Anyways, 3 weeks back I reckoned I’d left it long enough to try get a resolution from Ford and figured I would have to fork out to have this thing replaced. So I book my car in to have the thing replaced. As an aside I had the pump replaced with a Ford OEM part that cost R100 less from the place I took the car to than the official Ford stealership. 2 days later (earliest I could get a booking) I hopped in my car and headed off. Barrelling down the highway at 120kph (gotta stick to the limit!) I notice fumes emanating from underneath the bonnet. Uh… yeah, so there I was struggling to get into the emergency lane on the left from the fast lane seeing as the centre island is not exactly a fun place to be.

I stopped in the emergency lane, popped the bonnet and took a look. I’m not a mechanic but I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t be seeing what I presume is water vapour everywhere. The bottle was completely empty so I guess that the entire system had overheated, sprung a nice leak somewhere and depressurised. Well the car would still run and I was pretty close to the off-ramp and the mechanic I was taking it to, so I decided to limp all the way there.

I made it there alive and it looks like nothing overheated too badly, so off I went to catch a taxi to get home. Finally finding a taxi going to Randburg I got in and it had dice in the mirror. If anything I could say that this cab was rare but I thought now forget it, yo home to bel-air. I pulled up to a house about seven or eight and I yelled to the cabby yo, home smell you later. Looked at my kingdom I was finally there to settle my throne as the fresh prince of bel-air.

It really sucks when they turn our water on and off for a week to fix the damn thing.

So off I went to have the thing replaced and after bleeding through every orifice I got my credit card back and drove off with a shiny new tyre. So now I have 2 tyres that are 35k km old, 1 that is 15k km old and the one I just replaced which doesn’t even have 50km on it yet. So there I am measuring my tread depth with my key (always an accurate way to do it) to determine how best to match them. Obviously the 2 old ones should be paired, I just had to check which ones they were. So soon I’ll be going off to get everything aligned and have them rotate the wheels at the same time… and while I’m at it I get to cough up another R150. Is there anything that’s a bigger waste of money than a vehicle?

In other news the water pump on my car failed. It’s a warranty part, which I thought was great! I’d only have to pay for the antifreeze and get the rest for free. No such luck unfortunately, it appears that the dealer I bought the car missed the service interval and voided the warranty on my behalf. Never mind that when they sold me the car they assured me that it was all good and even signed over the (nonexistent) warranty into my possession. Now they tell me “sorry, can’t help”, well that’s terrific. So I phoned ford, and now I’m waiting for a response, which I doubt I’ll get.

Ford quoted me ~R2800 to change the part and have the car back to me. I phoned them a few days later, spoke to their workshop, and the guy quoted me ~R800 for the part. R2000 for labour and fluids? That boggles the mind considering they told me it was a 2 and a half hour job. Since it looks like Ford are unwilling to honour the warranty I guess I’ll be doing it myself.

First off, traffic density. I’ve never really had to travel in high density peak hour traffic. However what I remember from going to college and UCT, the traffic in CPT is not any different, in some cases I can confidently say it’s worse. The main difference is that the distances are shorter in CPT so you spend less time in traffic overall. I’ve never travelled on highways in peak hour though I quite often travelled the M5/N1 during office hours, and the off/onramps are much worse in CPT than they are in JHB. Lastly, I do William Nicol everyday, fortunately only a very short section of it. Overall it takes me about 2 minutes max to get through that section. From what I’ve observed, there’s not much difference between William Nicol and Wynberg Main Road (which I travelled every day for 2 years), with the exception being that WNicol is 6 lanes and Wynberg is 2.

Directions. JHB isn’t too difficult to navigate, though everything does look the same (and no, I don’t miss the mountain). Many road are very poorly marked, with those faded b&w roadnames adorning the pavement corners… not very easy to read. The big roads in the main city centers tend to be marked at the top of those roadside “billboards”. I must say that this is quite nice since I can actually read the damn things before I get to the road in question.

Road markings. There are road markings? I tend to rely quite heavily on road markings such as determining which lane I need to be in. However driving around in JHB I’ve noticed that many roads are either unmarked or the markings are so faded that they may as well not be there. This turns general traffic into a free-for-all as people just drive all over the road completely ignoring the “markings”. I’ve also hit a few speed bumps pretty hard because there weren’t any lines on them… yay. Another trend I’ve noticed is that old lines have merged and overlapped with faded new lines, making driving really confusing as it’s sometimes hard to tell if you’re in your lane or straddling 2 lanes as the lines suddenly shift sideways. I’ve almost overshot robots because I was looking at the far robot and didn’t see any lines… great.

Now to drivers. Crap drivers are crap drivers, it doesn’t matter what city you put them in, they’re still crap drivers. That being said the general trend in JHB seems to be far more aggressive drivers. I quite often get tailgated in rush hour traffic; everyone is moving at 40 or 50kph but no, the guy behind me has to speed around me into the cruising gap I left and then suddenly brake hard because he’s going a good 30kph faster than everyone else. All that’s happening is you’re wasting petrol for the time you didn’t save since you’re going to get stuck at the offramp robot anyways. Unfortunately most drivers tend to indicate as, or after they change lanes, or not at all, and with the amount of lane changing going on I can see why so many bikers get knocked down; mirrors? blindspots? apparently not.

Though, bikers… well I’m struggling to have any sympathy for them. The way some of those guys ride in traffic makes you wonder how much their life insurance policy is worth. Usually bikers split between the fast and the middle lane, with the general rule of thumb being 20kph faster than the surrounding traffic. Apparently many N1 bikers didn’t get that memo. I’ve seen plenty of them weaving in and out of traffic at crazy speeds, not to mention the bikers that treat the emergency lanes as their personal highways and cruise down those at highway speeds.

There’s much more to say on the topic, but this is all I have for now. I almost got taken out by a taxi this morning, he must’ve missed the part where they teach you to yield to the right.

I only started packing on Friday afternoon, which meant I spent most of Saturday packing, yet we still only ended up leaving an hour later than planned so that wasn’t too much trouble.

All in all the trip was fairly uneventful, only getting a scare when I ended up driving over something (???). I had my car lifted off the ground and everything checked out during the week so there doesn’t appear to have been any permanent damage fortunately; I even scored free wheel balancing.

Otherwise, this whole endevour has been a fairly costly one for me: having a towbar fitted, having smash and grab fitted, a full service done, as well as wheel alignment and balancing. That just covers my car, I also rented a trailer, flew my brother-in-law down and had my bike “couriered” up, not to mention the costs associated with the actual trip itself. My bike was collected on Tuesday evening and arrived on Wednesday morning… that’s some pretty speedy service.

One thing that did surprise me about the whole trip is that I barely even felt the trailer I was pulling, occasionally having to check the mirror just to make sure it was still there.

I guess the next entry will be about how life has changed for me, and the differences between living in JHB and CPT. So far I can say: not very much, but I’ve only been here for a week so we’ll see how that opinion changes over time. I’m also going for a ride tomorrow, so maybe I’ll finally get some photo’s of me on the bike.

To clarify somewhat: the dog was right in the middle of my driving line, which would be roughly the middle of the lane. For those who know Belvedere, they also know that it’s a really wide road, which in this case is really fortunate as I had plenty of space to do a nice little emergency avoidance maneuvre, which only placed me partly into the oncoming lane — I did check for oncoming cars, and I decided to go that way because there was another car behind me to my left.

Regarding the car behind me, he’s really lucky he wasn’t traveling directly behind me; he probably would have been way too close to avoid it in time given the speed of travel and time of reaction required.

I shudder to think what may have happened had I actually hit this dog. I’m pretty sure I’d be rebuilding the entire front end of my car if I had, not to mention the possibility of being rear-ended by the guy behind.

So on a final note, please look after your pets. Maybe I should have stopped to see if the dog had tags, unfortunately I didn’t have the presence of mind at the time, and I didn’t see any trace of it on my way to work today.

In other news: my bike has been fixed up and is ready for delivery. Somehow I don’t believe them. Everyone who reads my blog should be able to figure out why. It’s fixed, with “one” exception… they couldn’t fix the tripmeter. Let us all keep in mind that they broke the trip meter and new (or even used) clocks are going to cost me a few grand.

It’s the responsibility of the insurance company (I have fully comprehensive insurance) and the repairers to return the bike to me so that I receive the same value that it was insured for. It’s not and I’ve lost a chunk of money on this whole fiasco; certainly enough to have bought myself another bike (an improvement on what I had) had I decided to keep the bike as is and sell it as scrap and parts. If they had written it off and paid me out in full as they should have, all this could have been avoided and I’d have been better off.

One thing I have learned from this: if you have an accident, take the vehicle home!

Fortunately it only cost me about R2k. As I’m going to be claiming this from the council it is my obligation to minimise the cost for them, otherwise they won’t pay out. As a result I had to get the wheel fixed instead of replaced (R650 vs R2222). My father somehow managed to organise a matching tyre from the last container in the country — so if I break a tyre in the future I’m definately going to have to replace 2 at a time.

The tyre that was replaced had 7mm tread; new tyres of the same type also have 7mm. So I basically toasted a tyre that had no wear. This is good for me as now the council can’t give me a discounted payout. Generally they will deduct the amount of wear on the old tyre from the price they pay you, which means I’d have been out of pocket for the difference.

My father also managed to get a 30% discount on the tyre. Don’t know how, but it appears to be standard on some tyres. It cost ~R1300 originally — expensive low profiles :(.

This post is sponsored by the Cape Town City Council.

The damage:

My front left tyre is finished; it has bubbles on both sides and is clearly unsafe to drive on. The rim is warped and has a pretty large dent in the exact same place as where the tyre bubbled. Fortunately the back wheel on the same side came through unscathed even though it too went through the pothole. I guess my front wheel absorbed enough of the energy. For safety reasons my front and back wheels have been swapped as a temporary solution. There doesn’t appear to be any further damage than that done to the front wheel, though it’s certainly going to cost me enough to repair what “little� damage there is.

The result:

My existing tyres have been discontinued apparently. This means that I can’t replace just the damaged one, but I now have to replace a pair. Damn… So the tyres are going to cost me about R1330 a pop at my current quote. Damn… Add to this R2222 for a new rim and things start getting *really* pricey. Of course there’s also the obligatory balancing and alignment. That will only set me back about R250 combined, which is pretty much peanuts in comparison to the rest.

The alternative:

Get two cheaper tyres and fix the rim. I have low profile tyres, so even the cheap ones aren’t that cheap. I have official Ford rims, which I quite like, so it’s either fix it, replace the broken one, or replace all four. I’m not replacing them, as I mentioned that I quite like them and I’m not sure about repairing it, I’ve had bad experiences with “repaired� wheels as most would know if they’ve read some of my bike posts.

Well either way, it’s going to cost me a fair amount, which is the last thing I needed after just buying the thing. Oh well…

At least I know I’m not the only one going through the same thing. With camera in hand, I went back on Saturday to find and photograph this devilish pothole. I wasn’t there for more than a minute when a car went through this pothole. *Crunch* It sounds even worse being outside the car and just listening to the pothole cost people thousands in damage.

I didn’t bother counting, but in the short time I was there I’d say somewhere in the region of 10 people will be requiring new tyres and possibly rims. This was in the daytime, so the pothole was in plain sight, though you can’t really tell how deep it is (roughly 3�) from a driving position. I also watched 2 cars gutter their wheels trying to straddle the pothole, and plenty more swerve into the oncoming lane trying to go around it. Too many people have no idea where their tyres sit on the road in relation to them, nor how wide/long their cars really are (how often do you find someone parked off centre?).

The especially amusing thing were the people who clearly aren’t concentrating, namely the ones that drove straight through the pothole as if it didn’t exist even though the car in front of them just wildly swerved out the way not even second before. Granted some people have slow reactions… but seriously? This is a high-trafficked road and the cars don’t travel all that fast. Anyways, I did get to see one guy almost lose his wheel. It was looking pretty dodgy as I watched him drive off.

Pothole Location:

In Hout Bay on the section of road between the turning-circle that goes off to Constantia and Chapman’s Peak (M63 — Hout Bay Road), and the robots the head up over the mountain to Camps bay, or down to the harbour (Victoria Ave). It’s situated about 3 meters ahead of the bus stop in the turning circle direction (near Valley Road). If you don’t know where this is, just look up Valley Road in a map book.

You can just edit the URL if you feel like viewing the rest of the pictures (car01.jpg -> car06.jpg).

I will eventually get a gallery running so I can embed pictures into posts; but that’s a mission for another day.

 

New:

Yes, I edited this post to embed a thumbnail. It will probably change from time to time as I test my gallery, and start embedding pictures into posts instead of links. I also lightboxed the full size image, so click on the thumbnail and see what happens.