Text 23133, 78 rader
Skriven 2011-11-28 13:10:02 av Roy Witt (1:387/22)
  Kommentar till text 23124 av Robert Bashe (2:2448/44)
Ärende: Price and durability
============================
28 Nov 11 07:51, Robert Bashe wrote to Roy Witt:

 RW>> If Bob would have stayed put in the good old south, he wouldn't be
 RW>> having those "northern" problems with rust. Except here in South
 RW>> Texas where the sun gets car bodies so hot, it burns the paint right
 RW>> off them. So, you see cars driving around here with a lot of surface
 RW>> rust, but they don't rust out here nearly as early as they do up
 RW>> north.

 RB> The worst rusting I've ever seen was, unsurprisingly, in Montreal
 RB> (Canada), where they measure snowfall in meters (approx. 3 feet)
 RB> instead of inches, and the temperatures in winter (which lasts from
 RB> late October to mid-May) can get down to -40øC (which is
 RB> coincidentally also -40øF) at night.

They measure snowfall in feet where I came from. Three feet was nothing
in comparison. I've seen snow up to the 2nd story windows on many
occasions in Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin. My parents told of
days in their youth when the snows piled up worse than it was when I was
a kid. Now days they pray for snow.

 RB> Since they can't use salt (sodium chloride) to clear the streets at
 RB> such temperatures (salt only works at temperatures down to around
 RB> -5øC), they use _calcium_ chloride, which is effective in removing
 RB> ice at lower temperatures, but is _much_ more aggressive to iron and
 RB> steel than mere salt.

Before they used salt in our small town, they used the ashes from the coal
fired furnaces in the court house, city hall and jail on the streets. That
was a bad idea because in the spring, all of that ash was driven into the
air by the cars driving on the now dry sometimes wet roads. So they went
to Calcium Chloride one winter and the cars began to rust out, like you
say, within 3 years or so.

 RB> The result was that cars only 2-3 years old were rusted through. It
 RB> wasn't nice, but after a while you got used to it.

I never got used to it...you have to wonder about the really old cars of
the 30s and 30s that didn't have any rust to speak of when I was a kid.
They were built from thicker steel and lasted far longer than those built
after 1950.

 RB> The average car only lasted 5-6 years before having to be junked or
 RB> the body completely repaired because of the rust holes.

One day in a suburb of San Diego, a small town of Poway, I saw a 1965 Ford
Galaxy 500 that you could see through, it was rusted that badly. It had
Illinois plates on it and I inquired from where they had come from with
the car. They told me they lived in Chicago and were vacationing the
winter in So Cal...I had an idea it was from that area of the snow belt,
it looked that familiar...

 RB> The wierd thing about Montreal was that it was just as hot in summer
 RB> (like northern Texas) as it was cold in winter. In the summer, you
 RB> couldn't believe it would ever be cool again, and in the winter, you
 RB> couldn't believe it would ever be warm again. Real continental
 RB> climate. I was happy to get back to the typical rainy-muggy winters
 RB> of Germany ;-)

That's Northern Illinois too. Along with the humidity that you would have
in Dallas...then -35F in the winter which really begins in mid-November
and can go to the following May. When my father passed in April of 2001, I
noticed that there were only a few trees with spring leaves on them as we
entered Illinois through St Louis. There were none by the time we got to
the town where they lived on the border with Wisconsin...I thought to
myself that it sure was a dreary place and it's no wonder I moved out of
there when I did.


                R\%/itt


PS - Did I ever tell you that I hate winter? It's true.

  ... Only 5% of all humans have the privilege to live in America.

--- Twit(t) Filter v2.1 (C) 2000-10
 * Origin: SATX Alamo Area Net * South * Texas, USA * (1:387/22)