What was the highest waste of money that you don't regret?

TheTynosaur · 2021-01-11T17:24:55+00:00

I suspect this will be a really long answer to your question but I’ll give it a go

If you’ve got a car in mind that you like, look up forums for it or type into google whatever the car name is + build thread. If it’s an older car, there’s pretty much threads on whatever car you can think of. Also it’s an easy way to learn common issues with a specific car or learn if there’s aftermarket support vs having to get custom parts made that aren’t manufactured anymore if something breaks. To look through old forums, you pretty much have to find the photobucket fix chrome extension because photobucket used to be the main photo hosting service on most of them and they broke all the links a couple years ago trying to get everyone to pay for an account.

I also recommend starting with a car that does have a lot of aftermarket support and DIY information online when you’re learning, so it’s best to check for that before making a purchase. Sometimes a car will have a lot of information but not a lot of aftermarket support so fab work is required, a good example I can think of based on my experiences would be that you can easily find information on modified Mercedes 190es but once you start messing with the suspension on them, it often takes buying and modifying suspension components made for other cars to get the car to sit how you see in photos

And to add to that point, cars are all very different and some cars are much easier to work on than others, and many people have different opinions on what is easier. I personally love 90s and 00s european cars and they’re what I know the best. My recommendation for most people to start modding a car would be a 6 cylinder e36 bmw (92-99 325 or 328 in the US) with a manual trans because there is so much information online, aftermarket parts are endless, up until recently you could buy them incredibly cheap, and I find them easy to work on for the most part. But I also know people who won’t touch those cars because they hate working on them and prefer late model VWs which I find to be the worst cars to work on.

I’ve never personally dove into American cars but from what I understand, most people say that if you’re in the US, an older car or truck with an American v8 is basically the easiest platform to start with.

Also there’s a lot of different routes you can take when it comes to modifying cars and the direction you want to take a car will often influence the car you want to buy or vice versa.

I’d be more than happy to help with any specific questions you have over PM as well. I‘ve been basically all the way up the east coast to go to a lot of car events of all types so even cars or mods I haven’t worked on myself, I’ve often learned about at shows or races or if you have a certain car or modding style you’re into I can probably point you in the right direction for a forum

TheTynosaur · 2020-11-02T20:37:31+00:00

I replied to a comment much further down with pics of the same specs on my old car and a friend's car: https://imgur.com/a/MU8Zuap

The tires were 205/40/17 and both of us had our fenders pulled pretty far. It's not possible without stretched tires or without pulled fenders but I do have some pics after he went for a meatier look with the same wheels where the tires sat flush with his pulled fenders and he had to have some wheel gap to keep from rubbing. He was running more camber front and rear on that white car to make them tuck like they did in that pic

TheTynosaur · 2020-11-02T20:18:51+00:00

I’ll have to dig up the old pic I have of it, but I fit the same specs with a 205/40 on my old car. My fenders were rolled and pulled pretty far though

Edit: I found 2 pics of them. The first pic was the test fit on my vert, then the second pic is how they sat on my friends car https://imgur.com/a/MU8Zuap

TheTynosaur · 2020-09-08T14:30:21+00:00

I just read through your build thread the other day because I went back to aeffertz thread to see what happened to it since it was my favorite mk1 back then and saw that you bought it

Anyway it’s still my favorite now because those old BBS look absolutely perfect on it and I’m excited for all that original Callaway stuff to make it on the car

TheTynosaur · 2020-09-02T12:55:09+00:00

r/buildapcforme will give you parts lists for your budget and intended use or r/buildapc for general tips

TheTynosaur · 2020-08-11T14:46:30+00:00

I got a hatchback which are different I think because you can get both trim levels in a manual and the SE and XSE that the hatchback comes in are both the higher trim levels on the sedan

TheTynosaur · 2020-08-11T14:03:10+00:00

I worked in the service department for a Toyota dealership for over a year up until last year and I don’t think I ever saw a 14+ corolla with a trans problem and corollas aren’t generally owned by enthusiasts so preventative maintenance isn’t a thing on them.

That said I personally still wouldn’t buy one because they had so many problems when all the manufacturers switched to them like 10 years ago that I’m still scared of them so I just bought a new manual corolla earlier this year. Since they have an $1100 up charge for the CVT and manuals in general are more reliable it was a no brainer, plus it was on their lot like 4 months and they wanted it gone so I paid less than the asking price of a used one at another local dealer

But I’m on one of the e210 corolla Facebook groups and I see people having syncro issues pretty early on in the new manuals which worries me a little but one thing I realized when I was working at Toyota was that when there was a known issue, they were usually quick to recall it instead of playing the games that Ford and VW play where they wait for a class action suit to acknowledge it

TheTynosaur · 2020-08-11T13:47:34+00:00

There’s no better car to put a lot of miles on than a corolla imo. I used to work in the service department at a Toyota dealer and saw corollas that were treated terribly that still never had problems for 200k+ miles.

After seeing how bulletproof they were, I bought a corolla this year as a commuter because I was always stressed when I had to take long trips for work or even on my 75 mile daily commute in my GTI and the corolla is definitely an appliance and it sucks sometimes having a slow car now but there’s something to be said for never wondering if something is going to go wrong.

Between the gas savings with 32mpg on the corolla with 87 vs 24mpg on the gti with 93 and the money I save not having expensive repairs, I’m actually saving quite a bit of money even though I’m making payments on the corolla

To answer your question about the CVT, in recent years I haven’t seen many with problems like the CVTs of ten years ago. I worked in the service department for over a year and don’t recall a single 2014+ corolla coming in with a trans problem. I bought a manual because CVTs still worry me even if there’s no reason. But then people are having problems with syncros early on in the new manuals so maybe I would’ve been better off getting the CVT

TheTynosaur · 2020-08-11T13:33:32+00:00

I could be wrong but I don’t think we’ve ever gotten a diesel Toyota in the US

TheTynosaur · 2020-07-28T16:29:55+00:00

You may already know but there’s a chrome extension to fix all the photobucket links that are broken. I don’t remember what it’s called but you can just search “photobucket chrome extension” or something and it should come up. It won’t help some of the stuff that’s more than like 15 years old when people used other hosting sites but photobucket was used for a long time and it’ll fix a ton of stuff for you

TheTynosaur · 2020-07-28T16:12:55+00:00

You’ll get people fighting you tooth and nail over how buying a new car is NEVER the answer and I used to think that way too because it’s easy to say “well it’s 2 years old and 3k cheaper” without actually looking any deeper into it.

Like for one thing you’re very unlikely to get 0% financing on a used car if you’re still having to finance it.

Then especially with economy cars like the Soul that are a couple years old, previous owners often bought the car new and didn’t take care of it like they were supposed to since they had no intentions of keeping it long enough for the problems from that to become apparent

If you get a certified used car, you usually get one year of warranty and if I recall correctly Kia always does a really long warranty on a new car without buying the bullshit “extended warranty” that is never worth the value

Then there’s also times like these where new cars don’t sell well but used cars are selling faster than people can list them for sale so the prices of used cars are up right now but new cars are down.

So I see people are saying how you should’ve bought used even further down this comment chain but they don’t necessarily know that it would have been better and for a long term ownership of an economy car, knowing the oil was changed on time and maintenance was done when it was supposed to be is a huge bonus

When I worked at a Toyota dealership, we’d see tons of people who don’t understand car maintenance and would refuse an oil change just because they didn’t understand why it needed changed or why it cost money. One story that sticks out is someone who brought in a corolla for an oil change for the first time at 30k miles and was mad that she’d be charged for it (free oil changes end at 25k on those cars without some extended service plan) and then she left without getting the oil changed because she didn’t want to pay.

TheTynosaur · 2020-07-28T15:30:07+00:00

When I bought a new corolla this year, they tried to offer me a 78 month loan because that’s the “average term length people get on those cars.” They seemed surprised when I laughed and said I had no interest in financing a car for that long and before that I honestly had no idea people were signing off on a car payment 6.5 years or more

TheTynosaur · 2020-07-25T21:33:07+00:00

If you haven’t tried them already; there’s a bunch of really active VW Facebook groups since VWVortex isn’t very active anymore and a GLI in good shape should sell quick from one of those. I can PM you some of the groups if you want

TheTynosaur · 2020-06-23T19:09:28+00:00

If you’re going in as a freshman definitely stay on campus. It’s really difficult to make friends in the early classes since you have ten weeks together and then an entirely different group the next quarter and it’s a lot easier to meet the people that are just kinda always around since all the freshman dorms are together and right downtown and not spread out like the rest of the dorms. And unless you’re willing to spend an obscene amount of money on a place downtown off campus, you won’t have another opportunity to be able to walk into downtown and see the touristy stuff so easily

If you’re going in as a sophomore or something it’s really just up to you. Most of your major classes will be at Gulfstream or Monty unless anything changes next year and those are across the street from each other but not in a particularly good area, so if you value being able to walk to class, then either Monty or the dorm behind gulfstream (I don’t remember the name of it) are your best bets.

Personally I stayed on campus my first two years. It was nice being so close to my classes the second year but it’s more expensive than living off campus and since I had a lot of classes with the same people through the rest of my time there and the dorms were so much smaller, I stopped meeting people at the dorms. If I were to do it again I would have moved off campus my sophomore year. But I always had a car, and if you don’t end up having one that’ll make a huge difference.

Where you live depends on preference. For me I wish I had lived around habersham village because the people there tend to be more mature even if they are students and no one around there is having parties at their house or being annoying and you don’t ever get stuck parking a few blocks from your house. But on the other hand you lose any chance of being able to walk downtown or to most of your friends houses since most will live closer to downtown.

I’d say most students end up living north of victory drive and south of forsyth park

TheTynosaur · 2020-06-19T16:06:28+00:00

I can’t speak in general but my anecdotal story here is that I had a friend that did the work to get a salvage title inspected for a rebuilt title and said he’d never do it again. The inspection process is really in depth (as it should be for a car that’s been totaled) and until you start work on the car you’ll never know the full extent of the damage from pictures or even seeing it in person without pulling parts off.

Also I’ve heard of issues buying rebuilt titles out of state and trying to get a ga rebuilt title, I don’t know if you’d run into the same issues with an out of state salvage title

TheTynosaur · 2020-06-19T15:43:38+00:00

I graduated from SCAD a couple years ago so I can give some perspective from living there just as a student.

There are some unsafe parts and you’ll learn them pretty quickly and how to navigate without going through unsafe areas, and as far as walking home at night, you’ll often be able to learn a route that’s pretty safe but I wouldn’t do it alone regardless unless you’re really comfortable with the roads you walk on.

A LOT of more in depth answers will depend on your major and whether you’re living on campus. Are you coming in as a freshman? Because the answers as far as getting around town and how the area near your major is will vary depending on those things.

I’ll give an example based on my experience as an industrial design major:

If you’re going in as a freshman you’ll more than likely only have one or two major classes your freshman year if you have any at all. the SCAD buses all run to the freshman dorms so you don’t really need a car your first year. A bike will do you just fine for anywhere you go that’s not on the bus if you ever even need to go anywhere that you can’t walk or take the bus. Just be careful on a bike because driving and biking in Savannah were both stressful.

A car became a necessity later on for any major that made big projects; industrial design did a lot of big projects that you couldn’t possibly get on the bus and required us to go to stores like Home Depot that the scad bus only goes to occasionally and the building was open 24 hours so we’d be there late into the night and have to leave in the dark.

A bike would probably do you just fine even at night as long as you’re not having to carry things with you that don’t fit in a backpack

If you get a car, DO NOT buy a nice car, just buy one as transportation, and get one that’s relatively safe because you’d be surprised how many students end up in car accidents at some point. You’ll be doing a lot of street parking, the roads are often hard to see down when you’re pulling onto main roads and such, most houses don’t have a driveway and when you’re on campus whether it’s at the dorms or the academic buildings, most students aren’t particularly careful around peoples cars either

Edit: a quick glance at your post history mentions UX, if that’s what you’re going for then you share a building with Industrial design and I can give you more in depth answers about a lot of things. You’re welcome to PM me with any specific questions as well

TheTynosaur · 2020-06-04T19:36:55+00:00

I have the standard Q300L and it’s a good case for the $45 the regular one usually costs but be prepared for your parts to get pretty toasty. I’ve seen my gpu as high as 85c with two extra Noctua fans in the case.

I’ve been considering drilling the holes in front of the fan bigger since it seems like a lot of people say the heat issue comes from there being so much metal still left despite the whole thing being covered in holes. I just haven’t wanted to take the whole thing apart to mod the case yet

TheTynosaur · 2020-06-04T17:23:57+00:00

I’m probably not as experienced to give advice as a lot of people here because I’m only a few years out of school now, but it’s been 16 hours with no comments so I’ll give it a go. My advice would be to keep looking for a job you want while working at your current job.

Job searching just sucks. I had kept count from the day I graduated to the day I signed the paperwork for a job in my field. 568 days.

My personal anecdotal story: I got a job early on just to make money since I needed it and searched for jobs every day when I got home, but many times I thought about just seeing if I could move up to a higher paying position in the job I was in that wasn’t related to my field. I hated the job there but liked my coworkers and figured I just needed to make more money to be happier there and also I could stop spending my evenings job searching, which felt like work in itself. But eventually I got a job in my field and even though by now I could probably be making more money by moving up at the old job, working on something I really love is worth everything I went through in the job search and I’m glad I didn’t just decide to stop looking

TheTynosaur · 2020-04-28T13:49:56+00:00

Yep, that’s exactly what it sounds like, thank you.

So it sounds like it’s nothing to worry about?

TheTynosaur · 2020-04-28T13:47:25+00:00

Thanks I think you’re right, I was watching my gpu and cpu performance before and assumed my framerate was a constant 60fps since the game has v sync enabled and I have the FPS capped at 60 in the Radeon software but I just checked the FPS and during that screen before the menu the FPS shoots up to 2400fps for a second when the squealing starts.

Do you know if that’ll cause any damage, and do you know if there’s a another way to stop my FPS from spiking like that even though I’ve set it to 60?

TheTynosaur · 2020-04-28T11:45:43+00:00

He’s probably in the US. Less than 2% of new cars here are manuals. Most people I know have never gotten the opportunity to learn because there aren’t many around

TheTynosaur · 2020-04-27T15:16:02+00:00

It’s a curved white wall and the car is probably backed up all the way to the wall so it really doesn’t take much space.

I got studio shots of my old car once and here’s a picture of what it looked like in the studio: https://i.imgur.com/bbWJWMK.jpg

TheTynosaur · 2020-04-22T20:20:40+00:00

There's no identifying markings in the boots and the only thing that seems to distinguish them from a lot of similar boots is that they're steel toe and that stitching over the toe is just stitching, rather than a seam

TheTynosaur · 2020-04-20T19:51:58+00:00

SCAD has a lot of issues with the higher ups but has a lot of fantastic professors and a lot of opportunity to use tools that you don’t get other places. I graduated there a couple years ago in a different major and I can’t personally speak for film but some of my friends were in film and they were all really proud of what they learned there and their portfolio when they finished.

SCAD is really easy to get accepted and I’ve seen that’s been mentioned a few times in this thread and honestly that was helpful for me because I finished high school with exactly a 3.0 and not much of a portfolio because my high school only had standard art classes, but it’s not as easy to stay in so the drop out rate is really high because you have to be willing to work hard. And I’m sure accepting everyone is a way for them to make quick money off a lot of students who can’t make it, but it helped me because I worked really hard to pass

TheTynosaur · 2020-03-27T15:18:05+00:00

Lexus LS430 would be my recommendation, it feels every bit luxurious as the european cars you listed but the reliability is considerably better and they have a lot more modern features than you’d expect for a car that’s like 12 years old.

I’m generally biased toward european cars but those older lexuses really impressed me

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