Mine are bypassed too so yeah, more an annoyance than a need.

Thankfully no skylights in our house. We might need a roof in a few years though - waiting on the next hurricane to make it an insurance expense sigh.

 

Let's hope none of the underlying plywood needs replacement. A single 4x8 sheet of plywood these days is over $100.

Do you park your car outdoors, Mike?

 

$100! Wow! Inflation must be hitting NY way harder than CA. We're we're still right around $30 for a 4' x 8' x 3/8" thick sheet of plywood... We just built a shed, so I had to purchase several sheets for the roof. The plywood for the flooring was $40 - $50 per sheet, but that was for 3/4" finished/sanded..

 

I built a wedge platform last month to level out our backyard for the inflatable pool... about $40 a sheet for 1/2" b/c here in SC (from Lowes no less)

I do park outside - our garage has nonstandard garage doors that, with the edging, are just barely wider than our car's mirrors. I'm not sure the G would actually fit - the Mazda3 barely did. The CX5 has about 1" on either side.

Since the CX5 sits higher, when the fam evacs for a hurricane I keep it if I'm staying and I send them inland in the G37. I also have to evac my 87 year old mother so the taller ride is better for her.

It's funny you should ask though - we evac'd inland to Columbia SC for Matthew I think and that's where all the rain got dumped - and I had 6" of water on top of my carpet in the G.

 

I'm just repeating what the roofer warned me about back in April when we had our shingles torn down and replaced. Maybe in the last 4 months things eased off. That was smack in the middle of the supply chain crisis.

If I were living somewhere that I could casually talk about evacuating because of a hurricane, I wouldn't be living there long. Mark my words, the Northeast against the Great Lakes will become the #1 destination spot for relocating Americans. Maybe not in our lifetime...

Or maybe in it.

 

If the climate goes full 2012 (the movie) then we're moving to Tennessee... assuming we stay in the US. (edited to add: IE, the western side of the Appalachians)

Otherwise... Once every 3-4 years we get some wind and rain and I send the wife and kid to the inlaws in inland NC for a few days. If I'm lucky, I get a few days off and can get some household stuff done. If I'm slightly less lucky, that involved camping efforts due to lack of power.

I'm in a veteran group that responds to natural disasters with boats, chainsaws, volunteer electrical lineman, etc and we go around and clear roads in neighborhoods etc. It's pretty rewarding - such that I'm not leaving for less than a direct 5.

Also as a surfer (still, even at 50) I'm *that* kind of crazy.

 

I'm in contact with a company for a very potentially exciting product for our cars, but there is no guarantee it will pan out just yet. If it does I think it would be a product a lot of you may be interested in.

 

Glad you had a blast! If you are looking at swaybars I would buy adjustable Front and Rear Swaybars, they sell them as kits as the added roll stiffness to the stock suspension will help you become much more precise with the cones then you'll need better tires

 

I've already started looking into the sway bars. There is a hotchkis bar in the classifieds right now. I'm also looking into Z1 as they seem the cheapest, so I'm currently debating between the two. I'll also be adding new endlinks to go with them. As far as tires, I'm on the lookout for a 3rd set of wheels to put 200 tread wear tires on next year. Just missed out on getting a 3rd set or G35 Rays, I was waiting till the end of the week to make an offer but unfortunately they sold earlier this week.

 

Keep in mind that while a lot of us cheerlead for Z1 (myself often included) they don't actually make any of their own products - they engineer most of them and farm out manufacture. I'm sure to some extent the others do as well... but I know I can call someone at Hotchkis and get a technical question answered quickly. Z1 is great but can take a while.

 

If you are still at stock ride hight then the aftermarket endlinks are not really needed. Only concern would be if they are failing, Someone correct me if I am wrong but that's not an issue. Reason for aftermarket endlinks that are adjustable is to remove any preload, If you are lowered that's when you need adjustment. Up to you just wanted to give you the FYI.

Since both bars are the same OD you'd need to find the wall thickness and hold positions to compare apples to aples, though Z1 does provide adjustment in the front.

Also another thought, you can see what people are SCCA Nationals are running but not sure there are many 370z's if any. At the end of the day just flip a coin both will be an improvement

Hotchkis

• Specs: Front Sway Bar 35mm (1-3/8 in.) Hollow
  • +230% Stiffer than Stock G37
  • +205% Stiffer than stock G37S
• Rear Sway Bar 28.5mm (1.125 in.) Hollow
  • 3 Way Adjustable
  • +130 185 260% Stiffer than Stock G37
  • +15 40 75% Stiffer than stock G37S

Z1 Swaybars

• Bar Diameter
  • 35 mm Front
  • 28.5 mm Rear
• Front Bar Stiffness (Over Stock)
  • Hole 1: 114% Increase
  • Hole 2: 165% Increase
• Rear Bar Stiffness (Over Stock)
  • Hole 1: 138% Increase
  • Hole 2: 214% Increase

 

Thanks for digging up the numbers - looks like the sweet spot would be Z1 front and Hotchkis rear.

The Hotchkis front bar is a teeny bit too stiff IMHO if you do anything else to the suspension - replace the shocks, get lowering springs, etc. Hotchkis + NISMO Z springs + Koni yellows + 19" wheels on an S Sedan = a little skittish in the front, on normal poorly maintained road surfaces at least. Good, fresh pavement it is *AMAZEBALLS*

 

​​​​​
I used to have an MSI GT72 Dominator G 17" gaming laptop for several years and I liked it quite a bit. It had a 6th gen Skylake i7-6820HK, 32GB DDR4 RAM and a GTX 970M and it stayed pretty cool for a laptop, but it was a bit bulky and I wouldn't recommend if having to haul it around for work purposes. Good quality laptop though, never gave me any issues. I think I paid $1400 for it at the time.

In relation to the economy, the graphics card market is started to simmer down a bit now since the market is flooded with used cards and not enough demand, so prices are starting to drop. Supplies are overstocked and you can see a lot of merchants having some big sales to push out their inventories to make room for the newer gen 40 series cards that are supposed to release pretty soon. I'm waiting for this perfect storm to keep brewing and I'll ****** up a 30 series card for a nice price within the next year.

I wonder if something similar will happen with the car market if demand starts to slow down. Will be interesting to see what happens. You also have other factors such as ICE cars becoming more rare as more companies are migrating to electric cars, which may keep the used car prices with ICEs above average.

 

I wonder if the graphics card market slowdown is directly resulting from crypto crashing (and thus mining not being as profitable) or just market overcorrection.

Car content: The number of used ICE cars on the road is still so large that EVs are just a tiny fraction total. When you replace Farmer John's F150 on the ranch with a usable EV, then we all better start growing our own corn for ethanol for our outdated ICE fun cars.

 

I think it's a combination of a few things. NVIDIA was selling literal plane loads of cards directly to miners almost since the launch of the 30 series, now they don't want them anymore, so NVIDIA has piles of chips. The used market is also being flooded with ex miner cards. 4000 series is also set to launch, but the rumor is that they don't want to announce anything until the abundance of 3000 series cards are gone. Production has already stopped over a month ago.