Tag: tuning

On tuning

Today while walking with Maxim, I passed by a municipal parking. There was nice looking car. I came closer to have a good look at it. It was Honda Accord with all the sport-looking things you can imagine – rims, tires, spoilers, stickers, etc. It looked like a really fast car. Very aggresive too. I walked around it and looked inside. And guess what I saw inside? You’ll never guess – an automatic gearbox! Suddenly I lost all my interest in the car…

New tyres

For the last few month I was thinking about buying new tyres for my car. The old ones were getting slimmer and thinner every day. Considering my driving manners which envolve lots of speeding, driving on old tyres became dangerous. This is how my old tyres looked:

Old tyre

Without waiting any further for the worst to happen, I went to the tyre care today and bought four new tyres. This is how my new tyres look:

New tyre

I’ve tried them a bit driving around the town and I do like them a lot. I can feel the difference driving as slow as 30 km/h. High speed testing will follow shortly.

The new tyres are roughly of the same class as my old ones. I used to drive on Flamingo. The new ones are Runway. They are priced the same – 60 CYP a piece. They are guaranteed to withstand the speeds of up to 210 km/h, which is about the maximum my car can produce. The traction and temperature measurements are at their maximums, but I’ll have to do so reading on that subject as I felt rather uneducated when I talked to the tyre master today. If you have any good recourses about tyres bookmarked, let me know via comments.

I’ll be passing the garage about every 10,000 kilometers to change tyres back to front and vice versa. The procedure will be free of charge.

Anyway, while at it, I suggest you check your tyres and see if you need the replacement. It’s better to change those a bit earlier than forget and cry in pity later…

Tire care

Tires on my car are getting old and bald. Unfortunately I don’t have the budget to replace them now and driving like they are is not fun anymore. So I decided to swap the front tires with back ones to buy myself a couple of month.

I passed by the 24×7 tire care service. While one technician was swapping the wheels, balancing them and checking for other problems, I was talking to another one. He told me a few interesting things that I didn’t know or forgot about.

  • There is a specification of how bad one’s tires can be. Police is actually cheching tires on the cars once in a while. Offenders are fined 50 CYP per tire. I thought that there should be a law about it and fines and everything, but the accuracy of the claim should be taken with a grain of salt from the guy who sells tires for life. Anyway, so far I seem to have one tire which is illiegal.
  • In Cyprus, all cars older than 4 years must have an MOT check (mechanical compliance test). There is a fine for not having MOT certificate. But that’s not all. Without MOT certificate one can’t pay the road tax. Unpaid road tax is a finable offense by itself. And that is still not it. Without the MOT certificate, the insurance is invalid and non-enforcable. That’s right – if you will have an accident, your insurance won’t pay up unless you have an MOT certificate. Interesting, isn’t it?

So, all these news just show that I will be spending a bit more money in the near future than I wanted. Firstly, I’ll have to bring the car for service and get an MOT certification while I am at it. Than I’ll have to go pay the road tax. And than I’ll have to save some money for the tires. I need to buy at least 2 of those. All of these make an amount of roughly 400 CYP shine much nearer than the horizon. Oh, well… At least I enjoy every kilometer driven in my car.