I finally got my Tesla Model 3 a few weeks back.  Driving in an unfamiliar parking area, I did an over correction avoiding a pedestrian and ‘crunch’, I scrapped the rim on my M3.  Sigh.  So here is how you can repair the damage without taking the wheel off or paying $200 to a shop.

First, lets have a look at the damage.  It’s not major but heart breaking non the less.  So there are a few ways we can go about this.  With advise from my friend Norman Woo I looked the problem this way.  How far away do need to be before you notice?  So I thought about it and decided on the 3-6-9 rule.  At 9 feet I should not be able to see it.  At 6 feet I should have to look carefully for it, and 3 feet I should be able to see it but it should not ‘stand out’.  Now that is for me.  Most people, unless you say something will not see anything.  And even if you ask them to look for it most will do not find it.  You will see what I mean at the end.  So now that we know what we are trying to achieve, lets get started.

First, lets assess the damage.  It looks worse then it really is, but there are a few pretty deep cuts in the metal.  Now we could take a hand sander and smooth it all the way until it’s perfectly flat, but because the aero caps are almost flush with the edge of the rim, it could be noticeable since the fit will vary from the repair area to the rest of the rims edge.  So instead we decided to smooth down only enough to give us a clean surface and we will let the paint fill the remaining divots.

Step one.  Tape off the area that will not be worked on.  We used duct tape here.  (BTW, its really good for shirts too, ( How to get name tag off a shirt  ).

Next we grab a sander (if you do not have one I think you can borrow from the city or just rent one).  The rim is pretty soft so it only took about 3-5 min of sanding to get to a nice clean level.

BTW, if the cuts are not that deep, or you have time, take a 200 grit bit of sandpaper and do it by hand.  Smaller scrapes I do that.  I went to NAPA auto parts and bought a kit that has paper, gloves and filler.  Really easy.

(Shame.  We forgot to take a pic here)

Next, we grab some emery-cloth (type of sandpaper, (medium) 100 grit I think, followed by 200 (I think) and sand it smooth, making sure to keep the same shape as the rest of the rim.   20-30 min of this I think.  This was the hardest part.  Take your time… Get it right.

This step we skipped but upon reflection, we should have done it.  You can get primer that is pretty good at filling divots.   Ah well…

Ok. Now we get some windex (yes windex) and clean the surface.  DO not touch it!  Let it dry!  Good thing it was a bright warm day so we did not have to wait that long.

Here is where I owe Erwin Lara a bit of thanks.  He found a REALLY good match that is made for Ford.  The pen (link) was around $15 bucks I think.  Shake that think up a lot!!!

And now let the artist flow.  The first coat will not look good (again because we did not buy primer) but keep at it.  We did 5 coats over all.  Be sure to let each coat dry!!  No short cuts.  Plan to take time.  15min per coat minimum depending on weather.  Long strokes!

Finally, we put on some clear coat.  We only did 2 coats, could have done 3 but it’s good enough for the 3-6-9 goal we set out earlier.

And that’s it!!  The pictures we took were purposely at the worse angle to show the damage.  The third pic was with clear coat and the last picture was taking at a good angle.  Even at 3 feet you cannot see it.

Now we put the aero cap back on.  Nice!  Looks even.

And there you go! Around $30 bucks for pen and sandpaper, a few hours time, and lots of patients and its fixed.  So for those not used to low profile tires, sooner or later this going to happen to you.  If you are obsessed will trying to keep you car looking brand new as possible, you will want to invest in the tools listed here.  Worth it!

Good Luck!!   If you end up doing a repair to you rims like this, send me pics and I will add it to this post.

Also, my referral code, because why not?  https://ts.la/christopher12567

…and remember…

The “USB selective suspends settings” option in the Power Options may be Enabled.

• Click Start, type Power Options in the Search box and then click Power Options from the returned list
• Click Change plan settings for the selected Power plan
• Click Change advanced power settings
• Expand USB settings and then USB selective suspend setting and change the setting to Disabled for the option for On battery: or Plugged in:
• Click OK on the Power Settings window and click Save changes on the Edit Plan Settings window

  Important: This is a default power setting , disabling this setting will cause additional battery power consumption when your mobile PC is in Sleep or Hibernation mode and unplugged.

I recommend that you only do this for the plugged in setting.  If you are on battery, you may want to keep this enabled unless you need the higher speeds.  If so, you can turn it off, pull or push the files you need, then turn power saving back on.  Good luck!

I had a quick look at the Twitter blog to see of there was any warnings of something new with the API.  Nothing jumped out at me but I did notice that something was changing from 32 bits to 64 bits.  I did not pay it much mind.  As I was debugging I finally decided to get the keys from the twitter site and manually start making some calls. The site started working again.  What the heck?  I checked my SQL statements and I was getting data from the database.  Then I looked at the last 4 digits just to see of perhaps my tokens got corrupted or something.  They do not match!  For the first 4 digits DO match!  Then it stuck me.  I quickly logged into the database and yup, just as I thought.  I had my fields set to textvar fields set to 40 charters.  Default.  Arrggg.. All this work and it was just the keys getting larger.

I changed to token fields to 64 each and everything started working again.  Well mostly again because I introduced new errors and founds some weakness in the codes that I never noticed before.  That was one afternoon shot to hell.

So if you suddenly find your twitter app is not working anymore, check you database schema, could be a quick fix and save you a few hours.

The users who are facing blurry, bold or hard to read font problem in Windows 8.1, just need to enable this new option and their problem will be fixed forever.

So if you are also facing this problem, just check out following simple steps:

1. Right-click on Desktop and select “Screen resolution” option.

2. Now click on “Make text and other items larger or smaller” link.

3. It’ll open “Display” settings page. You can also directly open “Display” window by selecting “Personalize” option from Desktop context menu and then click on “Display” link given at the bottom of left-sidebar.

4. Now enable “Let me choose one scaling level for all my displays” option and apply the changes.

5. Restart your system and your problem will be fixed.

Since Windows 8.1 is under development, it seems this new feature is not working properly in many computer systems. We hope the issue will get fixed in final version of Windows 8.1.

Go to -> Control Panel\System and Security\Windows Update and install the updates.  Odds are this will fix your issues.

If this time it does not fix your issue, give it 2 days and check back. It seems like there is an update everyday.

I’m going to live with this in my 4 year old tablet for a few weeks and see how it feels. You can read other windows 8 posts here.

Its still basically the same product as a year ago, and yes you still need jailbreak to use it.  There was one new feature though, you can choose to compile the video later or save as a .mov in realtime.  I appreciate the option. As some point, I will have to do a comparison between video recorder and Cycorder and see which provides better output. However, what I like about video recorder is the video and sound compression options. I can also choose between portrait and landscape.

So far, the only bugs seemed to be a crash after a movie has been compressed. Not the end of the world, and the inability to send a movie via email.  Big fail there. Hopefully this will be attended to soon.  This is important because the compressed movies are stored as mp4. You need to either post it up to youtube or convert it yourself. Here is where using the .mov option is more compatible.