dr4b | snow day

Oh, that's really funny, I forgot to make an LJ entry about yesterday.

Right, so we woke up around 9am to find Seattle cloaked in something like 4-6 inches of SNOW!

That much snow never happens here, so I was like "great, I think I'll go back to sleep," and so I did. Got up again around 11am and there was still more SNOW!

So I spent the afternoon doing some reading I needed to do for work, doing some more work on redoing all my stuff on the new hard drive, and I made more Mac&Cheese, gotta get rid of the older boxes of it, and at some point

mh75 and

pauldf came by, having met up randomly walking around Greenlake. I realized, "hey, Paul has an Amazon connection at home," so a few hours later I went to Paul's house and I finished up some stuff and sent it to my boss. Ahh, I really hope I can get set up with a dial-in account or something soon. It just happened to be luck that Paul lives two blocks away and coincidence that he visited.

PP after that, but I will spare you the details. I got my Long December gown after 2.5 weeks. Yay.

So, now it's morning and Eli wants me to drive both of us to work so we can go to Eastlake afterwards... wish me luck, hopefully I won't die on the way. I've never driven in snow before, and I doubt Seattle's the right place to learn.

EDIT>
Eli has pictures of his walking around snowy Greenlake here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The principles are easy:
1. Slow and smooth. Makes it far less likely to loose traction.
2. Leave extra time. This applies both to the drive time and slowing
for stops and turns well before you need to.
3. Leave extra space. Instead of the "usual" 1 car length per 10 mph
try 1 per 5 mph or even more space. Really, this is an extension of
#2.

There are a lot of other details I don't recall because they've become reactions for me. Ultimately experience and patience are what makes a good snow driver. That and the knowledge of when not to drive in the snow.

Corollary to point 1: Brakes fit with "slow", but not "smooth", especially if you jam them. Start-and-stop is one of the big things that can cause you to lose traction and slip, and it's also easier to keep rolling traction than to build starting traction. If you aren't already the sort to drive so you control your speed with the gas more than the brake, now's the time to do it.

Point 3 helps with this, because you get more time to slow down or drift to a stop without using the brake if weirdness happens ahead. Also, the 1st and 2nd gears that most people almost never use on an automatic transmission help you drive slowly without constantly braking to slow down. (They also help if you're stopped and having trouble getting that initial purchase. Always try downshifting first if your wheels are spinning.)

The key to using brakes on snow is gentle pressure and knowing when to ease up. Really being smooth with your brakes is an art and makes them as useful, or more useful, than using gearing and engine to slow down. Also, my downshifts (I drive a manual transmission car) are somewhat abrupt, and I have lost traction momentarily on dry pavement when doing so, so shifting is not in all ways supperior to braking. However, downshifting to prevent yourself from going fast in the first place, or to control speed while heading down long hills is a good idea.

I usually find spinning tires are best cured by easing out of the gas. Also, lower gears produce more torque, and can be a reason for not finding purchase as opposed to a cure. For instance, my tires will spin in snow (or gravel) if I am in first gear, but if I am in second (and gentle) the tires can get a grip. I feel like mentioning here that with a little effort I can spin my tires on dry pavement, so a little of it is my car.

Absolutely. When you do have to slow down relatively quickly, a gentle touch with the brakes is a whole lot easier to finesse than throwing yourself into a lower gear. It's drive-five-feet/slam-the-brakes-hard/wash-rinse-repeat, going downhill on ice (which I've had the "pleasure" of being behind during one of last year's particularly nasty icestorms) that will hurt you, and that seems to be a common pathology (at least in my neighborhood.)

I've found with my car that if I'm trying to pull out of parking and the wheels are spinning, drive is geared way too much toward quick pickup to get the low-speed control I need and it's a lot smoother in 2nd. I think that's an automatic-transmission thing; I've gotten a lot of people spinning in snow or mud moving by dropping them out of drive long enough to get forward motion. 1st may well be going too far the other way, though.

granted PP probably means puzzle pirates now but for some reason i was thinking ParaPara. to be sure i don't get confused (cuz i'm a dolt) PP = puzzle pirates, PPP = ParaParaParadise? ... just doing a sanity check. ^_^

snow day

Snow Driving

Brakes bad. Granny gears good.

Brakes still work

Re: Brakes still work

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