I've made the leap from wagon lurker to wagon owner

Sorry I couldn't post up any new pics last night. I got home to find that my Internet has been disconnected. I had to scramble for a bandage to seal up the hole in the vein of my right arm where the cable modem was yanked out.

I recently cancelled all of my services with our national telecom conglomerate, Rogers as I have no respect for their business practices. I signed up with a smaller Internet provider that caters to geeks like myself. They're offering better service packages for the same money but they have to use Rogers' wiring to get to my house. Rogers sent out a technician on the day of my cutover who's only task was to clearly label the lines at my house as being in use by a third party to prevent accidental disconnection. It seemed silly to me to think that someone would ever come to my house to perform a disconnect rather than the head-end node in one of the cable boxes at the street but I didn't fuss over it and the switchover went smooth as silk. Lo and behold, 6 days later I'm completely cut off. My new ISP can't do anything about it because it's a physical issue and now I have to wait for Rogers to come back out and reconnect the cable but that apparently won't be for another 3 days.

 

Sounds like sabotage to me. I wonder who...........

 

Yeah...to me too. Sounds like Rogers is getting revengeful.

 

So get this. I cancelled my services with Rogers and they were to shut me down on the 29th. TekSavvy, my new provider said that they couldn't do the switchover unless a Rogers tech came out. The "tech" came out, cut the line on the outside of my house and installed a box to contain the new splice along with a bright red tag on the line to prevent it from being accidentally disconnected.

On the 5th, my 'Net went dead. I called TekSavvy and they couldn't do anything and had to dispatch a new tech to take a look. The tech came out on the 9th to take a look. After feeding me a few lines about how my older 900Mhz splitter would cause problems with my line and that my connectors weren't suitable he settled down and started looking for the obvious problems. I let him redo all of my RG fittings and put in a new coupler and then I explained to the kid that I felt certain that someone must have processed a disconnect order and pulled the plug at the head-end node on my street as there was nothing wrong with my fittings or that splitter. After all, it couldn't be disconnected at the house as there was a bright red tag on it...right? The tech looked at me funny and went to look in the box on the outside of the garage. Sure enough, another tech had come out on the 5th, opened the box and disconnected the splice. He even went far enough to put a blue tag on the line that said "disconnect" and he put it on the line right beside the red tag clearly telling him not to disconnect it. The tech said that this was the third house he had been to in the last week where someone had disconnected a line that was labelled with a red tag. In any case, I'm back up and running again no thanks to Rogers' stupidity.

 

Stupidity? Or, sabotage?

 

I'd love to believe sabotage myself, but the techs are a third party agency. New technicians are hired and put into the field, without training, in the Disconnect Department. Once they've been there for a little while they move up to Service. The tech that came out to fix it had only been in the field for 2 months and had already been moved up due to a new group of techs coming in. Seems very much to be plain 'ol stupidity.

 

Easy to instruct newbies on what to do.

 

I posted a while back about how I was messing around with various ways of restoring black rubber trim on my wagon. I thought I would update that a little.

I haven't been really happy with Mother's Back To Black lately as it doesn't seem to last long and I'm constantly having to redo my trim. Recently I used a Mother's Clay Bar on my paint and Dynoc and was really pleased with how well that worked out. I got thinking that I should be able to do something similar with my rubber trim. Much of my trim has oxidized and has water stains on it. I noticed that it was very rough to the touch when I was working on it. I figured a mild abrasive should get me back down to a rubber surface again. With my love of Rubbing Compound and Polishing Compound I figured this was a great opportunity to see how it would perform. A few posts ago I showed that I was having luck with Rubbing Compound on my bumper moulding as shown below. The trim on the left side came out smooth and black after only a minute or two.


I have some replacement rubber molding that I bought from forum member kurtbrown to replace the pieces that a previous owner screwed on. It was good clean trim but it could use a little TLC. As you can see it has some abrasions and the surface also has some water buildup on it.


Here's that same piece laying on the bumper of my car alongside the molding that I've already done some work on. The difference is quite noticeable.



I wiped the rubber piece down with water and then using a clean cloth I worked over the whole piece with rubbing compound. The first pass took off all of the water stains and a couple more passes removed most of the abrasions. This particular piece had a large gouge on it where the rubber had kissed something in a parking lot at some point. Wet sanding with some 1000 grit and 2000 grit paper took care of that and I then went over it again with Rubbing Compound.

Here's the same piece again alongside the previously cleaned trim on my bumper.


While this piece is still in the garage, I have used this same process on my front bumper molding as well as the black step pad on my rear bumper. Once this is done, these pieces soak up Back To Black like you wouldn't believe and water beads off of them like they're brand new and have just received a fresh coat of wax.

Since I had already decided that I wasn't a fan of Back To Black anymore I also started hunting for a replacement. I really love using Stoner's Invisible Glass on my windows. It's so easy to use and makes glass look fantastic with minimal effort. Based on that, I looked at other Stoner products and picked up a can of Stoner's Trim Shine. This is hands down my replacement for Back To Black now. It's much easier to use and, so far, has done a beautiful job. The only downside to it is that it's a spray-on product and overspray is more than a bit of a problem on pretty much all automotive trim. I'll have to play around with application methods but so far it was money well spent.

 

Wow, nice work. The results are very very good. I can use this on the wife's toy.

 

Here are a few pics of the newly cleaned carpeting on my door panel. The pictures don't do it as much justice as I would like. In person it's a pretty impressive improvement.

BEFORE


DURING


AFTER

 

Looks pretty darn impressive to ME!

 

very nice!!

 

I left a store tonight and as I walked back to the wagon I noticed an elderly gentleman on a scooter circling the car giving it a good look. The back of his scooter had a whip antenna that was flying a very large Royal Canadian Air Force flag so I rushed over to see him. After several minutes discussing the coolness that is my Roady we stood in the parking lot for an hour with me listening to tales from WWII and his time spent working for numerous car dealerships in our area. We had a lot in common. I'm really loving the sorts of folks my car draws in!

 

Yup. You gotta love those old guys with real history under their belt. Right?

 

When you drive anything unusual or old, it is amazing how many people stop to talk, even when the car in question looks as sad as Nora. Definitely not for the shy and retiring! What really surprises me is the number of teenagers who stop and talk and ask questions or just want to talk about the old girl. There is something about 'old school' that draws them in.