Impala SS Winter Survival Tips

Here are a few tips that I like to live by since I am out on the road so much in the winter with my baby and I don't have the self-control to not drive it for 4 months. It's bad enough that I can't ride my bike. If, when reading this, you say to yourself, "what about ...". Well, email me with your ideas and I will probably add them.

• Clean and wax that paint. Salt is tough on the finish. Wax it every 3-4 weeks with good wax to keep the paint nice. If you don't have the time to do a good job, just run over it really quickly if you have to. A poor wax job is better than none at all. Please clean the car really well before waxing it. One speck of grit in your wax rag will scratch the entire car. Don't be fooled by the automatic car washes. They are tough on paint jobs. That underbody spray-it's recycled salt water from the 500 or more cars before you. Get outside and spray it off in a coin operated one. In the wheel wells and underneath too.
• Use 5W-30 Mobil One. You take a lot of life out of an engine when you start it up cold anyway. Why starve it for oil too? I use 10W-30 Mobil One in the warm weather. If you don't believe me, leave a bottle of 5W-30 Mobil1 and a bottle of your favorite oil outside when it's about 10 degrees and let them get cold. Open them up and start pouring. 'Nuff said.
• Always try to warm the engine up before taking off. I know sometimes it just isn't always possible, so really really take it easy for a couple of miles if you need to get going right away. High RPMs are the real killer here, so give it very light throttle and let it shift early. If it is just a matter of convenience, get a remote starter put in for about 200 bucks. Then you can start it from inside your home or office and let it run for a few minutes before you get to it. Cold starts take more life out of the engine than anything else. Especially very low temperature ones like in the winter. The oil is thicker and will not flow through the bearings or splash up onto the cylinder walls as well as at operating temperature. The very worst thing you can do to any car is to start it up cold and then only drive it for a mile or two and then shut it off. Doing this every day will take a hefty toll on the life of the drivetrain. "This car was owned by a little old lady who only drove it on errands." Yeah, that's the car I DON'T want to buy. I'll sooner take the one year old car with 50k miles anyday.
• Grease the front end joints extra well. Make sure grease is oozing out all over the place. This is a good time to check the joint boots to make sure none of them have any tears in them. Wipe off the grease zerk before you hook up the grease gun. You don't need to put anymore dirt inside the joint than is already there. Dab some good thick grease on the grease zerks when you are done to protect them. Better yet see if you can get some of those cool little snap on plastic covers. My Hotchkis sway bar brackets have them. They rule. If you take your car to get this done, don't count on the shop to do it right or even at all. Be a pest and go out there and watch the mechanic. Tell him what you want. You are paying them and it is your baby. Be sure that the upper ball joint gets done. The wheel almost always has to be removed for this. There are 90 degree zerks that you can replace the originals with that might let you get in there with the wheel on. I just pull my wheels off. Gives me a chance to look everything over anyway.
• Get a good brass-tipped ice scraper/snowbrush. I buy mine at Meijer for 3 bucks and get a new one every year. The brass is softer than glass and won't scratch it. If you can believe it, plastic will actually damage the glass. Be extra careful of that brass edge around the paint. It will damage the paint in a hurry.
• Get a good set of winter wiper blades. The rubber covered kind. They will prevent ice from sticking to them. Never run them on an ice-covered windshield. I haven't found a set that fit well yet since they are taller from the blade edge to the mounting hole than the originals. Consequently, they don't rest on the stops at the base of the windshield, but it's only in bad weather anyway and a fair trade in my book. The thing that makes wipers effective is if they have a good square edge and can flip-flop. One quick trip over the icy windshield will grind those edges smooth and make the wipers smear more than wipe. I change my wipers twice a year for this reason. Spring and Fall.
• Use RainX or some like product. Often. Very often. Like every other week. The snow and ice will not stick to the window as well and you will not have to run your wipers as much. The reason to do it so often (as opposed to every 3-4 weeks in the summer) is that you will have to run your wipers due to road grime if there is no real precipitation to keep the window clean and that takes off the coating in a hurry. The thing with RainX is that once you use it, the windshield will start to look terrible when the wipers have been run too much without applying more RainX.
• Never RainX your headlight lenses. They are polycarbonite (like snowmobile windshields and helmet shields) and the chemicals in the RainX can make them cloudy. I wax them with wax that doesn't scratch clearcoats (Maguire's or Mother's). This helps keep them cleaner. With that low beam pattern they need all the help they can get. Be sure to squeegee them off when you do the windows as you are filling up with gas.
• On the subject of headlights, I will mention that I always run my headlights anyway. As fast as I drive, I believe it's cheap insurance to make the car as visible to others as it can be. This is especially important in the winter as a dirty car blends pretty well with it's surroundings on a hazy day. If you don't subscribe to running your lights all the time, at least turn them on when the visibility is even a little marginal-like at dusk, during any precipitation and if there is fog. I see so many people running on dark rainy days with their lights off when the best I can see is about 500 feet. What I really want is to get DRL working. And a Tazer to vaporize drivers without lights in poor weather.
• Always fill your gas tank completely. Especially if you are going to leave the car sitting. A couple of reasons for this. As the ambient temperature fluxuates, so does the temperature of the fuel and air in the tank. The less air there is in the tank, the less moist air can come in and leave water in the bottom to freeze the pump or fuel lines. However in my opinion this is not as big of a culprit as constantly opening the fill cap and adding a little bit of fuel. The more you open that cap while it is snowing or raining or is just plain humid, the more moisture you let in. Filling the tank will push out all of that bad air. It never hurts to add a bottle of gas dryer every few tankfuls (like 5 or 6). This will take out the water that is in the bottom of the tank that you don't even know is there.
• More on the full tank. There is effectively free ballast behind the wheels to the tune of (23 gallons X ~6 pounds/gallon) 140 pounds. That's almost a couple of bags of salt and whole lot less harmful. If you must put ballast bags in the trunk, please get gravel instead. You can dig some out and throw it down in front of your tires if you get stuck-and it won't give your car premature 'lightening' from the inside. If you happen to have a cat, you could use kitty litter. I've been told it's even better than gravel for traction, and you can use it in the litterbox in the spring.
• Even more on the full tank. Your chances of sitting out somewhere are much greater in the winter due to either you going off the road or someone else crashing and stopping traffic on the highway for a long time. Your heater will only work if there is gas in the tank.
• Have a cellular phone. They are far too affordable to not have one.
• GET THOSE WHEELS AND TIRES OFF YOUR CAR!! Sorry to yell, but as cool as they are, they just plain suck in the snow. One word: Blizzaks. Your car is worth it. I bought some aftermarket wheels for the winter that look like Winston Cup wheels and I really like the look of them (for steel wheels). There is a picture of one on the car here. Get an alignment-those tires are a soft compound and will wear out pretty fast. The 225/70-15 is nearly the same size, but the wheels are just enough different size and offset that the actual pressure center is different than the stockers. Not only that, these have a much softer sidewall and respond very differently to the suspension loads. It's a good idea to get your front end aligned every 15k-20k anyway, so why not a couple of times a year. It's only 35 bucks.
• Keep a pair of GOOD jumper cables in your trunk. Make sure you can get hold of those little side post bolts and that they stay there. They are cheaper than a service call. And your time. Plus, if someone else is stranded with a dead battery, it gives you the chance to open your hood and show off some of those goodies...
• Remember that you are going from having a car that can stop and handle better than 95% of all of the other cars on the road when it's dry to having a 4300 pound projectile that cannot possibly stop well in the snow no matter what you do. Remember that cool limited-slip differential that barely holds both tires at the same speed under full launch? Well, ABS treats the rearend as one brake and the ice can't overcome those clutches. That 'locked' axle makes these cars a pretty exhilirating experience to stop when it is icy. Just be more aware of what's going on ahead and give a little more space to the other motorists.
• A note on ABS: The ABS system cycles far more effectively than a human can ever hope to-especially since it has individual control over each wheel and can compensate for one wheel getting less traction than the others. This keeps all wheels working as hard as they can to stop the car. DO NOT PUMP THE BRAKE PEDAL. It's really quite simple: push the pedal hard and steer. The rear will get a little loose due to it's limited slip differential, but you will still be able to control the car while you are stopping. Take time to go get used to the horrible buzzing the ABS does when it's working properly and get a feel for the brakes in general. A parking lot or backroad with no traffic is a good place for this. It's much better to practice at your leisure than during a real panic stop.
• Go into empty parking lots at every opportunity and do donuts. Don't hit any light posts or parked cars, though. These cars are a gas. That's why I drive mine year-round. I can't enjoy it when it's sitting in a garage (unless of course it's getting an upgrade of some kind!).

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Scott Knight
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