RichardK

First drive! Really - surely you're all used to me just trusting people and then finding out later 😂 First, a wash. Wet look hides the lacquer peel... It's a while since I've bothered with this stage... Worth it... Looking nice... Ready for a run out. Always were well-proportioned compared with other folding hardtops. Dried off at friends' house! Roof dried off. Roof overrated... Home! OMG. So good. I really rather like this car. Verdict: suspension a little tired, can fix - front coils and a steering damper first as they're eaaaasy. Handles nicely though, just a little short on travel. Love the manual - yes, Mercedes shift quality, but can really play with the 2.0 and it feels easy to drive. No untoward noises, no weird smells, maybe needs a coolant flush but I'll give it a proper service when I'm in the mood - right now I just want to drive it. And I remember why the SLK is the one car I kept for years, not months. First drive = absolutely delighted and grinning like an idiot.

Insured! That was straightforward. And cheap, until tried adding my dad as a driver...

I looked for the interstitial loom mod - the cam magnet is leaky, it'll be getting a new one (hope they're still reasonably priced - it's a decade since I last swapped one though!)...

It begins. Partially derailed by pharmacy informing me my meds are unavailable - of course after waiting a week during which they could have told me at any time What's it like? Needs a scrub. And paint... But one, I can do. Looking a tiny bit nicer, I think. Could be a keeper? Plot twist:

It didn't hurt, put it that way...

Sometimes life has a way of finding a balance. I've been recovering, in various ways, from stress over the past couple of years and it's weird how things pan out. Being isolated and single and confused by life to finding a totally random and very nice person in real life and things just being chilled, for the most part. Finding the ability to write and focus again thanks to a Chinese health therapist and that seemingly unlocking the 'learn Chinese skill' and also starting to cook for myself again by discovering how easy it is to make nice stir fry things, and listening to Chinese pop to help with parsing syllables and pronunciation - which manifested so much energy into the universe that it responded with a new long-term test car. Unfortunately manifesting energy is a skill Gridserve has yet to learn. This is a return trip from Chesterfield to Doncaster which took me 2 1/2 hours because the Atto 3 dropped to 11 miles remaining and Woodall services chargers were out of action. The whole network was out of action due to payment issues. But nothing within range on Zap Map (also the BYD can lose that last percentage rapidly apparently). Not the fault of the car at all. Yesterday I tried to charge but the 50kW chargers in Clay Cross were also out of action. That experience - plus the car wanting a software update so I spent ages in Tesco trying to dredge a few kWh from the 7kW units there - pushed me back towards replacing the Pontiac after all. Fate is interesting. I lost money on the Pontiac, for sure, because it didn't suit what I wanted and I didn't get to enjoy it instantly. Such is life. But the way I see it is, the Pontiac cost me my Volvo 740 and the lost insurance. The deposit for the Pontiac covers the lost insurance. The balance of it in a brown paper envelope still on the desk covers a delivery from @Agila... Which after chatting I figured I would have a look and if I didn't like it would just roffle as planned and not lose any money, also avoiding a trip to the bank. I checked insurance quotes first. They're fine. Once I saw it and looked it over, I'd say it's better, really, than my yellow one was when I got it. I say that because when I got it, the owner sent me pictures of the rust on the rear arches, and them repairing the rust, so I knew what I was getting. This is pre-repair level but still good. Front wings are very good. Didn't dig super-deep but underneath is good, including the torque links. Interior is good and has electric seats. No AC, no problem. Roof works and is smooth, no clatter from the parcel shelf, no squeaks from the windows. Gearbox/clutch feels good, steering is nice, nearly new Uniroyals on the front, decent history file, two keys. Downside, the paint. Who cares. Paint doesn't stop it from working. But you'll see if I can make a difference to the overall ambiance of it anyway with a bit of attention... That Carat Duchatelet rear spoiler is subtle and really rather nice. But what made me really happy was this: I owned my previous SLK from 2012 to 2018. This is a VERY familiar view for me and one that predates the psychopath that helped me ruin my life. "Don't do what you normally do with cars, it's a cheap one, you could go nuts with it". Yep. I could. But the way I see it, if I'd been offered this as a swap for the Volvo two months ago I'd have jumped on it, no hesitation. So yes, Adrian Flux made a few notes out of the shenanigans (and are losing a few more because hey, don't piss off motoring journalists who will never shut up about or forget the shitty attitude of companies) but I got to meet @brownnova, got to drive a Pontiac Trans Sport GT and look about inside one, learn a bit about a car I always wanted, then got to meet @Weird Car and @Agila AND I have an SLK back in my life. And this is the best side of Autoshite, by far

SLK dropped the steering box with R171 and I can't remember if 171 also went to struts rather than SLA/double wishbone front... I prefer the original setup, never had a problem exceeding sensible let alone legal speeds in anything with a steering box, and I like a little wiggle-room straight ahead. But many people don't realise steering dampers are there for a reason and are a consumable. And also piece of piss to replace.

Rest and be thankful is not part of a Rally stage... Hope she is feeling better and all is well, and you get some downtime.

Lights back in now the silver bulbs arrived, Lilith exits her lair... Dusty - not good for polishing. Good start but the Karcher bottle ran out. Custard one I should have dialled back a bit... So. Yellow. Finally rinsed off. Shiny. More shiny. I cleaned behind the panel in here. Then waxed. Quite clean, but not scrubbed yet. Many litres. May have polished the lenses. Tomorrow the rest of the car will match and I'll get some under arch/sill/floor pics. The door shuts and A-pillars are looking very nice, but the front mudflaps can't hide their years! Shiny. Shiny! Stylish things? Chrome wheels are NOT fun to clean.

I love the forensics on this. Hate the validation of my view that "British garages do shit work, bodge cars and don't give a flying fuck about the customer, the engineering or the actual process and problems" but you're doing an amazing job undoing and improving! No wonder Jaguar couldn't lose the reputation for shoddy stuff if that's a warranty fix 😕

No, you're obsessive.

When I had a manual 3500S in Kelso it was close enough to boy racer times that it got to work out a bit. In 2000 it was capable of upsetting one of the more confident ones in his XR4i, and I never held back on my driving style with it despite it being a decade older than most things. Being white it also made drivers of a certain age visibly shit themselves when it appeared in the rear view mirror. "with a sense of purpose". Don't think I have driven another '70s car that was so easy to overtake everyone with. The SD1 V8-S I considered to replace it felt decidedly gutless by comparison.

Why are PX27/7W bulbs so awkward to get in the UK? Or more precisely, why is it so hard to find silvered/chromed amber once to de-fried-egg the lights? It looks like Land Rover used them so it's not just a weird not-domestic car thing but the options for bulbs look crappy as anything, no recognised brands at all. So I'm stuck waiting for some of those before I pop Lilith out onto the drive and break out the snowfoam for a pre-detailing (dunno why I feel stupid saying that. I just called it 'cleaning' when I used to put three coats of Simoniz on my Manta and polish under the sills and inside the door shuts) wash. The roof is getting a deep clean in the roof well - I never paid much attention to how it works because to me, it's like a VW pram roof - except it isn't as obviously if it were the Cruiser would out-pram a Metro 114 Cabrio. The entire lower hoop of the roof drops down into the back when you open it, with a set of seals and guides keeping it all neat - I'm going to give those some attention. When you close it the whole assembly lifts and seals against the inside of that 'hoop' covered by the black metal trim ring. Chrysler made a big deal about making the PT Cruiser into a convertible, and for a car that they made less than 80,000 examples of (though that is more PT Cruiser Cabriolets made than the entire production run of Volvo 480s...) and a car made by DCX during a period where the cost-cutting mentality would make 1990s PSA gasp, the roof system is probably one of the best in the business. We've seen how well neglected, shitty old PT Cruiser Cabriolet roofs hold up - the rest of the car might have fallen apart but the roof mech/seals/condition generally makes VW, BMW and other contemporary ragtops look like crap. It is such an odd, thorough design. They made a full cabriolet - the windows are frameless with no centre hoop - then added a centre hoop not for rigidity, but as an aerodynamic aid to reduce wind noise. It works. I think, from the way it's designed, they'd considered offering two models of Cruiser Cabrio - but having detrimmed mine I did see the welds applied to secure the bolt-on hoop. It also needs the hoop as the upper support for the seatbelts, though the bolt-on design means an alternative treatment could easily have been implemented. The roof itself is really well insulated with a thick headliner, and very generous, flexible cant rail seals. Even the headliner treatment is unusual - there's a fat roll of thick fabric at the base of it, when the roof is lowered that roll cushions and seals the leading edge of the C-pillar. Gut feeling is that somewhere there's a drawing board proposal for a two-seater PT Cruiser 'hot rod' that used a smaller roof package that folded fully into the well, a solid cover, and had no rear seats or roll hoop. Either way, once I've got new bulbs (the old ones worked but they were flaking the amber off and I wanted to replace all the bulbs while I had the lights out to rustproof) I'll get this MOTd and try and enjoy a few drives with working tunes and so forth before the roads get salted.

Finished: Can't embed the video from FB so some stills but the point is John Grant Pale Green Ghosts which absolutely hammered the broken speakers playing without (added) distortion and sounding alright even at full volume.

One who designed the interior before the iPod wa invented...

HUD definitely went off when my RT4 did random reboots, then I'd get kmh for a bit until it woke up.

Also given how thoroughly batshit the role of the RT3/RT4/Navidrive is in terms of the car's interfaces it wouldn't surprise me one bit if botched radio wiring would knock out part of the HVAC.

A lot of these had those bloody Parrot things wired in - as did many cars of the time - though I am pretty sure my RT4 one had fairly decent Bluetooth support - paired to a Nokia E90. I miss when iPhones and Androids were just 'an option in a sea of options'. If I'm remembering correctly you could, with RT4, hoy out the 1.8" iPod-like 30GB drive (was 10GB reserved for music? I know it was not all that generous), put in a larger one or presumably now, an SSD adaptor board and then there were some Mirascript hacks to allow a bigger partition but it still ran into the files/folders limit. I do remember the car's own voice recognition being quite good, if limited. And it didn't have full postcodes I think so I ended up with a TomTom in the A-pillar corner anyway.

All C6s are double-glazed, though, so given the attrition rate it probably won't be too hard to obtain a replacement - don't think they have different shades of tint, either. Might need to wipe the soot off some of them.

Well, the PT Cruiser has working speakers and sounds good, but it's damn hard getting the right sealing foam to recreate the original! And it has weird bulbs so off go the ones I got on Amazon. But with the aid of a flexy hose it's had more stuff dripping from random cavities than a dodgy hentai Laserdisc. Could definitely do more rustproofing but I need a proper bucket and application kit. And I really just want to reassemble the interior now.

The one mentioned there ticked all of those boxes - new dash, maybe a suspension warning light was mentioned but also fully working according to the seller, disclosed a small suspension creak, autobox mentioned as good, cosmetically it looked pretty good. Put it this way, because it was cream, grey, under 100K miles and described/looking well, I had an amount of nostalgic temptation remembering who I was when I had my new one...

On eBay there's a very appealing Storm Grey with cream 2.7 with lounge pack for £2750. Sensible words, sensible price, under 100K miles.

I think that's why I hated mine most. I wanted Citroën madness, but the true Citroën madness is the C5 II with HP suspension, V6s, curved window (or sensible wagon) plus fixed hub wheel etc. - a more cohesive car, a more effective car, and actually a more authentic Citroën IMO. Whereas the C6 was a wonderful concept slapped on hold for five years - during which time PSA gave Peugeot all the love and treated Citroën like the unwanted step child in a fairytale - then production engineered onto an existing platform with a lot of old tech retained despite the delays hitting the market and a bunch of features just dropped (check out the adaptive cruise control symbols left on the instrument pack, for example). The suspension bushes and bearings on mine seemed woefully underspecced, I think it was a very cynical PR exercise possibly done to test the water for a DS brand - and had they held it back, developed it more, it could have been a stunning DS relaunch halo model. But in the showroom it looked stunning right until you sat in a C5 Exclusive with multi-adjustable seats, RT5 Navidrive etc. and realised the C6 would never be allowed to catch up because it was so short-run and unprofitable. It was never intended to be competitive, to be better - it was there just to milk cash from CX/XM diehards and francophile heads of state. Whereas DS, CX and XM set out to do things differently in the belief they were doing it /better/, and were planned to sell in volume. This was PSA doing a JDM style Nissan Pike/Sera type car for fashion but without the dealer training or lifestyle common sense (the Pluriel does that aspect better IMO). It is the perfect 21st century autoshite car because it is the 21st century Tagora - a clever and interesting design rendered into a bit of a compromised lemon by PSA's determination to not let the family firm be outgunned by a subsidiary.

Oh, I got that too, my opinion on C6s is not a secret - but I think the rarity is why people tolerate this stuff.

They only made 20,000, they got about 1,000 RHDs to the UK and some of those were so hard to sell new they went to NZ?