Hands at two o’clock and ten o’clock, and on your M-4, soldier.
Last Call indicates the end of Hooniverse’s broadcast day. It’s meant to be an open forum for anyone and anything. Thread jacking is not only accepted, it’s encouraged.
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Last Call: Student Driver Edition
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Soldier? The Army doesn’t operate those. It’s either a Marine or a Sailor.
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OT- For some reason the S197 Mustangs have a power draw that eats the battery charge.
If I park for a week, the battery is dead. New battery, everything off.
Tonight I jumped it, let it idle for 45 minutes. That seemed to get the battery back.
Disconnected the negative. We’ll see in a week if that worked.
I made a good investment with the Duralast Gold 5yr battery…-
It should last longer than that. Do you know how to perform a current draw test at the battery using a multimeter?
If not a slightly easier and less accurate way to tell if there’s a draw is to disconnect the battery negative terminal wait maybe 5-10 seconds and reconnect while everything is off. If there’s a large spark upon reconnection, there’s a decent amount of draw.
Most cars should be within spec at 0.05 A or less. Any more than that usually indicates abnormal draw and should be investigated/fixed.
You should also have the battery condition tested. It’s possible to have a faulty battery despite its age. Brand new batteries can be defective and you could be chasing what seems to be a draw in the car that doesn’t actually exist.-
There’s something about that model Mustang that draws off the charge.
Most suspect it’s the radio to keep the presets. After this experiment I’ll get it back to top charge and pull the radio… at least a fuse.
I have a mutlimeter or 4… Harbor Freight insists I take one every time I visit.-
I bet you get at least 5 different readings with 4 free Harbor Freight multi–meters.
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Every car has radio presets to be memorized unless it’s 1970s era or earlier. That feature isn’t unique to mustang and shouldn’t be causing that issue on its own. There’s also the clock and various computers also keeping memory. Also the keyless entry system is always live and waiting for rf signals that match the paired remotes.
These type of draws are usually a faulty sensor (like the trunk switch that’s broken and keeping the trunk light on unbeknownst to any one, or a module in the vehicle that is failing and staying on when it shouldn’t be. -
You don’t specify exactly what year the car is or what exact radio is in it but sometime in the late 90’s/early 00’s Ford stopped using battery power to maintain the radio presets. It is that way in the 03’s that I have. You can disconnect the battery and let it set for weeks, reconnect the battery and while the clock will reset to 12:00 the presets are still there.
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Harbor Freight?!? Oh, so you’re the reason Sears moved Craftsman tool manufacturing to China.
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Not me- I buy sledge hammers, things that’ll I’ll use once and break from HF.
I buy all my tools from Craftsman- at least the Craftsman made in USA.
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My old Honda Odyssey had a stuck ac compressor clutch relay that would drain the battery in hours. I took to driving it with a ratchet & 10 mm socket in the cup holder and disconnecting the battery if it was going to sit long. I could hear the click of the clutch solenoid when I connected the battery which is how I tracked it down.
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Shopped
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No, they actually put those signs on Humvees, MRAPS, and large trucks like that when they have students going through the courses to get licensed to operate them.
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I’d hang one of those signs if I had any kind of behemoth military surplus rig. Causing “Code Brown”, or even a mild sphincter clench, in even 1% of normally semi-comatose CamCordIma drivers would be worth it.
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Ok, somewhere between a minor and major rant….On my DD 07 Suburban, I have factory navigation which I wanted for the backup camera to hook up my trailers more easily. The problem is at night, when backing in my driveway the screen is so bright, I have to put my hand over it to shield the light so I can see out of my side mirror, because looking at the front of my trailer doesn’t do me much good…except the driver side mirror automatically dims at night, so with the glare of the backup screen, I can’t see a thing. Speaking of the nav screen, its set so low in the dash that I can’t safely use it as it takes my eyes too far off the road. And don’t even get me started on the map lights that double as the interior lights…Horrible design.
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I’ve found that well designed reading lamps are a rarity. Driving at night and my wife wants to read, I have to deal with the glare of her reading lamp in my eyes. Our 1999 Odyssey was so bad, she used the visor makeup mirror lights instead.
My 1993 Escort had reading lamps in the dome light housing so they were behind your head. Perfect. My 2005 Mazda3 has deeply tunneled reading lights that are fantastic. Other than those, every other one I’ve experienced have been crap.-
One of my constant design bugbears. I hate the big glowing rectangle being forever in my peripheral vision at night.
One day they’ll perfect an LED screen where only the bits that need to illuminate, e.g the bits of the picture that aren’t black, will illuminate. At the moment rendering black on a backlit LCD can’t really be done.-
That’s exactly how an AMOLED screen works (like in many smartphones):
“An AMOLED doesn’t have a backlight at all. Instead, each little sub-pixel is like a tiny red, blue, or green colored light. If the screen is instructed to display black, it doesn’t need to block any light, it simply doesn’t light up any of the little colored sub-pixels.”
From: http://www.greenbot.com/article/2834583/how-much-power-does-a-black-interface-really-save-on-amoled-displays.html
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2007 is the future!
What about a piece of cardboard and paint tape to dim the screen? -
Could you put a film over it, like a tint?
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That’s a great idea. And take it off during the day.. I’m going to do that, thanks
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Isn’t the screen brightness adjustable?
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Thats the sad part. The screen does dim at night, but not the backup camera function. There is no adjustment for that.
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A couple of years back I was stationed at Ft Wainwright and got to watch as a student driver greatly underestimated the stopping distance of a Stryker… and plow into a civilians car at a stop light.
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My farmer father-in-law has driven pretty much every type of civilian vehicle there is at one time or another without so much as a speeding ticket let alone any kind of accident.
When he was still driving school bus he worked with a bunch of pranksters who put a giant STUDENT DRIVER magnet on the tailgate of his pickup. Needless to say he didn’t think it was as funny as every one else did.
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