David

Way to go Drew, keep it up and you will hit your target goals soon!

Oil tests are great also, forgot about them, but they usually only need a test tube full so not enough to really notice it. Like everyone else having said, it WILL NOT void the warranty. Look forward to hearing what auto this is on and what your thoughts are about why you want to do this?

WOW, sorry to hear that Ocnblu. Your issue has made me interested in seeing what else was out there and I am shocked, this water issue is not only to the bug, but also the Jetta and the Touereg diesels. Electrical issues on those two auto's is the biggest issue but the engine with the water problem is the second biggest and like you many have posted that what they thought would be a fun to drive long life diesel auto became much shorter and in one persons listing the engine died before the warranty was up, replaced by VW and just shy of 15K miles out of warranty the engine died again. I thought VW was getting better at building auto's than this but it would seem they are pulling an 80's style of build it, sell it and avoid fixing and making the product better as long as they get your money. Sad as I always liked VW's SUV's but now would stay away from them due to what I am reading.

The pictures on the black one makes me think this was a home conversion job to dually and not oem stock. I suspect it was single wheel orginally and the person wanted the look of dually or they had to replace the rear differential housing and put in the wrong one.

I know most are not like me but growing up doing body building and power lifting, if a day time job was not required to support myself, I could live in a gym and just lift every day and work out. I love the gym with the various activities you can have the body do.

Sludge-like material is really based on the engine design. Some engines were poorly designed and would sludge up really bad. Others do not. Plus driving style does play a role in how an engine behaves and how clean it is. I have a friend that only drives 5 min from his house to the park and ride and his engine with low miles is just carbon dirty. Then you have my escalade that has 120K miles and by the time I take it in at 7500 miles for the synthetic oil change, it still looks almost new. Yes I do enjoy driving on longer trips which help to keep an engine cleaner. End result, if you do the maintenance and drive the auto it should for the most part not create sludge like material but till still have normal coloring adjustment in the oil. Engines that seem to build up heavy sludge like substance are rarer today than they used to be.

At 6'6" tall, 285lbs, I could afford to loose some weight or at least change from fat to muscle. Course I am like a bouncing ball as I am down 15lbs since skiing season started and I know I will loose another 10-15lbs by the end of the season. Then it stays there till Halloween and then I creep back up till ski season starts. Stopped diet soda again and will just focus on hitting the gym 3-5 times during the week and skiing the weekend and I should be good. I do love me my proteins. BEEF it does a body good!

Same here at my work, I was able to when I started convince the Director to standardize the department on Dual NEC 27" MultiSync EA273wm monitors. Each person uses one in landscape mode and the other in Portrait mode. Allows great development of training documents and powerpoint presentations, etc. With the 43" Ostendo Monitor that would easily replace the dual monitors and not have to worry about one being in Portrait mode.

Very interesting news. It will be fun to see your guys review of the new Golf and while the concept is exciting as all concepts are, I wonder how reliable these complicated electrical driven power train systems will be. Bet this power train makes it into a subcompact model first.

Awesome write up, way to go, you really hit it spot on. Love these to read.

Actually I have some coworkers at the CES and they said the loved the smaller screens in the 45-65 inch range that were curved. Reason being is you can kill two birds with one stone. Say you have a room that needs to function as an office but also a relaxing place to watch the ball game. Your curved screen can go in the corner and give the room a nice view for watching the ball game, but then when you need to sit in front of it as a large working monitor you have a great curved monitor to view and work on rather than having a multi-monitor setup that you end up angling two monitors to work on or more. Curved Monitors will be come standard in work places where you need to see more data than a single monitor or 2/4 monitors would serve. Example is stock brokers, technology workers, 911 operators, just about any position where you need real estate to show everything at a glance rather than having a couple of smaller monitors. http://4sims.net/curved-monitor-pc/ Take a look at these setups. I love this 43" monitor/TV. http://www.techhive.com/article/183208/43_Inch_Curved_Monitor_Can_Now_Be_Yours_For_Just_6500.html Plus allot of this technology is coming through very cool new products like GaN or Gallium Nitride. We can thank this for the super bright LED's we are seeing on auto's and the new Super HD, 4K and 8K HD TV/Monitors. http://www.ostendo.com/gan/

Correct as Drew stated, compression test will not void a warranty. Something else that my father taught me when he used to own a repair shop and I had forgotten about till now. Dyno Test, I know some places charge crazy prices, but most will do a basic hook up and computer run of the auto to give you the base line. The nice thing with this is that for the couple hundred dollars it would cost you, you get a real data of what your HP / torque is and a complete output of your computer showing how the whole engine, tranny and computer system behaved. A great report to see if the auto is solid and consistent. Surprising part here is that when I used to work in my dads garage helping mechanics run these base line numbers, it was amazing to see what auto's actually failed to give you the numbers marketed by the auto manufacture and which ones surpassed those numbers. Since HP/Torque stated is at the fly wheel, it is always pleasing to see a car produce those numbers at the actual wheel telling you it is putting out more than stated.

Sounds like a multilevel marketing scam where the early in people make money and every one else gets the shaft! O'h wait, the world governments are already doing that to us!

Yes Ford has this issue with their Ecoboost also collecting water in the intercooler plus deposit build up on the intake valves.

Z, one way you can do this is by pulling spark plugs one by one and doing a compression test on each cylinder to compare the readings. You can also pull your fuel injectors and see how clean they are. One additional item I have seen done is that some people will put a magnet on the oil plug to pull any metal particles onto the plug so when they drain the oil they can see if any particles are floating. Also as you already mentioned the OBDII, read for codes. If you have the mgmt software on a laptop, you can connect the laptop to the interface port and leave the laptop recording for the day to see if it catches any random issues and see how the over all performance of the engine is running.

2015 Canyon my Friend is calling you or a Colorado! Sorry to hear about this, surprised this did not show up in cold weather testing.

True better than MB or BMW generic designs that say STALE!

Nice Road Salt Work on that body!

OMG, You can actually see it's nose!

While working in the technology world, I guess I have totally missed this one. BITCOINS??????

WOW, first impression is Bland and Boring but probably very safe since that is what they have built their name on. Conservative style with safety for the occupants. Not impressed and would not win me over with that current design language.

Sure, Heading over for dinner tonight so will borrow it to copy it so I can post it here.

Interesting to hear about the engine details. Still not a fan of the Predator Grill. The external body language is just weird to me and the rear tail lights remind me of the hideous front head lights on the butt ugly 4 Runner. Inside, the dash just scream patchwork ugh! Seat are intersting but do not look comfy but supportive. Maybe the pictures are just stretched weird for me on my monitor as it looks just out of porpotion weird.

It's a joke about the Toyota Tacoma Frame Rot Issue. Toyota was buying back Tacoma trucks multiple times over their blue book value or doing full frame replacements. A tenant of mine had the frame replaced on his Tacoma, but he said it was never right after that and ended up trading it in on a real truck, a 2013 Sierra quad-cab. Maybe it's a secret recall.. So I looked at my dads letter and come to find out, select group of 2004 to 2006 Canyon and Colorado trucks have weak heads and so in this case they extended the warranty on these 4 and 5 cylinder engines to 100,000 miles. Also for my dads model year truck, a whole group of trucks had contaminated Dex-cool put into them causing internal corroding. As such, for these owners, they are to run the truck to 100,000 miles and then they can get a new engine installed at GM's expense to replace the old corroded engine. Seems GM is making good on taking care of the customers. I like this. Build faith in the new GM.

Good point, having my son and daughter out of college and on their own, I forget about growing families that could see their needs change in 1-3 years.