HarmonicCheeseburger

Is breakdown recovery on call for the Iveco?

Is breakdown recovery on call for the Iveco?

Is breakdown recovery on call for the Iveco?

Is breakdown recovery on call for the Iveco?

Is breakdown recovery on call for the Iveco?

Is breakdown recovery on call for the Iveco?

Is breakdown recovery on call for the Iveco?

Is breakdown recovery on call for the Iveco?

If you have read any of my posts on other parts of the forum you may know that that lovely man Sadiq Khan is putting the kabosh on my hobby in August by expanding his fresh clean air Eutopia to my house. I currently own 4 non compliant cars and have been debating what to do about it all
Well in true AS style my answer is to bury my head in the sand and buy another non ULEZ compliant car
Not only that, but a car that's been off the road for a few years, has done less than 1000 miles since 2013
Throw in the fact that whilst I have seen it in person it was a bit of a ten minute glance over it rather than a full inspection, and I haven't driven it due to no MOT. I also haven't seen the paperwork as the seller had COVID when I went to view it. 
Finally, due to some time and logistic constraints I wasn't able to arrange for Ceri to collect so have booked the cheapest Shipley bloke with a Beaver tail Iveco to bring it half the length of the country
WCPGW, folks 😳

Looking like we may finally be able to go car shopping soon!

Progress report #947...
I thought that I'd take a closer look in trying to ease on the exhaust manifold situation. As it is, it's rough. Pulling away emits the characteristic chuff and it sounds painful. I still need the car for a bit so with nothing to lose, attempted to improve on the situation today.
The locknut that is unwound on the manifold was carefully removed, it left the stud behind. Threads were checked and it all looked fine. So, not wanting to snap the stud, a normal nut was put on behind a washer and wound up tight, the lock nut was put on after. Then there is the snapped stud and then the next nut which is corroded and looks ever so slightly loosened. I managed to get a 12mm to bite on it but it wouldn't undo. Not wanting to snap the stud, I eased it tighter until I didn't want to chance any more. Then a washer and a normal nut was put on over it. Theory here was that it would lock up and turn the stud if there was any luck left. The other nuts are not moving but appear tight to the manifold. They all look like sods to remove.
Whilst I was under there I noticed some wiring bodgery associated with the fog lamp running off up into the depths of the engine. This car has endured a little off roading at some point and it shattered the undertray which has been fudged back together with 56 cable ties. The lower grill intake box was all loose and stuffed back in haphazardly.
It looks like any damage was limited to exploding the underside plastics and hooking some wires on the O/S. The bottom of the rad shows some very minor crushing here but has escaped damage from whatever happened.
I re-routed some wiring, tidied up failed insulation and applied new conduit for it to run through. Disconnected plugs, cleaned and greased the connections and secured them where they look like they should go rather than them hanging in a suspended birds nest.
I checked the tightness of main components and the frame, a few mm was got on the steering rack but the rest appeared tight.
Then I finally replaced the fog lamps with some special yellow items that I bought years ago and never fitted, because yellow fog lamps are for winners.
The air intake box was then fitted properly and the remains of the undertray was correctly located and bolted up to the bumper and subframe using new hardware. It looks a lot better from the front now, instead of a load of wonky, falling down plastic and a billion clear and black cable ties, you can just barely see the heads of two bolts.
As the exhaust blow only happens on take off, it needed to go out on the road. Immediately the car was quieter and I can accelerate with it sounding fairly good, I can hear the engine and super charger a lot clearer, making those lovely noises that they are supposed to make. Aggressive acceleration shows a blow still present though but it's not as severe by a long stretch, and perfectly usable. There appears a small blow from manifold to cat too but those nuts are solid and the studs fairly corroded and as I plan to bin all that, I'll leave it for now.
Funny old day weather wise, causing me to fight against the waves of rain showers every hour, but with a 79% success rate, I done alright really.
Car was treated to a tank full of momentum as I can't stand going to the Tesco station during the week, it's one of those where there's queues down the road or half the pumps work or it's just randomly closed for no reason! I'm averaging 19.9- 20mpg going about my weekly business. Double figures I'm happy with.
It's the first tank fill up the car has had in probably 7 years so I was anticipating leaks and /or fire, but we're good.
MOT is due this month, so I'd better get it booked in before the next thing packs up on it!

https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/786994502724279/

Apparently someone upstairs didn't think we had enough on our plate with an uncle suddenly becoming terminally ill so now it's my gran's turn for a similar (albeit less unexpected/out of the blue) diagnosis. This becomes a problem as carrying on as normal albeit with a bit of dark humour is my coping mechanism, and that doesn't sit well with much of the family (although it at least does with my gran - very shortly after telling me she joked that I'd finally get her Kitchenaid mixer I called dibs on 10 years ago!) - so it's probably going to be a rather tense and unpleasant few months when dealing with other relatives. 
Nothing like going away for a week and being brought back down to earth with a thud not 12 hours after getting off the damn plane.

I avoid that forum completely.
I might enjoy your opinion on a Toyota heater control but anything political seems to turn toxic almost instantly.
 
 

The politics forum is making me grumpy.  It used to be that we could have a more or less civilised debate on there (barring one or two persistent trolls) but it's becoming more and more like Twitter by the day, with people who I previously respected turning into condescending cunts and any semblance of debate descending into an exchange of insults.  It's quite depressing.

Unfortunately this is caused by folk being sold "full services" for £150 which are just glamorous oil + filter changes. When phoned up to be sold the air, fuel, cabin filters for an extra £x, £y and £z each, they decline, because they think they're already getting a full service and everything else is just a sales pitch. 
If an indy tells you a full service is £300-350, it means they're doing it properly, not ripping you off. Unfortunately 80% of people don't realise this. It's not their fault at all though, just scummy sales tactics by the fast fit industry and the likes of Servicing Stop. 
If you tell someone you're doing a "full" service, that would imply 'everything' is being done. Clues in the name. 
As an example at my indy, we offer full, tailored and intermediate
Full is what happens the first time we see it and/or there's no prior history, all the normal fluids and filters get changed. Including Iridium plugs where fitted. No surcharges, no bullshit. You get a base price depending on the make/model and that's what you pay
Tailored is a full, minus what isn't due. Generally every 2 years/20k miles. So you have the base price and then the price goes down for every item that isn't due, e.g if the fuel filter doesn't need doing for another 2 years, or the plugs aren't due for 30k. Etc etc 
Intermediate gets done every 10k for the motorway milers or every year for the "2k a year" mileage customers. It's basically an oil change and health check, what others would call a full service. Yet it's our lowest service. 
If someone calls a service a full service but the wheels haven't been taken off then I sometimes cry a little inside... 
For further info, I posted a rant in the motor trade thread which sums everything up!

Hey @martc, I found one! 

It pulled away before I could get on and it was only a couple of hours before I had to leave for the airport but at least I got a reasonable picture. 
 
Just behind and around the corner from the above picture was this scene. 

This is a major road in to the city leading down to Nyugati station. I'm stood in the middle of the southbound carriageway at 0830 without a worry about being run over because the police have shut the road. The coaches are parked in the outbound lanes. I noticed a lot were Slovakian. 
I had to walk a bit further north to find some Tatra KT8s on tram route 14 taking me north into the suburbs, but crucially, away from the bloody Pope. Had a nice morning walking around some old railway buildings and communist era flats looking for chod. 

That was the guy's deluded intention. He used to make grand claims of being "Ireland's operating bus museum" and "the largest transport museum in the world with over 400 buses" but in reality most of them were just scrap 'donated' by operators glad to find a way of getting rid of them without paying the scrapman. Plus it was a field in the arse end of nowhere about 2km from any kind of civilisation so hardly a focal point on Ireland's tourist trail. One of the strangest episodes in bus 'preservation' for sure.

it really is quite amusing how some evenings go, so here I am settling down for the evening, hot chocolate in hand, when a good lighting collector friend of mine *in the states* who i have not directly spoken to in a few years drops me a message 

okay computer issues sure, that sounds innocent enough, I am fairly competent with the things, what be the issue with ye olde computer?

Oh....
 yeah thats a different sort of computer issue entirely, I mean theres "help me install a video game" and then theres "help me low level hack my car" but I am not one to leave a friend in need
so, 3 hours 44 minutes later, at almost 2AM in the morning, yeah I fucking pulled it off LOL

 
 
but fucking hell it was quite the roller-coaster ride for me because,
at first thought ok, perhaps he just needs help setting up the dodgy windows XP era software that these things need and then I could just let him handle it from there?
I see that he running ubuntu linux on his laptop, so ok lets setup a windows XP VM and do USB device pass through, simples right? NOPE, turns out he is, essentially as far as all this is concerned, completely computer illiterate, and he did not even know *which* program he was suppose to use and how to use it,
and this is where it really dawned on me like "ahh fuck" 
like how would I have a fucking clue on how to work an ECU programmer? but again I was not going to leave him the dark
turns out he at least had another computer running windows (windows 11 eugh LOL) so i got him to get team viewer on that and I just took the reigns from there LOL (and just told him when to plug/unplug things) I know how to work linux myself no problems, but I was not going to even try and walk someone who is computer illiterate through how to setup teamviewer on linux/how to work a command line package manager! so windows it was!

but even then, I mean I have never fucking done this sort of shit before, so figuring it all out was fun, hence the roller coaster ride-ness of it, because there where several points during this where I was like "what the dodgy hell is that" or "where in the dodgy hell am I going to find that" and subsequently thought this was just getting too complicated/obscure for even me to be able to get going, but I got there in end!
first of all was getting the software setup, that in itself was actually not too bad, and in the end I did not even need the windows XP Virtual machine for it, so all that was a waste of time LOL (but hey now he can play pinball LOL)
but then came getting it to talk to the programmer magic box thing, turns out he got this one, some cheap knock off version of some programmer of sorts
https://www.amazon.com/Diagnostic-Scanner-V5-017-Programming-Unlimited/dp/B08M5SHK2L/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
note the glowing* reviews...
so the software was giving me a fit about it, after a bit of head scratching (read: googling cryptic error messages and trying to make sense of broken english posts from some god knows what forum) I had figured out/it turns out these programmers have an internal SD card thats onboard which contains the firmware for the programmer itself, and this SD card was bad (or was not making good contact in the socket) so I got him to open up the magic box and have a look for me, sure enough there be SD card

he got the SD card out, not in the manner its supposed to come out mind I dont think mind...

so then he had to go to the local store get another SD card, because he did not have one spare at home

I then had to figure out how to go about prepping the the new SD card, I mean just figuring how to program a car ECU is one thing, now I had to figure out how to program the fucking programmer itself! finding the firmware from god knows where on the internet, (yay for random broken english forum posts again) but, got it flashed to the SD card! (all while my friend had his thumb going numb holding the SD card down into its socket to ensure a good connection after aforementioned botched removal)
and this finally got the software and programmer talking to each-other, which by some miracle as per above was then happy to talk to the ECU in the car and dump its firmware, thank fuck for that! woo!
(for those wondering he says he needs the firmware from his ECU for some sort of remap, he says the chap modifying the firmware should be helping him flash it back to the  ECU, which is good because fuck having to then try and flash back *modified* firmware to something and the risk of bricking someones car, it was bad enough just trying to figure out how to dump it, knowing there was a still a none zero risk it could still get bricked)
this is up there in really fucking obscure technical support I have had to give/been involved with, I mean I have helped people out in all sorts of weird computer situations, in the past, from Hackintoshing a deaf guys desktop machine over FaceTime to helping someone else with the software for a Gas chromatography–mass spectrometer, but at least the person in the 2nd example was computer competent and aware of what they where doing and involved with
 but managing to help someone who is in in a completely different country and who does not have the foggiest idea whats what, dump the ECU firmware of his car, using the most obscure/dodgiest software tools/software known to man (and having to also fix said tool in the middle of all of this) is something that I am quite proud of LOL
and its clear he is really appreciative of the support (apparently he got the kit over 6 months ago and has been fretting about it ever since, not knowing what to do etc) and I am also just pleased I was able to help someone out in their time of need!
 
 
(and I guess this is what people mean by being tech savvy, I might not have had a clue what I am doing at first with this particular "computer issue" , but it seems I have enough similar-ish previous experience, general know how/understanding of how things work, and google fu to figure it all out in the end LOL)