Locate an Auto Repair Shop in Stuart, Oklahoma

Stuart, OK Car Consumer Discussions

Re: New Mazda3 comes with CHEAP tires [blanca58]

by petesleaf on Tue Oct 21 06:35:26 PDT 2008

Same prob with my 2007 Mazda3 bought new from factory with Toyo Tires. Not convinced that it is the actual brand of tires causing the inside wear at 15k after reading the eight or so blogs/complaints about Maza 3s rear tire negative camber problems. I took my car to Tires Plus in Port St. Lucie Fl and they called me into the garage to explain that the alignment computer is showing "factory specs" on all four wheels. They said there must be a factory defect in the car and to take it to the dealer and demand correction and a new set of tires or threaten Lemon Law !. I took it to the Mazda dealer in Stuart Fl and they said the car was fine and that I just had not rotated the tires each oil change. I went home not convinced and started searching on line finding all the forum write ups on the problem being extreme negative camber on the rear of most Mazda 3s. One forum explained how you could personally try to make your own corrections to the rear camber by turning the two hatchmarked adjustment bolts in or out on both rear wheels. This made sense seeing my problem started exactly at the same mileage a lot of the other forum writers stated. 17k on factory tires. I rotated my tires once since new at 14k moving the rear tires with the worn inner ridge to the front of my car. That is when I started noticing unusual tire/road noise. It threw me off because most tire wear is usually caused from front end misalignment. My front tires were fine and then they started wearing right away when I moved them to the rear. I noticed the wear was a little more extreme on one side than the other so I adjusted the rear camber on that side one and a half hatch marks and the other side only one hatch mark correction using two large 17mm box end wrenches with the car jacked up and with safety jack stands in place. You can actually see the correction to the negative camber when you turn the camber bolt in or out after loostening the threaded lock nut on the outside. You can notice the tops and bottoms of the tires moving in or out a little with each turn. Negative camber is when your wheels are tilting in at the top and out at the bottom. As you add weight to the car such as heavy passengers you will get even more negative camber on the rear wheels. The front wheels do not need camber adjustment and don't have an adjustment as far as I could see. After making the minor adjustments to my car I took my best tires and moved them up to the front hoping that I could get a little more out of them. I figure 30 to 40K would be fair. We'll see. I still have the road noise because of the previous wear damage. I haven't noticed any oversteer as a result of the minor adjustment which I considered an easy fix/job as car repairs go. Now I'm driving around behind every Mazda 3 I can catch up to in traffic and in parking lots observing the rear camber. It is amazing. Some are very easy to detect visually that the rear tires are tilting in at the top as compared to other cars . I stood behind a Mazda 3 five door the other day and couldn't believe how obvious the negative camber looked. Why the dealers are so misinformed or underhanded I don't know. It sure isn't ethical. Withl the problems they fix and diagnose, I wonder if the service managers ever read the forums to find out stuff that is affecting their customer's confidence. It probably has to do with them having to own up to a new set of tires for every complaint. That could be a lot more expensive than a routine alignment. On the other hand their reputation is at stake trying to hide stuff. Who would want a car that wears out a good set of very expensive tires every 15000 miles?

Re: I Especially Enjoyed. . . [lexusguy]

by laurasdada on Fri Oct 03 19:33:45 PDT 2008

Fine, fine, fine. You are one tough customer to please. But, whatever you want, Stuart appears to have: Okay, how's that! :)

Re: [laurasdada]

by tagman on Wed Aug 13 21:34:10 PDT 2008

I'm quite certain those front-mounted guns could me modified. With only 8,050 miles... and, a price tag of a mere $89K! However, dada, I must admit, it is exquisite! Stuart Carpenter has quite an interesting collection. TM

Re: Why blame the UAW [dallasdude1]

by cooterbfd on Sat Aug 02 08:11:35 PDT 2008

"John Stuart Mill was a good liberal, describing the threat of popular opinion as being as much a tyranny as any King on a throne and arguing that people should be free to engage in whatever behavior they wish as long as it does not harm others." Forgive me for responding to just 1 sentence in a long post, but doesn't the concept of free market contradict this when a company, in the name of raking in more profits, sends jobs overseas, putting Americans out of work???

Re: Why blame the UAW [duke23]

by dallasdude1 on Fri Aug 01 15:47:05 PDT 2008

The word liberal is in my vocabulary, go ahead and get it out Duke my friend. Liberal means you are a partisan of liberty in it’s social, political and economic forms. If that is a disease let it spread! Our founding fathers were liberals in the John Locke vein, who prized liberty over tradition, opposed concentrated power, and thought we should fear our government more than revere it. Adam Smith was a liberal, who understood that free trade and freedom were intertwined, and that while supporting steel tariffs might help you win votes in Pennsylvania, it distorts prices and ultimately steals from consumers to “pick winners” rather than letting markets decide. John Stuart Mill was a good liberal, describing the threat of popular opinion as being as much a tyranny as any King on a throne and arguing that people should be free to engage in whatever behavior they wish as long as it does not harm others. Now I get it that you are out to bash folks who’ve taken the liberal tradition and remixed it in ways you don’t approve, but that is no reason to take down a perfectly good word and misuse it. I hate to see you lined up with abusing language. Orwell wrote about how language would be manipulated to reduce the ability to ever speak the truth. That is what is happening to that word. People misuse liberalism as a slander to attack what they actually practice (that’s what you are doing) and others misuse it as a cover for statism or other types of collectivism (I think that is the disease you are after) but that doesn’t change the meaning of liberalism or the tradition it represents. Saying Americans “masses” don’t understand this usage is insulting. First their are no “masses”: just individuals who all have the means to learn what the word means and the tradition values. To give up on the proud tradition of liberalism and start using it as a slander is a mistake. You cut yourself off form the liberal tradition and make it that much harder to describe its values accurately to others. Don’t help build an Orwellian lexicon where “liberal” means something bad instead of something good. This is updownism. It’s a misuse of language that is beneath intelligent discourse. Liberalism is not ancient rhetoric – the issues liberals support are as pressing today in the fight for liberty around the world as it was when liberalism came ashore on the New World. There is certainly nothing conservative about fighting wars to protect human rights and institute democracy. It’s classic liberal radicalism of the Tom Paine variety that believes humans weren’t born with saddles on their backs to be ridden by others (apologies for mixing a paine reference and a jeffersonian image, but it helps the larger point). From what I’ve read, you are a classical liberal. It’s not semantics that is the issue – it’s philosophy, history, and ideas I care about. I don’t like seeing people mangle a political tradition – be it a socialist who believes in “social liberties” but not economic ones, or a modern day “conservative” who too often doesn’t recognize the source of their own liberal beliefs, and too often sleepwalks into mixing social conservatism (morality politics) with a lazy attitude toward protecting individual liberties (like the truly Orwellian named “patriot” act). Milton Friedman makes clear what is wrong with your use of the term “liberal” in the first chapter of Capitalism and Freedom. And Friedman may be ancient himself, but his explanation of classical liberalism is eminently relevant today. This idea that the term is archaic is asinine. It may not work on talk radio, but any educated person ought to know what liberalism actual refers to (though few actually do). As I tried to point out, it is eminently relevant in an age of liberal military adventurism where we are actively pushing back conservative regimes abroad to try and advance liberal values like free markets, free elections, and human rights. I’m with you on what is terrible about the Orwellian use of language, but you are doing it yourself by framing liberalism as a boogie man. You are trying to make white mean black and trying to blame it on the “masses” or mainstream usage is such a cop out. Step out of the matrix. Sure, you and George Will may want to conserve the nation’s liberal tradition, but you are no conservative in the traditional sense of the word. I know of a caliph or two who has a rather conservative outlook on the world, and it is pretty obvious you aren’t supporting his side in this global battle. It is too bad that people talk about politics at a Rush Limbaugh level and abuse language by turning liberal into a bad word. I don’t think it takes us very far toward understanding the world around us. John Kerry and George Bush agree on far more issues than they disagree on – they represent the left and right wing of “American liberalism” – and to my mind, represent a sad chapter in the rather exhausted story of “American liberalism”, where neither is above supporting tariffs or takings when expedient or curbing liberty when political popular. But if you aspire to keep company with folks who read Friedman and understand what he is talking about, you need to come to terms with the fact that liberalism isn’t the sickness you are claiming it is. It’s more like the cure. I would like to move Liberals to a more classical and orthodox Liberal philosophy, something within the spirit of those early Republicans who strove for the abolition of slavery.

Re: Dada - Pull the trigger [clembo]

by blckislandguy on Sat Aug 02 08:23:59 PDT 2008

In a post a couple of days ago, I mentioned that there were a lot of good high end cars now hitting the "sweet spot" price-wise as the original lessors (or is it leasees?) have now moved on to their next "latest thing". (You have to love the early adopters: they pave the way for the sensible among us.) This raises the question: what is the "sweet spot" for say a couple's third car. A car that you would use 8 or so months a year maybe to go out in for an ice cream after work, to summer weddings, or to use on Nantucket. While I'm sure that answer varies a lot depending on individual cirucumstances, somehow the figure that comes to my mind is between 30K to 40K. In this price range you will be getting a decent car, one that offers a lot of fun. This price level would include all used Boxers, 2005 and earlier XKs, 996 but not 997 Porsches, most Land Rover Defenders, all used 9-3 Saab convertibles (don' t laugh: they are probably a lot of fun for the money and you could even use it as a ski car), M3's and maybe even an M5, all new Jeep Wranglers, even the new four door version that seems to offer a lot of summer fun, X5s, etc. For less than 40K you could afford to garage it for three or so months a year and not have too much in the way of opportunity costs , especially the way the stock market is now. Additionally, the depreciation would already have been baked in to the price and if you bought the car right, you could probably get most of your money back a year or so later if you tired of it. Maybe you even have a new romantic acquaintance this summer? You could buy it with her input. It would then become "your" car as you as a couple zip around Watch Hill or the Berkshires. If you were still a couple this fall, you could go leaf peeping in it. The possibilities are endless if you buy it right. I think if you bought it right, the smart thing to do would be to throw on a set of new tires if necessary, check the coolant system, install a new Optima battery in the now three or more years old car, and be prepared to have fun! Incidentally, the poster above referenced Copley Motor Cars in Boston, I think that Stuart is an honorable guy with some neat cars. I think he probably has more used Defenders than anyone else in the US. His pricing, his asking pricing please keep in mind, may seem too high, but he probably is just testing the market with the BU students. The dealer-principal at the Porsche dealership in Boston told me a year or so ago that about 50% of his sales were to international students attending BU whose parents paid by wire transfer. That figure probably has gone up as the dollar has weakend. YMMV