On Sat, 7 Jan 2017 19:13:48 -0700, rbowman wrote:

On 01/07/2017 02:53 PM, Muggles wrote:
On 1/7/2017 3:29 PM, Oren wrote:
On Sat, 7 Jan 2017 14:05:55 -0600, Muggles
wrote:

Pussy. We had -19 Wednesday morning, missing the record by 2 degrees. We
also just missed the record for the coldest high temperature for
January. This global warming really sucks. This is supposed to be the
Montana Banana Belt not frigging North Dakota.


Yikes! How often do people have trouble starting their vehicles at those
temps?

Some places up Nawth use engine block heaters overnight to keep the
block from freezing, cracking and the freeze out plugs from popping
out. I'll never go back.


Oh yeah .. I think I've heard of engine block heaters at some point.
Someone here probably has mentioned it a time or two, I think.


When I was a kid I just put an old electric hotplate under the
crankcase. Never even burned the garage down. Sometimes a 100W light
bulb under the hood would do the trick. Note to millenials: a 100W
equivalent LED ain't going to keep a sparrow warm.
A guy I used to work with drove a '60 corvair and lived "out in the
sticks" up around Drayton Ontario. In the winter he parked it in the
corn crib, and when he got up in the morning he put the coffee on, and
went out to the corn crib where he has a steel fence post wrapped in
burlap and chichen wire soaking in a barrel of old engine oil and a
bit of diesel. He'd pull it out, spash some gas on it, and light it,
then stuff it under the back of the old corvair and go in for
breakfast. The back end of that butter yellow corvair was a tarball,
but he got in to work every day.

There are magnetic oil pan heaters available too, but they don't work
on the newfangled alloy and composite oil pans.