Mojo31

Well versed in those sounds - I have a Jeep.

Every once in a while my wife will ask what a creak, rattle or other noise is. I just tell her those are Jeep sounds. Have to learn to live with them since you can't fix them.

LAJ

Rick Carelli.

Early 80's. I drove the hauler and changed rear tires on pit stop races. This was the heyday of Late Model racing, to be honest. West coast, we ran Open Competition, which is run what ya brung type stuff. Big blocks, small blocks, whatever. We ran a Fischer Engineering 388 ci, but others ran 440 and 426 small blocks, etc. All weight break and carb size. One year in Phoenix, Joe Ruttman would have qualified 23rd in the Indy Car race, based on time. They were fast. Back east we ran ASA, Artgo and All Pro. Those used to be the races the Cup guys would run on their off weekends, and that was treat to jaw with those guys. That was before the Sportsman/Busch series took off.

Rick then took off to the Trucks and Cup, and he spots for Eric Jones nowadays. He did well in the trucks, won a few, and contended a lot. He tried to kill himself in Memphis when he hit the wall. He had the same injury as Earnhardt, but for some reason, it happened where it did, and the Elvis Presley Memorial Hospital happened to be a Level 1 Trauma as well as having some of the best spinal guys in the world there, at the time. He got lucky, and he knows it.

It was fun.

rjones28 

Can't hear those things with the top off.

Mojo31

One more reason not to care!

rjones28 

My brother was crew chief for a small, father and son, late model team for a few seasons. He also had fun.

Velo Vol 

When do you take the top down?

LAJ

I definitely got to see a lot of the country.

Mojo31

Cool stuff.

The guy that handles the computers and network for my office is a motor builder for Duntov Motor Company. He never gets anything done when he's here because we sit around talking about cars all day.

Mojo31

You don't take the top down on a Jeep. You take it off. Same with the doors.

As for when, any time it's not raining pretty much sums it up for a lot of people.

big john

My 86 S-10 Blazer had the infamous "chirp" from the tailgate latch. When it was bad it was absolutely maddening. An almost constant, high pitched chirping that could not be drowned out by the radio. I tried to fix it by adjusting the latch, lubing everything, and even hammering the body to force the glass to fit tighter. No dice. One day I discovered if I slammed a folded paper towel in there it was quiet until the paper wore out. The industrial fabric wipes worked better and I carried some with me at all times.
I worked at a Jeep dealer from 1989-94 and people would complain about noises, especially on the low end models. I saw a body/electrical guy write on the repair order "Vehicle is a Jeep, not a Cadillac".

Mojo31

Nice thing about Jeeps is that you can simply unbolt anything and take it off. Makes for easy mods. Of course, all those bolts mean there are a lot of mechanical connections to creak, groan, squeak, rattle, etc.

I added some rock rails to my last one that required removing body bolts that were used to hold the rails on. Of course, ever since, the thing would make a loudish thunk going over bumps, rocks, etc. Never did figure out what it was as the body bolts were properly torqued and never came loose. Oh well.

big john

I was not involved with much of the noise diagnosis at dealers. My hearing isn't good and it wasn't usually assigned to me, except exhaust leaks and engine noises. Sometimes the advisor would ask me to go ride with a customer to hear something, which was pointless, unless it was really loud.

I'm riding with a guy in a Volt and he says "there, do you hear that?" No, I didn't hear anything. He tells me his wife can't hear it either, nor can anyone else he's tried to demonstrate it to. WTF?

big john

Supposed to be a chance of rain today but right now it's beautiful and windless. I can see clouds coming, so I better get out and ride something. Yesterday we did 40 miles of relatively flat and the wind was kinda awful.

Mojo31

Right after I got my Cayman GTS in '15, I started hearing a suspension noise in the area of the driver's side front. Took it in to have it checked out, and the dealer could not find anything. Took it back in, and they kept it for a while. They did things like take it for a drive with a guy in the frunk trying to hear it. They used chassis ears. Nothing they did could pinpoint it, and I was beginning to think that they thought I was nuts. Finally, I saw an article in one of the car mags that described the same noise on one of their long-term testers, and sure enough after showing the mechanics the article they found my car had the same problem. There was actually a loose suspension piece.

abshipp 

Last time I heard a curious mechanical noise was one of the last times my dad flew us to Quincy to see family pre-pandemic in his Bonanza.

Right after takeoff I could swear I was hearing a fairly high pitched mechanical whine where the pitch would rise and fall in kind to changes in engine RPM. Dad couldn't really hear it and everything looked nominal so I tried to forget it. Overall the flight was uneventful.

After takeoff on the return leg, upon raising the gear a voltage warning popped up on the panel and we circled back to land. Turns out the alternator failed and my wife and I had an unexpected 4 hour drive back home

rjones28 

Sunny days.

Benson's first top-down ride, 3/11/2012.

rjones28 

I ran without sides or doors from April thru October one year, because of rusty hinges. I kept putting off installing new door hinges until it fall weather started creeping in.

genejockey 

At the time when people were flocking to beaches in Florida, there was no reason to believe it was any safer than congregating indoors. We were only about a month into people paying any attention to the disease at all.

The biggest problem I've seen vis a vis expert advice, the media, and the public is that experts have been playing catchup since last January, the media have been trying to convey hard-and-fast rules from recommendations, and the public are - honestly - too dumb to understand that when you learn new things you change your recommendations based on them. People want hard-and-fast answers, and are unwilling to accept that you don't get them, and so they treat changing recommendations based on new data as "Science keeps changing its mind", or "It's too complicated, so I'm gonna give up and just do whatever I want".

Add to this the media's inability to explain, and the public's to understand, how science actually works, that our job is to come up with our best estimate based on everything we know, and then try to prove that wrong, and if we fail, we STILL don't know that we're right. Most people don't get probability or statistics, hence Las Vegas.

Velo Vol 

Sounds like a big hassle.

Velo Vol 

Speaking of which, the operation to move my saddle forward was a 10+ minute ordeal.

rjones28 

Doesn't take any longer than shaving.

LAJ

A Noise, Vibration and Harshness expert is worth their weight in gold. Many people don't understand how hard that is. I have a set of chassis ears, and setting them up takes time. People still don't get the fact that time is money, and it should be easy... Vetronix actually makes/made a tool that analyzes the noise, or vibration, and can help pinpoint it.

Here's a yawner:

Velo Vol 

wut

I peak in a subforum on the other site and see this (bear in mind that I've only posted in this particular subforum a handful of times this year)

genejockey 

The thing about hearing is it's a mind/brain thing, and people hear things differently.

I remember listening to a piece on NPR years ago, talking about language development and hearing. Different languages use different inflections, and it turns out that if you don't grow up hearing a particular inflection, you probably won't be able to detect it. They demonstrated this by having a native speaker of some language speak two words that are completely distinct in their language, but which to nearly everyone who wasn't raised speaking it literally cannot hear as different. They sounded EXACTLY alike!

So, if the guy says, "Nobody else seems to hear it", it makes me suspect he might be hearing some sound nobody else can perceive, for some reason.

But also it reminds me of my Dad, in his 80s. I was visiting in August, and the cicadas were doing their usual noisy buzzing calls. I mentioned it to Dad, who said, "Oh, yeah! I thought that was just my tinnitus."

LesterOfPuppets

I need to get one of those on the Schwinn Tempo. It has a rattle that sounds like it's up front, but the brake caliper doesn't rattle, headset is tight, bar, stems, brake levers, front hub, DT shifters all seem good.

I eventually noticed the BB is a little loose, but doesn't seem loose enough to make so much racket. I should look for ye olde BB hook spanner and cinch it down today (I hope it's not in storage in Vancouver, WA).

Of course I really need to set aside half a day, strip it down to a bare frame, repack all the bearings, lube all the threads, and put it back together.