Changed the oil and balanced the tires. It was 7 months and 5 days on the oil, 3619 miles, with 33% oil life remaining. Had a thin, pasty accumulation on the end of the drain plug magnet but no larger particles. Not concerned with that.
Used Pennzoil Ultra as I usually do, but installed a generously donated Royal Purple filter. Put about a cup of oil in the filter prior to installation.
Rotated and balanced the tires, nothing to report really, the one lousy tire is still lousy and on the LF now, that should make life more enjoyable. I paid some attention to tread wear since I had the time to play around a bit today. This [ame]http://www.amazon.com/Longacre-50560-Tread-Depth-Gauge/dp/B000VAOH8A[/ame] is the gauge I used. My alignment is/was pretty much in the middle of spec and tire pressure ran about 32 to 33 psi cold, give or take, so about 10% over spec on the door.
Very minor inboard to outboard shoulder wear difference with the inboard shoulder showing ever so slightly more wear. Also noted the center tread was deeper than the edges, car is driven conservatively so I'm going to say a slight under-inflation. All four tires exhibited about as close to identical wear as I think you can see in 16K miles of driving. I think I'm going to shim the rear hubs with a few extra tenths of a degree of camber so I can get rear camber just on the positive side of the middle of spec. Can't get there with the existing adjustments, not enough range.
I bumped inflation pressure to 34 all the way around, might go 35 for the winter though. I set my tires with a digital gauge accurate to 1/2 psi, then relearned the tire positions. Car was not driven for almost 7 hours when I set pressures and tire air temperature was 75 to 77 degrees as reported by the TPMS sensors. I had the same pressure indicated on all four tires by the TPMS tool after some tweaking, seems to be accurate to about 3 or 4 tenths of a pound. Previously, I noticed the LF tire was always different from the rest, usually 2 psi lower on a cold tire and then all 4 would even out as I drove. I want to see if that trend now continues. Some customers seem to think we don't do our job right since all 4 tires aren't exactly the same. I couldn't spend the time I did today setting tire pressure on every car like I did on mine, the boss would have a bird. I don't think you can get all four tire sensors to change at the same rate, due to a variety of reasons, on most cars, most of the time. We'll see.
As I drove, tire pressures had already started to vary. After almost 10 miles of driving, three tires showed 37 and one was 36 and today was cool around here. About a 3 psi jump on a cool day, imagine what happens on a hot mid-summer day. I think I'm going to find the sensor that was on the LF previously and now on the right rear will still change at a different rate than the other three pressure sensors.
Last observation I made was to look at the exhaust outside diameter changes. Pipe coming from each bank seems to be 1.875" outside diameter at the bends in the pipe and 2" in the straight runs. Once the two banks dump into one pipe, outside diameter ranges from 2" at numerous places, from just forward of the last catalytic converter, through the bends heading for the muffler, to 2.5" just forward of the resonator. I don't understand why the inlet to the resonator has this very abrupt diameter reduction from 2.5" to 2". No need for it. I've been tempted to change resonators, one for a bit more sound and, secondly to work around the pipe diameter change. After the measurements I took today, it's either change everything from the Y on back or leave it alone. This would involve changing the inlet to the last catalytic converter, the outlet is fine, and then everything from there back.
Ideally, I think I would want to run 3" pipe, through a new 3" converter and run 3" pipe to the split for the dual exhaust at the rear. Probably 2.25" out the back is fine, once your past the split back to two pipes. A lot of dreaming on my part, not going to happen anytime soon, if ever. Gains would be all top end and I don't drive there often enough to justify the cost for the few ponies I think you'll gain anyway.
Okay, just my 3 cents worth.