In the meantime, I thought I’d share some simple lessons about winter car survival, because, well, there’s a whole bunch of snow on the ground here in Minneapolis, and I just didn’t feel like looking too far for inspiration today.
So, we already know, or should know that snow tires are a really good thing to have for wintertime driving. The compound of the rubber they’re made with as well as the depth and design of the groves, sipes, and tread blocks all join forces to keep your car gripping in conditions where an all season tire will have you sliding. To illustrate just why winter tires are good things, I’ve procured a little visual to show what can happen when traction is lost.
Here’s a photo I snapped on my way into work today, showing the wreckage left in the wake of an accident. You can see the indentations in the snow bank where a vehicle ramped up and through it to plow down the parking sign. Betcha’ they didn’t have snow tires. In fairness, though, this was actually a 6 car accident.. Only two or three of the vehicles involved were not parked at the time, though. Longtime readers may also recognize this location from a previous post last year involving a Firebird that got creamed at this same corner. That Firebird ramped up at just about the same place as today’s wreck, but spared the parking sign in that instance by a matter of inches. I will pay ramp parking prices before I leave by car parked along that expanse of curbside, and anybody else who parks in downtown Minneapolis would be wise to follow suit.
So yeah, winter tires. They’re good, get them, blah, blah ,blah, etcetera. This blog has beaten that horse deader than the parking sign from our accident picture featured above. Here are some other perils of winter.
First up: Snow… I know, you’re probably thinking, well, duh! But, if you’re like me and you don’t own a snow blower, figuring that shoveling snow is Minnesota’s all natural aerobic workout, then you know just how much it sucks to shovel when there’s a bunch of accumulated snow and you happen to own a corner lot. About the time I finish the first fifty feet of shoveling this last time around, I was really regretting that I’d spent the previous night’s gym session working on my arms and boxing. The repetitive activity of jab, cross, hook, uppercut until one’s arms feel like spaghetti is fine up until you have to spend the next morning with your shovel doing scoop, lift, tip, and toss about a thousand times. None the less, there’s a certain satisfaction that goes along with that last scoop of snow when you know you’ve busted your butt to clear the walkways and the driveway and you have a clear path to show for it.
Of course, it’s not as simple as it seems. It’s time to cue our antagonist… not mother nature, in this case. The source of tension here is far more municipal in nature; the City of Minneapolis Snow Plow. These guys clear the streets of snow using large, heavy trucks that have a massive plow blade on the front end, and typically feature a dump bed full of brine or sand to sprinkle across the roadways in their wake. Sounds like they do a pretty good service, right? Well, they do, but they also set the stage for a great deal of frustration for homeowners who have just spent two hours shoveling their walkways and driveway clear of snow. As the plow pushes snow off the roadway, it flings it to the side, where it usually lands on the boulevard between the sidewalk and the curb. Of course, when the curb cuts away for somebody’s driveway, the plow doesn’t just magically stop flinging snow all over. It creates what is called a berm.
A snow berm is like a snow bank, only composed of dirty, icy, chunky snow that’s been pushed and packed firm by the plow until it is deposited at the end of the driveway you just finished clearing. And it’s not that easy to shovel this stuff, because it’s denser, heavier, harder, and icier than the fluffy puffs of snow that fell from the sky flake by flake to accumulate. This stuff is back-breakingly brutal to shovel, and if you don’t get to it right away, it will freeze up and create what might as well be a brick wall blocking you from entering or leaving your driveway without roughing up your car’s bumper or getting the undercarriage hung up on it. In other words, it super sucks. You can drive right through it if you have enough ground clearance and AWD or 4x4, or you just got off work, it’s really late, you are dead tired, and you just don’t give a crap, so you goose the gas and pound the car right up through it without consideration for the risk of damage or possibly sliding right into the damn garage door… That was the case with the photo above -and no, the garage door was not struck.
Still, the next day, that berm needs to be dealt with. So, like Sisyphus who just finished rolling the rock all the way up the hill just to have it tumble right back down, I dutifully grab my shovel and try again, arms still feeling like spaghetti, back sore from the previous bout of snow shovel aerobics. Thanks a lot, Minneapolis plow trucks, you’re going on my shit list next to Nikon until spring.
Of course, it’s not just driveways that end up with snow berms. Intersections and alleyways get them blocking the path, too. Last week, the alleyway berm was so intimidating that some jerk (probably the same one whose lousy graffiti I had to scrub off the stucco on my garage -you can still see some trace of it) who stole a cart from the grocery store that’s like twelve blocks away couldn’t even be bothered to try to boost his pilfered shopping cart over or through it, and instead, ditched it next to my garage so now I have to deal with the damn thing. Thanks, asshole… you just made the list next to Nikon and snow plows.
Regular readers probably already know that it’s a major pet peeve of mine when people in parking lots do not put their carts away in the cart corral (see the Black Friday post from November regarding a mild confrontation I had with a Smart Fortwo driver over this very thing)… So you can probably imagine just how much it rubs me the wrong way when recalcitrant shopping carts end up near my own driveway.
Let’s move along to the back end of our despised plow trucks. The back end is where the brine and sand falls. This stuff is nasty for cars, which is why upper Midwestern used cars are so famous for their rust. Road salt eats away at finishes and hastens the oxidation process. The sand that gets dumped is barely better, because having that stuff flinging up against your undercarriage and wheel wells is akin to a mild sandblasting that lasts all winter long, eroding any protective finishes and exposing metal to the elements to be corroded. All this nastiness tends to build up in the wheel wells and form what can be best described as automotive stalactites. Here’s an example.
Aside from being harbingers of future rust, these aren’t so bad to deal with. In fact, it’s kind of satisfying to kick one of these off your car, provided it breaks off in a nice, big chunk and that later, that chunk doesn’t freeze into brick-like hardness in the shape of a spiky little stalactite that gets hung up under your car when you drive over it. You’ll see these things in various shades of snowy white to silvery gray, to coal black, scattered all over parking lots and driveways in the wake of the vehicles whose wheel wells they’ve been dislodged from.
It’s important to get all this nasty road stuff off your car in a timely manner. Not just for the sake of the car’s appearance, but also because it’s winter time, and you will probably have to scrape ice or snow from your windshield every now and then. When you do that, you’ll find yourself leaning up against the fenders to reach the glass, and if there’s crud on your car, there’s going to be a transfer of that crud onto you. So, for the sake of not only your car, but also your couture, keep the vehicle clean. For that, you’ll need to go to the car wash… Hopefully, you were smart and shut off the water supply valves to your home’s outdoor spigots for the winter, so a home wash is out of the question. I like fully automated washes in winter, whereas I prefer the ones where I can do it myself in summer. I have a video that I will attempt to upload here for your viewing pleasure of my car going through the course of the automated car wash, but if you see but a void below this paragraph, you will know my uploading efforts were unsuccessful (you could blame my lack of computer savvy, but for this week, let‘s just say it‘s Nikon‘s fault, shall we?).
Hmmm... it seems that didn't work.. Hell!
Anyway, make sure you spring for the blow dryer portion of the car wash, or else your windows and doors will freeze shut, and you’ll be trapped in your car, or out of it. You don’t really need to worry about a spot free rinse, because if it’s cold enough, the remaining water droplets on your car will freeze into little ice pellets long before they have a chance to evaporate and leave behind mineral deposits in the form of spots on your clear coat. Voila! The car is clean and ready to drive for a few more days before so much crap accumulates on it that you have to head to the car wash yet again.
To summarize today’s lessons: 1) Nikon cameras have displeased me this week. 2) It’s cold here in Minnesota in winter time (shocking, I know!). 3) Snow tires are good, but the Northwest corner of the intersection at 3rd St S and 4th Ave S in downtown Minneapolis is a horrible place to park a car. 4) Shoveling snow is a great upper body workout and so is boxing, but try not to do both in the span of just a few hours. 5)Snow berms suck and so do inconsiderate plow drivers and shopping cart thieves. 6) Salt and sand is no good for your car, but is kind of fun to kick at in mud flap stalactite form. 7) Wash the winter off your car on a regular basis to keep it nice.
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