The following is a non-Honda related post. Well, in a sense, if you really want to break it down to specifics, the people involved did own Hondas at one time or another. If you only come here for Honda news, this update is not for you. We will be returning to our regularly scheduled program tomorrow. On with the show….

This is one of the rare times I’m really gonna talk about my car because it’s not really related to what goes on here. I just feel it’s worth mentioning and interesting because it happened on my 27th birthday. I started out just wanting to do something simple and my night ended up anything but uneventful…

As I get older I’ve realized that I’ve basically seen it all. There aren’t too many things I haven’t done or been through so on my 27th, I just wanted to do something simple. I had to go down to SD over the weekend to go kick it with my parents and what not for my bday, and it had been raining like crazy lately so I decided to bring my Q45 down there so I could wash it. I rarely drive the car. Usually it just sits there and collects dust unless I have a meet or event to go to. Then I’ll clean it and take it out for a spin. Other than that, I might occassionally take it to the market or something just to keep the blood flowing so to speak. The last time I checked my tire pressure was probably a month or so ago. Total number of times I driven the car since then….maybe once or twice. Let it be known that the main issue I have with this car is it has bad toe in the rear so the tires do tend to wear more prematurely. I’ve been meaning to get it fixed, but between it being too fuckin low to drive anywhere and my having no money or time, it’s just been sitting. I got tires about a year ago and it had been wearing a little better since I raised the car up abit when I finally put the rest of my Wald kit on…

Anyways, on with the story…I usually have dinner with the same 5 friends (Doods!) that I always do. My bday isn’t that much special so I didn’t really want to bother anyone with coming out. It was last minute so I just called the same 5 peeps I’m always with. So if you guys that know me wonder why I didn’t invite you, it’s just because I didn’t want to trouble you guys because it wasn’t that big of a deal and I know how terrible traffic can get in L.A. Thanks everyone for the bday wishes by the way, it means alot. I ended up deciding to eat at Cheesecake Factory in Pasadena and since my homies Chris and Tony were not too far from me, I told them to just meet up at my place. We played some Street Fighter 4 before we set off to go to dinner. I figure since I never drive my car and I was just gonna park it anyway, I might as well take it out for my bday and use whatever gas was left in it. So we rolled out to Pasadena in the Q. My car is slow as fuck so I usually just kick back and let that shit drive itself. We got to Pasadena without incident and had dinner and what not. I happen to have the SLR with me so we randomly pulled up and attempted to take some pics too. After that, we took off for home….

We were dippin in the 210 eastbound around 10:45 or so and all of a sudden we heard a pop. We couldn’t really figure out what it was and I honestly thought it was part of song that we were listening too. Everything seemed to drive fine and what not so I kept going. I even attempted to replay the song to see if that point of the song had a similar sound. As I was getting on the ramp to merge onto the 605, I noticed that my steering wheel was cocked sideways….I had a flat. When the pop occurred we were actually two or 3 exits away from the 605 so I actually drove for a while before I even got onto the 605 onramp. At that point, I pulled over immediately and basically knew that I was fucked. My once round wheel was gonna be square now and my perfectly mint set of Work Eurolines are no ruined. If you’re wondering, yes I do have stretched tires. It’s a mild stretch but it indeed is stretched. It’s also stretched on Falken Azenis ST115’s, which is not a great idea in itself. I wanna let everyone know now that this really has nothing to do with stretched tires nor does it have anything to do with the dangers of stretching. It’s more my stupidity and ignorance then anything else. I should have checked the tire pressure again after I drove all the way down to SD the night before and at a glance I really didn’t notice that my tires had worn down so much since the last time I looked at it. Again, my ignorance and stupidity caused this, not stretched tires. If you’re on a stretch and you maintain it and are careful about it, you will not run into these problems. The combination of low tire pressure, excessive wear on the inside, and me clipping a reflector or something similar to it caused my tire to tear apart. Now Chris, Tony, and I were stranded on the highway in the middle of nowhere near the onramp where semi-trucks haul ass. I don’t have a spare. I have a stock tire at home but it doesn’t even fit on here at this ride height…The homies I usually go to with these kind of problems were already with me, so I had to bug my friend Billy, who lives all the way out in Chino Hills. Billy is probably the only one that has a wheel that would even fit on this car and lucky for me, he decided to come help. Tony also hit up his friend Andy to come by with some tools to get this car off the shoulder of the 605 freeway….

Believe it or not, their are good people left in this world. Few but they do exist. We actually had a couple modified cars haul ass by us and honk and shit or be assholes. Some kids with turbos even rolled by, slowed down, and blew off just to show off. To those guys, a big “fuck you”. Next time I see you stranded on the road, believe me, you will get your’s. Anyways, some people actually stopped by to see if we were okay while we waited for our homies to show up. One guy like cut across the freeway and braked so hard he almost hit the fuckin guardrail just to see if we needed help. We thought he was gonna rub our asses but he was actually a really nice guy. I was ready to do some chinese jiu jitsu on that ass and break his neck and throw him down the hill. Either that or he woulda took us down the hill and raped us. Both situations presented an unwanted result so I’m blessed that he was a nice guy. The second guy that stopped actually just wanted a cigarette. How fucking addicted could someone be to roll up to a broken down car on a freeway and ask for a smoke…..strange.

An hour or so goes by and Billy rolls up in his Element with an Axis something-or-other wheel that I could use. It was an 18 on a pretty meaty tire so I knew I could roll my car home at least. A couple minutes later, Andy shows up with the tools and we somehow manage to jimmy that floorjack under the car and get the car back on the road. Changing a tire on a thin highway shoulder at midnight and it’s cold as fuck equals the perfect birthday present for me. I just wanted to have a simple dinner and I ended up hanging out on the freeway with some other homies. I babied the car all the way back home and I managed to snap some pics of the wheel…

Warning: The following pics are GRAPHIC. If you’re a fan of wheels and have a weak stomach, please look away.

Here is the damage…

I will vouch for Work Wheels any day of the fucking week. For the distance that I drove, at the speed I was going, damage to the wheel was very, VERY minor. No damage to the wheel itself on the outside and a very small bend on the inside. So small that you might not even notice it unless you looked very closely. A friend of mine had a similar blow-out on a Junction Produce wheel, drove a shorter distance, and his wheel was fuckin square afterwards. I can’t say enough for the quality of these wheels…

Again, this is caused due to my stupidity and me being careless. Had I been more careful, this type of situation would have never presented itself. You can clearly see that there is no damage at all to the front of the wheel. It’s perfect.

My stupid ass was driving on a tire that was balding and I’m very lucky to see so little damage. What makes this more of a stupid decision is that I don’t even have money to fix it. So I’m just gonna park the car for awhile until I have enough cash to fix it along with getting the car aligned properly…

This is what I’m stuck with. Looks like a donut on my Q45 compared to what I had before…I feel like such a retard. Happy birthday 27th jackass, you ended up spending almost 3 hours stranded on a highway and now you got an Axis wheel on your car and a tire that’s shredded to total shit.

File this under “How not to have an uneventful birthday.” It was good to see some friends I haven’t seen in awhile though….

First off thanks to Maybelyn and Ojay and the Doods! for coming out to eat dinner with me for my birthday. Big thanks to Chris Bobadilla and Tony Khamly for standing on the highway and getting honked at like assholes by ricers. Also even bigger thanks to Billy Shea and Andy for saving our asses. Oh if you guys got a call from me, it was because I didn’t have anyone to call at the time and needed help…sorry for calling so late….

Oh this is what the JP wheel looked like after a similar blow-out. Sorry I don’t have a shot of how FUBAR’d it was on the inside…

On a final note…at least my birthday cake was good…

…It’s got six candles on it because that’s how many months it’s gonna take for me to finally decide to fix this mess….