Friday, March 2, 2012

Check the stylist before getting styled

My girlfriend told me over the weekend that she would never have her hair done by a hair stylist with ugly hair. That's the same reason why, tuning shops need to have a nice demo car and why if you sell furniture for a living you need to have the nice stuff at your own house too. You can't be credible if you don't walk the talk.

The reason I bring this up is that with the advent of all of these forums and even more recently facebook based car clubs it's a bit surprising how much misinformation is out there. It's fine of course if like me, you take everything you read online with a grain of salt. You find some new information, verify where it came from, do a little more research into it and learn. Sometimes it can be a ruse to send you off on a wild goose chase, like when I started looking into information I got about how to upgrade the Lancer's front disc brakes. Misleading- yes, yet while chasing around the proverbial goose we did learn new things and find our own way.

There are however people out there who are, as politically correct as I can put it, more trusting. They get advice and go with it, sometimes not bothering to check where it came from. That's alright if what they were told do do is right in the first place. But sometimes there are quite a bit of people out there who might seem to know a lot when they are posting about this and that, yet in truth they are just really adept at using Google or quite good at retelling stories they have heard from others.

Reading through discussions there are a few terms that pop up quite often. One that I always here is that a certain part or some bit of information car from this so and so who used to race. The big names that we all know aside of course, the funny thing is that quite often people don't ask.. 'yes he used to race... but did he win?' Case in point, a friend of mine bought a cylinder head for his Lancer for a certain someone who used to race. Big valves, double valve springs and heavily ported and polished it was said to be 'too wild to use on the street'. Sounds exciting right? However when we inspected it, the valve springs were not set in the proper retainers, the big valve conversion was so-so and the porting was so bad, I we figured that head would actually give less power than a stock one. Another things I always here is that the work was done by this guy who used to have a car shop. This is even scarier. Why used to? If he was good or even at least decent he'd still have one today (there are exceptions I know) but we've had work done on one of our cars from such a guy and I spent a good amount of time re-tightening all the bolts because after a little bit of driving things started to come loose (among quite a bit of other mess I had to fix after). The transmission bolts were barely hand tight.

So now you know, before you have your hair done, check to see if the stylist looks good.

Edit: I realized while re reading the article. How strange is it that not only do I do I work on my own car... I also style (well, shave is more accurate) my own hair. :P

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