smooth1

... Happy New Year everyone I just woke up......after waking up for an hour and going back to bed again.

I was curious about the size change. The IS is a smaller car, although I kind of disagree with you about the back seat. I'm 5'11'' and I was surprised at the fit. There seems to be more room than it looks back there. I was quite comfy. OK, "Smooth", since you own an IS350 and disagree with my opinion about the usefulness and the size of the back seat of an IS, tell me how you fit an adult male human in it when two adult male humans are occupying the front seats. I tried it again today in the same IS250 in which I tried it a few months ago and with the same three friends. It was not pretty. I again got relegated to the back seat since at 6'0" I'm the shortest by a couple of inches and, of course, it's not my car. This time, instead of sitting behind the driver, I tried the back seat behind the front passenger seat which was probably most or all the way back since the guy sitting in the front passenger seat is 4 - 6 inches taller than me. With my butt pressed as far as it would go into the seatback, I could not even begin to swing my legs into the car -- my knees hit the hard side of the front seat back and there appeared to be only about three inches between the backseat cushion and the front seatback. Is there some kind of trick or is the IS backseat only for gnomes? The only way we were able to proceed was by having the front passenger slide the seat forward and have his knees pressed to his chin -- we made it - painfully - the couple of miles we had to go. My friend sitting behind the driver wasn't too happy either and the driver wasn't too happy because he had to sit too close to the steering wheel. I've had these same three guys in both my previous 90 LS and current 00 LS and even in our Camry and it hasn't been a problem -- or at least there was enough room that no one was screaming. I thought my memory might have faded but today's experience confirmed to me that the IS is mainly a two passenger car with a back seat for small children or pets - or gnomes. Well, first, I thought we were talking about the IS 300, not the ISx50. In the IS 300, the cabin is a bit longer and there is more space back there than the ISx50. Regarding the rear seat space in the ISx50, what year does your friend have? In 08' they changed the back of the seats to a "caved inward" design to make more leg room there. I often take a few of my employees to the local lunch joints in it, and no body has complained or said they needed more space. We are all about 5'10'' to 6'2.

I just installed a Vaitech SL2vi into my IS 350 with nav. And it has a direct jack that allows you to have Sirrus/XFM also. I have Sirrus, Ipod, and Ipod video all on my stereo. Touch screen controls and steering wheel controls all work. I love it! I was using the aux. jack before. The sound is much better than the aux., and the stereo pauses the ipod music while you get a call. Then when you hang up it resumes the music where you left off. In the aux in mode, even though the bluetooth phone overrides the aux. input, the device would continue to play. I've talked right thru 4 or 5 songs! This model was a bit more expensive than the other models though.

Under-Roo's

You can turn off all the voice prompting if you want. there is an option on one of the sub menus that turns off the voice prompt. I have mine turned off. When I hit my voice button, it just beeps once, then I say the command, and then it confirms as it's doing it.

Without the TPMS sensors, I sold my stock wheels and tires for 750.

Contrary to what most people may think, Ford makes a good product. I think they are just out of touch with what consumers really want. The Flex being another example. If pure user space and functionality are your only priority, and you don't care what it looks like, then the Flex may just fit the bill. Some retro designs are better left in the past I would say. I've driven the Flex also. The only complaint I had was the steering wander that seems to keep you in the constant correcting mode to drive. But other than that, the Flex does ride pretty nice.

Very nice job Blake! I stand by what I said about your car. Very clean, very nice!

Thanks everyone. :) That "wet" look is courtesy of DWG which I learned about from SW and rjt here on detailing forum. Man that stuff is nice! But I think I need a new or a btter camera. The pictures look white washed to me for some reason. The red calipers are more red than the pics show. You can tell by looking at the tail lights. I think it was Blake that took those shots of his LS that I thought came out great! And Flop took those shots in front of that country store, shed, resturaunt, whatever that was, I can't remember. And those looked really nice to. I don't know. I'll have to look into it more. :(

Thanks everyone. :) My wife and I went to Ikea the other day, so I parked in the VIP section. (aka: the boonies, sticks, timbuktu.) as I walked away, I couldn't help but keep looking back and smiling. I love how it came out. I agree, I think the red calipers look awsome too.

You need to ask him for a list of what he is replacing and post that here. If it's for all 4 rotors, and pads, it still a bit high, and he's not passing any savings on to you. That would still equal full retail. Stock rotors are retail $240.00 a set. Aftermarket EBC's or Power Slots (which are better in my opinion.) are $185.00 for a set. Pads as Bartkat listed are around $50. So the way I see it, if you buy the parts yourself, your at $575-$600. Which, isn't that bad compared to all other cars. If you do some digging and bargain shopping you should be able to save some bucks there also. But, I don't think you should have to replace the rotors at 35k miles. You should be able to have them turned and new pads installed for a couple hundred bucks at most. I don't know what condition your rotors and pads are in, so I can't say for sure. But if you haven't damaged them in anyway, you should be ok.

Both Tenabe and Tien make springs for the IS250 awd. Tien makes a Comfort Sport sreies called the CS. You may want to take a close look at those. As for tires, I live in Florida and I have an IS350. So it's strictly summer performance tires here. I've heard alot of good things about the Conti's Bartkat listed and the Goodyear F1's a/s plus. But I would suggest going to Tire Rack.com and looking at the comparison charts and reading thier tests and so on to decide which tire is best for you. * My bad. no coilovers for awd yet.

Nice bump though. I'll add this to the How to's .

Welcome to the LOC. I have a feeling you may be at the last 10-25% life of the tires you have on the car also. I'm not sure what tires you have, but alot of them lose their ride quality toward the latter half of thier useful treadwear. I think you may be making a big mistake here. The spring rate and the shock are designed to work together. A softer spring, especially a significantly softer spring, is going to put alot of load and strains on the stock shocks. You'll probably have to change those also. And if your going to go thru all that trouble, then I suggest you get a set of adjustable coilovers. They aren't just designed to adjust hieght, but they also have dampener adjustements. For example, I have the Tenabe Sustec Pro 5 coilovers with the NF 210 springs. I lowered my car about an inch, and set the dampeners to 9 (1-16 are available. 1 is softest and 16 being firmest.) to soften the ride up a bit as lowering the car made it firmer. I also have the TEAS system. It's an electronic suspension adjuster that can be controlled/programmed from inside the car. So when the car is travelling at low speeds, the suspension is nice and soft, but as the car starts to speed up, the suspension progressevly gets firmer as I have programmed. ( A super nice feature). But not as soft as an ES. I don't think that's a realistic goal for this car. But the car does have a significantly better ride now. Especially over the smaller bumps. I barely even feel those now.

Here, try this :Lexus_voice_commands.pdf

So I was just wondering if anyone has one and is using it and maybe had any issues, or advice. It looks like you can set it up several different ways with the emulation programming. I compared this one to the Lexus OEM version, Dice electronics, Navtool, and there was another one also but I can't think of the name right now. So which one do you have and how do you like it?

We woke up to 65 degrees with an afternoon high of 80 today. Mostly sunny, and a light breeze. Tommarrow is supposed to be the same. But then we get a big cold front that is supposed to move in and the afternoon highs will be all the way down to 72 degrees. I might almost need a light jacket for the morning hours.

I just finished cleaning it up and took it down to this park and snapped a few pics. It's been kinda slow on the boards lately, so I thought I'd post this out of bordom.

Oops!

wait, before you go that far, can you post a pic of it? Depending on how bad the stain is I have a couple of other options you may want to try first. 1) You have to trust me here, and if you don't then maybe find a peice of leather that isn't significant to you, and make a small blue or black pen mark on it and test me.( I have done this before. I'm telling you this from expereince.) But,,,,,,try hairspray on it. Preferrably the cheap Aquanet stuff. Spray the towel your going to use, not directly on the leather itself. Then rub on the spot with it. Be quick about it, and keep respraying the towel to keep it moist. Then after the stain is gone, use some milder cleaner like some warm soapy water to get the hair spray residue off the leather. Then recondition the leather with oil based conditioner. I don't know whats in the hair spray or why it works, but I have removed blue ink pen marks on leather from someone leaving a pen in thier pocket and sitting in thier car, and once I even fixed an exploded papermate pen disaster off light beige leather. If you really looked at the spot hard, you could sort of see the outline some, but if you never knew about the accident, you would never know it was there.

I have grown up a craftsman guy. It's not so about the best quality and gimmicks and all that, it's just my entire collection is already that. I could really care less what the finish is. My tools don't stay pretty very long. I use them too much for that. Although there was a time when I liked black metric sockets and chrome standard sockets so I could easily distinguish the difference from a distance. Now most aare metric anyway, so it's become less of an issue.

Happy Holidays everyone. I hope everyone is surrounded by family and friends with lots of love.

I was curious about the size change. The IS is a smaller car, although I kind of disagree with you about the back seat. I'm 5'11'' and I was surprised at the fit. There seems to be more room than it looks back there. I was quite comfy.

Well, first, welcome to the LOC. :) As for the IS 300 and it's issues, really, the 3.0 liter 2JZ inline 6 has a long history of reliability. In fact, it will probably go down as one of the best all time motors. The only issues are a heated 02 sensor that seems to go every so often. (Usually around 70 bucks to change out.) other than that the car is solid. I have allways loved how the car feels in your hands. It seems to just jaunt thru traffic. The CD player has an issue though. They tend to jam up alot. But that's an easy enouph fix.

The End.