five minutes before you head out the door for work in the morning, and sure enough the radio turns on at 7:55 A.M., thus waking you to the sound of morning talk show antics. You stir, looking for the source of the noise and see the current time displayed on the chronograph. Your half-asleep brain does a bit of arithmetic, then fires a surge of adrenaline through your body to get your lethargic ass energized to shower, shave, dress and sprint out the door while praying a power outage scrambled the time clock at work last night so you can slip into your office undetected by the higher-ups.

The Clock Radio works as advertised, even if your body clock doesn’t. However, you probably aren’t listening to Sublime’s new single on this thing. No, you want the good stereo your older brother bought with money from selling midterm answer sheets, don’t you? So, while the Clock Radio is a perfectly functional clock paired with a perfectly functional radio, it failed to exemplify the best attributes of either product. Sound quality is rather limited, given the single speaker. And, for many, many years, it wasn’t a particularly attractive clock, never destined to hang upon the wall alongside Great-Uncle Charlie’s self-portrait.

And so, we have the all-season tire: functional in summer, functional in the snow, but failing to match the potential in either when asked of it.

  Summer tires can’t cut into the snow because the tread pattern is meant to displace liquid water rather than powder, while the knobbly tread on a snow tire allows for some flex, meaning decreased grip in dry conditions.  As such, many drivers elect for a best-of-both-worlds approach, and have the dealer bolt on four all-season tires, and they won’t have to worry about it until they wear out.

I take a different approach.  Last year, I purchased a new set of rims and had some Bridgestone summer tires installed on them. I took off my stock rims, which had winter tread on the front axle and still-good all-seasons on the back, and bolted up the new ones for a transcendent experience in traction. These tires provided me with a spirited driving experience all through spring, summer and fall, until early December when I switched them back. Some may see the twice-annual change as an inconvenience not worth having, but I consider it time well-spent for an engaging driving experience nine months out of the year and peace of mind during the other three.

Back to squishy, cold weather compound for a few months, which brings me to late February.

Conditions were moderate in temperature, but high in humidity due to earlier rainfall. Much of that moisture was still on the asphalt as I crested a hill to find someone stopping quickly to turn left off the busy street. The duty then fell to me to modulate braking pressure to avoid a lockup. Normally, the anti-lock brake system’s computer would do that for me, but thanks to a break in the wire leading to the front-right wheel sensor that I haven’t been able to chase down, my ABS is inactive. Locking up the brakes would be bad for me, since I have moving traffic on my right, while there’s oncoming traffic to the left, and if I were to spin it would be far worse than unfortunate.

So modulate the brakes I do, and I can hear these winter tires howl like a wounded animal; a sound generated by combining the flex of rubber under stress with turbulent airflow around the tire’s tread. My heart stops, hoping to inspire the car to do the same, but it isn’t enough in these greasy conditions to prevent Eddie from colliding into the back of a late 2000’s Nissan Sentra.