Winter Woes

23 Jan Winter Woes

There are two things that come with winter that can spell nothing but sadness for car owners. Today, we’ll look at both of them.

The first tag-along of winter is treacherous road conditions. When we say drive safely, over and over, pretty much on the daily, we mean it. Not only are we a service shop and a performance fabrication shop, but we also have a full paint and body shop, so we see exactly what happens when people don’t heed our call for safer winter driving. We obviously think it’s best if everybody buys winter/snow tires, or at least a set of very capable all-seasons, but in today’s economy (or any economy, really) it’s not feasible to expect every roadgoing consumer to pony up $500 for a set of Blizzaks. Between snow from the roofs and hoods of other cars and the overall conditions, one wrong move in this weather — be it your wrong move, or somebody else’s — can spell disaster. Like it did for this Escape Hybrid:

The front end is pretty well smashed up, with the fender and suspension taking the brunt of the damage. This is typical of your normal winter damage — it’s usually a result of understeer while turning, with the leading tire running smack-dab into the opposing curb as the tires are unable to grab traction. It may be as simple as an alignment to fix the issue, or it could end up costing you (or your insurance company) thousands in repairs that will leave you without your car for a week or two. Thankfully, the expensive and electrically charged hybrid system didn’t suffer an inch of damage, but the suspension and body panel damage is more than enough. Even the A/C condenser is damaged and leaking.

Something tells us this wasn’t the originally intended camber angle for this wheel.

The other winter woe we’ll discuss today is salt. While not every state uses salt for their roadways and highways, Illinois does. If you mix the salt with a very humid summer and some small exposed surfaces on the vehicle, boom, rust begins to develop at an accelerated rate. Rust is the enemy of anything metal, as it will begin to eat through your metal until you’re left with a pile of golden-brown flakes that are not part of your daily recommended breakfast regimen. It happens very often on exhaust systems, where penetrating rust will give your exhaust note all sorts of awful characteristics. Such is the case for this Chevy Malibu. We had to replace its muffler, which had given in to the ‘car cancer.’

This of course meant handing it over to our tame fabrication squad, since the new muffler didn’t come with a tip, and we weren’t going to figure out a way to get the old rusted one back on there. Even though it was just a quick exhaust tip for a Malibu didn’t give us any reason to do it with less enthusiasm and effort. As always, the welds turned out nice, and here’s one quick example.

So yes, we’ll say it again. Drive safely. It’s not really you guys we’re worried about — it’s the other maniacs on the road you’ll need to watch out for.