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Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

Only time I hosed out a car is my uncle's car when it ended up in the ocean. Was low-tide and tons of seagrass on the boat launch. Lost traction and just slowly slid all the way into the ocean. Actually turned out OK after a serious fresh-water bath and carefully drying out everything.

Hosing out a car under normal circumstances is insane. I recently worked on a Dodge 12V diesel 1994 truck. Removed all interior carpet and WIPED out all the nastiness and vacuumed up the bits etc. Got it down to the metal and really nice and clean. Then layered up on Dynamat in prep for installing a high-end sound system and got a great result.

Unless you've destroyed the vehicle anyway by dipping it in sea-water, don't hose out your car.

A really great check to do if you're buying used is to look under the driver's seat for rust. It indicates flooding. In the case of pickups, it means they either submerged it or used it as a mudder. Red flag. Walk away.

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You’d be amazed at what you can hose out. My house flooded in 2019 - river flood, filthy silty water up to the roofline. Everything got dunked.

I decided I’d at least try hosing everything down. PC, NAS, TV, headphones, you name it, it got hosed, and then left in the sun to dry. Mud and silt had filled most of it, and I’d little hope any of it would survive.

Turns out, bar two hard drives, everything survived. The TV had water trapped in the screen for a few months, but it dried without any residue or mark, and was perfectly usable while the thin film of water between the screen layers evaporated.

But the car was a write off. There was no going back from an engine full of silt, and 100% cooked electrics.

Just a supplement to your point of water not always being fatal to electronics - I once found a PSP lying at the bottom of a lake. It was by a school, so I guess bullying had been involved. One thorough rinse later and it turned on. Battery and optical drive were shot of course, and the screen was seriously watermarked. But still.

I’ve sent many desktop keyboards through the dishwasher. Pop the keycaps off and put them in the flatware compartment first; allow 48 hours to dry before re-assembling and plugging in after. Even the cord comes out looking good as new.

The PSP is not especially ferrous, so you were not Magnet Fishing when you found it?

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=magnet+fishing

My dads Toyota Hilux was a rustbucket when he bought it 20 years ago. Still runs "fine", despite lots of use in the intervening years carrying highly corrosive NPK fertilizer on the farm.

A bit of rust isn't anything to be scared of so long as you know it's there.

The old TopGear trio put a hilux threw hell, ocean, on top of an imploded building, and more. It "ran" still at the end of it.

https://topgear.fandom.com/wiki/Toyota_Hilux#Indestructible_...

Playlist of attempts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnWKz7Cthkk&list=PL81Jb1_MsN...

Part 3 with the 23-storey drop from a collapsing tower block is worth a watch

Engine starts, car moves. Good enough for me.

I had a Jeep Cherokee where the only thing separating my feet from the road was the carpet. Would that satisfy your standards?

I HAVE a Jeep Cherokee, and now you've got me worried... XD

If you're only getting worried now, this must be your first Jeep Cherokee!

Hehe... It is my first! It's also the most... interesting, vehicle I've ever owned.

I love it though, it's really fun to drive.

that is when you pull the carpet lay some cardboard over the hole and put down some fiberglass and sell the vehicle. Old car salesman trick

Here in Finland the classic way was to wait for winter, slip a wet the rag rug under the carpet and let it freeze and then just sell the car ASAP.

Did you call it the Flintstone mobile?

Old Toyota trucks were basically indestructible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9Yy5P6FUes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBN3IuVCxl8

That said, it's generally good advice. You just chose one of the most overbuilt, reliable vehicles of all time - not great for generalizing to other cars.

I had an MR-2 for seventeen years. Near the end of its life, the passenger floorboard rusted through, so that if I hit a deep puddle the rug would be pushed up by the water, and you could watch the rug slosh back and forth. Big fun.

How do you see the metal under the drivers seat? Every car I have owned has had wall to wall carpet, including under the seats.

Look at the seat rails and seat mounting brackets. They're pretty much never galvanized, just painted a light matte black and work great as slow acting moisture detectors. Trim covers them up these days, but move the seat all the way forwards or back and you'll usually either see some of that metal or be able to get to a position where you can. They'll also rust over time due to long term high humidity from a leaking window or door seal, or shoddy crash repair, or a slow leak from the heater core, so even if it's not flood damage there might be other issues.

you remove the seats?

LOL What? Do you seriously remove the driver's seat when you are car shopping?

Don't you lol what me. You are making this about car shopping. mmaunder wrote about removing the carpet to clean. Ofc you don't remove the carpet of a car you want to buy. I would never had guessed that you meant 'see the metal' in a car shopping context, as it's as easy as breathing to flip some carpet over and get a sense of the floors state.

mmaunder also wrote:

> A really great check to do if you're buying used is to look under the driver's seat for rust. It indicates flooding. In the case of pickups, it means they either submerged it or used it as a mudder. Red flag. Walk away.

which is probably what the parent post was addressing with how do you check this?

You just slide it back all the way and then slide it forward all the way.

What is a high-end sound system anyways? I've always wondered, and now I ask. How do you measure it - just frequency response and power draw?

> How do you measure it - just frequency response and power draw?

Same way you measure any other high end consumer good: price

I submit that a better measure of high end audio equipment is weight.

Top end gear is HEAVY.

To be specific, top end gear has heavy torroidal inductors and transformers to keep the current flowing.

Not just that - high end speakers are heavy because of the need to use thick, stiff and dense materials to eliminate resonance.

Not for anything portable.

The noise floor of a car is incredibly high, such that it’s probably not a high quality system, it’s just a loud system.

One of the metric I know is sensitivity - how many dB per watts can a speaker produce. Logic is that at lower watts amp has less distortion. For best results buy an amp that's like 10x smaller than required, tho you will waste tons of power (which then goes into class A/B/C/D/E amps...)

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