gotta love them maryland roads

As with most semi-major car maintenance appointments, my recent trip to the auto place for tires ended up costing hundreds more dollars than I expected. Seems like there's always a myraid of problems with my car and whenever I get it checked it's just a matter of how much I want to spend and how much I want to roll the dice on. And there's always a little of both.

I've known for a while I needed new tires on the front, as they'd been getting well worn and were in poor shape from the cupping problem they'd had for a while. So, as usual, I decided to save money and only replace the front ones and leave the back ones alone. So I'm not exactly maximizing safety, which could be especially dumb for someone who wrecked his previous car when its back tires came loose on ice, but hey, gotta save money somewhere. And in hopes of solving the cupping problem, I decided to get an alignment done as well. Turns out it needed an inner tire rod replaced -- ouch. It also needed some camber bolts (I think) in the back to bring the rear wheels into spec for the alignment, but the guy said those aren't absolutely necessary so I passed on that. Heck, I'll wreck the car before I have to replace that small stuff. That's how it usually works. But a few hundred dollars later and the craziness in the front should be fixed, right?

Yeah. On the way to D.C. yesterday, with the new tires, the front end wobbled like nothing I've felt before. I've never had a car that didn't shake a little at high speeds, but whereas in the past it's been an issue of not knowing what's going (or gone) bad and how expensive it could be, this time it was actually uncomfortable to drive. That didn't suck as much once I realized I could just drive even faster and the vibration would lessen, but it was still inconvenient. (Speaking of that trip, the new tires didn't stop me from hydroplaning at least three times that I remember on the way home. Losing control, however slight, three times in a single trip is a first for me. It didn't do much for my confidence in those tires' grip heading into snow/ice season.)

Anyway, I am going somewhere with this. I went in this morning and had the mechanics check the work they did yesterday to find the problem, and it checked out fine. But they did show me that all four of my wheels are bent such that they wobble to varying degrees and that's what's been causing the trouble. I asked the guy if that's usually due to hitting bumps and potholes and stuff, and he said yes, that's almost always the cause. My trips on the motocross courses that pass for public roads in and around D.C., and on some of the horrible roads around here on which manholes are recessed so far they might as well not be there, immediately came to mind. The guys at least swapped the wheels around to put the two best ones on the front, at no charge (one reason why I've been to that place several times). But it still sucks that the tires will probably wear unevenly. I suspect one reason the vibration only came about with new tires is that the old ones had worn too much on the edges and so the wheel movement wasn't as noticeable.

So, in light of that, I'd like to give a big shout out to the fine (government-paid) folks who keep the highways and biways of Maryland in top form. I'm so glad the roads I drive on aren't hurting my car. It's also great to know that the huge chunk of each paycheck that gets yoinked for state taxes (check the list, Maryland is way up there) and county taxes -- get that, even the county gets a piece of the income tax action -- is producing results accordingly.

This state blows.