We drove the family Mazda 5 from western Chicago to home near Athens Ga yesterday. Woke up to a dusting on snow and drove straight into an ice bowl of crusty salt and overturned vehicles. Yuck! Just spent an hour scrubbing a thick accumulation of salt from the car. Guessing that you guys have daily drivers and nice cars on the side. Hats off to you! You must be tough folks.
Thats why i drive something i dont care about in the winter.
When i lived in mn, i always had a winter beater.
I either had a winter beater or a DD that I didn't care about. Now that I'm retired I just stay home when the roads get nasty, like Saturday morning. By noon the snow had melted and the roads were dry.
My roots run deep. Why let a little snow/ice make you run? Harsh winters kill the bad snakes and water bugs.
Yeah, I grew up in WI, recently moved back. Most non-car people just drive whatever until it rusts out. We park anything we like for 6 months or more every winter and drive something else that has higher turnover, usually a lease, that gets replaced before the rot starts taking off.
My parents have a huge storage unit exactly for that purpose- for the motor home and a couple cars.
Studded snows for the ice, spray the underside with used oil, and wash the top every week. My Rustang is getting it's first rust spots in the rear quarter after 8 years of my driving it all winter. I don't know what the PO did.
In the Northland the summer toys, kayaks, boats, m/cycles, bikes, sports cars etc are stored for at least 5-6 months. Winter toys and winter beaters come out to play. Normal dd cars/trucks get washed weekly if snow/salt happened.
As a Wisconsinite, I dont know any different. Deal with adversity, Nancy. Lol j/k.
I drive the '14 Grand Cherokee and was using a 91 Miata when the salt was gone and my wife thought that was backwards!
SPG123 wrote: Yuck! Just spent an hour scrubbing a thick accumulation of salt from the car. Guessing that you guys have daily drivers and nice cars on the side.
There's a reason why everyone in Cleveland drives a new/newish car, and it's not because everyone is flush with money. Used cars are thin on the ground and worth stupid money compared to what I see people post from other parts of the country so it makes more sense to buy new.
Funny story: This car was fairly rust free when I bought it out of Detroit. (I have photographic evidence) This was taken 2 years after that. Two years after THAT I stopped driving it, the hatch was so rusty that the latch doesn't work and to make room in the storage facility I removed the bumpers by the innovative "hold firmly and pull smoothly" method.
My RX-7 was totally clean when I bought it out of Wisconsin. I don't drive it if the roads have been salted and I still have had to rebuild the floors and the wheelwells. Well, one of them.
If you like it then you park it when the lows start to dip below freezing (before first snow/salting), and don't drive it again until the snow stops, lows get above freezing, and the spring rain rinses the salt(s) off the road. If you have a garage, this means months to do maintenance and modification.
Be sure to really hose out the wheel wells, rocker seams, and the whole undercarriage. Also the engine bay, there will be salt in there too.
I've never really lived anywhere else, so it just seems normal. Also, this winter was pretty mild in Chicago.
That's just another reason why we moved south.
i park good stuff and drive junk in winter. this is why my daily work vehicle is a 2007 express van with 428k miles. i don't care about it getting salted to death. i feel kinda ill that i've had to expose the new truck to salt, but it's going to happen and the best i can do is spray it with oil and hope for the best.
Im the opposite of most people. I grew up in Texas but keep getting further north and east as I get older. My parents moved us to Ohio while I was in High School. I stayed because of my now wife. The last 2 times I made big career moves, I applied for positions in Tennessee (2010) and Texas (2015) but ended up in Michigan and Pennsylvania respectively.
We are at least going to Kentucky when we retire
I like the changes, keeps life interesting. Plus it doesn't hurt living on 1000 or so acres.
patgizz wrote: i feel kinda ill that i've had to expose the new truck to salt, but it's going to happen and the best i can do is spray it with oil and hope for the best.
I debated about oiling the underside of the new Grand Caravan or run it through the full service wash (double undercarriage blasts). So far it's been the car wash.
pjbgravely wrote: spray the underside with used oil
Many of my cars have taken care of this essential step on their own. For those of you with working engine/transmission seals or some reservations about the environmental impact...
There is spray wax that does the same thing and dries so it does not collect dust onto the whole underside of the car.
logdog wrote: Im the opposite of most people. I grew up in Texas but keep getting further north and east as I get older. My parents moved us to Ohio while I was in High School. I stayed because of my now wife. The last 2 times I made big career moves, I applied for positions in Tennessee (2010) and Texas (2015) but ended up in Michigan and Pennsylvania respectively. We are at least going to Kentucky when we retire
I have this same issue, i grew up in md and wv and got moved too ohio as a freshman. Married a woman and had kids so i have a few years left up here.
I drive the ugliest, cheapest vehicles I can find from November to April, and park my Miata the whole time. Then after a ton of rain, I pull out the nice car. The winter is kinda nice in the regard that I can tear the nice car down for major work and not be wasting nice days working on it, instead of driving it.
Because winter is great - just not on cars!
This was this morning - sucks in April
This was a few weeks ago - I'm 6'4" look at the snow bank behind me!
This is what we do on it!
drainoil wrote:patgizz wrote: i feel kinda ill that i've had to expose the new truck to salt, but it's going to happen and the best i can do is spray it with oil and hope for the best.I debated about oiling the underside of the new Grand Caravan or run it through the full service wash (double undercarriage blasts). So far it's been the car wash.
Oil is oxygen permeable, just because it has oil doesn't mean it can't rust. IIRC the only petroleum products you can really trust to not allow oxygen through are petroleum jelly and certain kinds of wax. (That crayon smell in the non-rustable VWAG products)
Further proof: Mopars rust AND leak oil to prodigious degrees.
No one mentioned the awesome temperatures we live through. Normal daytime highs in the 0 to -10 range and when the real cold comes down from the arctic -20 to -30 with wind chills in the -50s or more. Not worrying about rust when hoping the car/truck starts and the heater at least warms the interior so you don't see your breath. The upside: I only used house A/C less than 10 days last summer.
They can take my Southern Arizona from me when they pry it from my warm and sun burned dead fingers....
race car is my daily. Just swap suspensions in the fall/spring and keep a seperate set of wheels/tires. Easy peasy. Every place you live has downsides. We have low CoL, low taxes, freedoms, decent income and plenty of things to occupy us. So we get winter and crazy weather that comes randomly. At least its not Hurricanes, earthquakes or high taxes!
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