de_boer_man

I already did.

On Sunday, 19 December, I was driving home from Logan, Utah kind of late. At about 11:00, I was headed south on I-15 in Ogden right where I-84 splits off and goes east. I came around a blind right corner, and suddenly, dry roads turned to a big sheet of black ice. Off to the right, a car was flipped over on its hood. There was an "emergency response" vehicle there along with a police car that were blocking the right lane. The next two lanes had a car sliding sideways in them, spinning slowly, but still moving sideways at probably 20 or 25 miles per hour. Behind that car was a truck that was going about 30 miles an hour. To keep from crashing into that car, the truck pulled directly in front of me. I was going about 55 or 60 miles per hour. I hit my brakes hard, in hopes that I could avoid plowing into the back of the truck. The road was still curving to the right, and I saw a concrete barrier directly in front of me. I wasn't slowing down at all (blasted ice!!!) and I just knew I was going to hit the barrier going 50 miles per hour. But then I realized that I still had complete control of the car! I had my foot on the brake as hard as I could press, but I could still steer. I steered around the truck in the emergency lane, passing another car that was off in the median facing the wrong direction. Its trailer had detached and was another hundred yards down the road. When I passed the truck, I pulled back onto the main roadway, all the while still pressing on the brake pedal. A half mile later, the roads were completely dry again. I'm completely sold on all-wheel drive and antilock brakes now. If I had been driving one of my Saturns, I would have hit a concrete barrier quite hard, totaling the car and probably injuring one or more of us in the process, but the Subaru handled well. It couldn't slow down on a solid block of ice, but it could still steer and manouver us out of a rather scary situation. It turns out that they were doing cloud seeding by the Ogden airport, which can make surrounding roads quite slick. There were 30 accidents on 1/2 mile of I-15 on that Sunday night/Monday morning. I love my Subaru!

:cool: So I finally got this thing installed last weekend. It turns out that the plastic nut, when rotated in the right direction, had a bump that fit into a slot on the deflector, so if I squeezed it juuuuuuuuuuust right, it stayed in place and allowed me to tighten it up. Thanks for the ideas!

I'll try threading the screws in and then backing them out. Hopefully that will work. I'm on stage the next few nights (I'm playing "Mordcha" in a local theatre's production of "Fiddler on the Roof"), but hopefully I'll have it mounted by the weekend. Thanks for the ideas!

Sorry... I was just bumping the topic. I tried doing that, but the darned things still spin in place. :-\

No ideas at all???

Yesterday, I purchased a hood deflector for my 2004 Subaru. I'm not much of a "car guy," but since the instructions show that only a screwdriver was needed, I thought I'd install it myself. The installation instructions are here. (PDF Document) The problem I'm having is on step 6. I put in the plastic screwplugs on step 5, but when trying to screw in the self tapping screws, the screwplugs start to rotate instead of staying in place and letting the self tapping screws, well, tap! I can see that the back side of the screwplug will have to expand when the screw gets farther in and it will hold well at that point, but I can't get the screw in far enough for that to happen. There's not any room for me to insert a crescent wrench or something else to stop the screwplugs from rotating. Any ideas?