Timothy Burke's discussions

It’s 150 miles for me, as that’s enough to get us from Tampa to Gainesville, where my mother-in-law lives. 

Something about the ride height and wheel offset seems really wrong here.

A dozen college friends & I went on an annual ski trip in West Virginia every year (they still do, I think? I don’t live in Ohio anymore though) & one year it was my turn to be one of the drivers. My ‘98 Jetta had not-great front tires and bad plug wires and we (along with the entire East Coast) were hit with a… Read more

yup. one of three we owned along the way — the ‘01 Jetta and ‘02 Cabrio both went 150k before we sold them off, too.

I put another 50k on after this before the reason that coolant light is on—a completely dissolved head gasket, basically—sent my ‘98 Jetta to the grave.

ehhhhh older ones came with the 3800, a much better engine IMO, or at least one that is more amenable to cheap maintenance. Correct me if I’m wrong and the 3.1L is fine—I know it went into a ton of GM cars that have terrible reputations—but this car is somehow too new for me.

This era of VW interiors absolutely did NOT hold up well. I’ve had three of them and no amount of babying kept pieces from breaking off, falling off, you name it. 

This is more than I paid for my 2012 X1, which has more HP. And my X1 can haul two dog crates. And get twice the gas mileage.

no, none of these things are the point

1988 Honda Accord coupe with a 1985 Honda Accord hatchback front clip, chopped roof, and cut wheel wells.

...the climate controls are integrated into that unit. how are you gonna fix that?

I am guessing this depends on where you live, and how much car insurance is there. Here in Florida car insurance is obscenely expensive and I ditched my Cabrio as soon as we got married (we both work from home and have for almost ten years). If car insurance is cheap where you are keeping an extra vehicle in your… Read more

the original clutch on his Frontier King Cab lasted 801,000 miles Read more

As a kid I had a Honda Express that would only start if I pulled the spark plug out and primed the cylinder with aerosol bug spray. 

Putting a lot of faith in the 635 pounds of that 429 to keep the thing from nosediving. 

I feel like I read decades ago (back when I was regularly driving a ‘72 Type 1) that VW Beetles had extremely low traffic fatality numbers per mile driven because their size and nature simply made them smaller targets, literally, for fatal accidents, and there were so many of them. 

Is it the right thing to do? I guess, though our income in March subsidizes the costs of the rest of the year (our mortgage and utilities in slow months like September well exceeds our income)

so we lost a total of $4500 in about 48 hours. We have about two months of cash reserves to keep it afloat if we can’t get any… Read more

Update: AirBnB is indeed forcing hosts to eat the costs of “nonrefundable” reservations that they are allowing guests to get refunds on. 

The real question will be if AirBnB cancels the insurance hosts pay against people canceling in the form of nonrefundable booking discounts.

As it currently works, hosts can surrender between 10 and 15% of the nightly rate in return for a guest booking the stay as nonrefundable. The problem, of course, is that AirBnB… Read more

people have been criticizing artistic portrayals of Jesus Christ as a white, northern European man for like 1000 years