Zelandeth

That's something I need to do. The really wet weather lately and cold last couple of days has really shown how abysmal the wet and cold weather performance of the tyres on the Peugeot is. I foresee a set of Rainexperts in its near future.

Can't be many of them left now. I had a really late one on an R plate back in 2003 or so and have to admit it did actually drive surprisingly well. However it absolutely did make the build quality of the Niva and Riva look like a classic Mercedes or Volvo in comparison. It was so obviously just cobbled together with whatever they had laying around in the factory. The bottom of the driver's seat collapsed at one point and it turned out that the canvas under there was a bit of a Russian flour sack. So for all it didn't drive badly, I really didn't rate its chances of longevity! In the same breath, when I sold it a couple of blokes did come all the way up to Aberdeenshire to pick it up to export it to Latvia if what they said was to be believed. It had other exciting features like doors which would randomly decide not to latch properly in sub zero temperatures after you opened them, requiring me to keep a bungee cord in the glove box to tie the front doors together just in case the driver's door would decide to open 90 seconds after leaving the drive in the morning in winter. The windscreen wipers automatically parked themselves maybe 1 time in 5. The indicators and brake lights decided to interact with each other at least weekly until I finally ran out of patience and just soldered the wires directly onto the tail light printed circuit boards and did away with the most awfully designed and constructed edge connectors I've ever come across. The headlights would occasionally just switch off completely when you went to select main beam sometimes as well, usually requiring frantic wiggling of the indicator stalk to restore illumination. Especially fun when you live in the back end of nowhere in rural Aberdeenshire, so when it's dark, it's REALLY dark!

My last Lada absolutely definitely didn't go through not one but two MOTs with the rear silencer hung from two chunky cable ties because the hangers kept unhooking themselves for reasons I never quite figured out. I always thought after the MOT " I need to sort that properly" but of course then forgot about it until the next MOT when "Exhaust hanger repaired" appeared yet again as an advisory...

Oh I understand that - doesn't stop it making my skinflint inner Scotsman from being grumpy about it though!

Surge pricing. Which can plainly be read as "screwing people over during busy periods purely because we know we can get away with it." Having a last look at hotel pricing in the vicinity of the NEC for an event there in May (well, actually at the Hilton Metropole next door, but everyone knows where the NEC is so it's a useful landmark). At the hotel I've historically used the a stay of the same length on a "normal" week comes to around £500. There are cheaper options, but I've always had good experiences with the Moxy, and it's literally a 5 minute walk from the convention venue to my room so it really handy. However if I do a search for the weekend I'm actually interested in, £905. It's gone up quite a chunk each year (and last year I accepted that somewhat due to making the decision I was going at the last minute so I knew I'd be paying above the odds) but £900 for a booking that's six months off is just taking the piss. The Novotel at the airport is £510 (also stayed there before, albeit for work rather than leisure) for the same period - so about £100 more than what the cost would have been for residential stay at the event (which I did enter the lottery for - we're vastly over-subscribed - and wasn't successful in securing a space in) which isn't that bad really in the grand scheme of things. Just trying to weigh up whether the extra walk between the sites is likely to impact my enjoyment of the event, as the ability to come and go as I please (or need) is quite instrumental in that working for me. It's an expensive week regardless...but seeing the prices at the closest alternative hotel having gone that high just really put my back up.

Have to admit that I largely stopped watching it a long time ago unless someone told me there was something particularly notable in an episode because I largely found Clarkson and his infantile humour to be so grating. I know it's all about personas on TV, but based on his usual part and a couple of other things I've seen him in , I reckon that James May is someone that if I bumped into them in a pub I could easily spend an extremely enjoyable afternoon nattering about all manner of automotive and technical nonsense. I guess my biggest hope with the current lot being disbanded is that Chris Harris goes back to doing more of his own thing again, as his channel going silent on YouTube was one of the biggest downsides of him having got swept into TG. He's a bit of an over-caffinated nutter at times (albeit orders of magnitude less so than Hammond), but comes across as a decent enough bloke and clearly really loves cars for what they are whether it be a multi-million pound hypercar or a 40s 2CV. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets dredged back up in a few years time in some shape or form, but I think it had really run its course long before Clarkson and Co left as it really felt that they were scraping the bottom of the barrel to try to come up with anything new to do to keep people interested for several series before then - at least to me. As several folks have said though, I think the days of scheduled broadcast television are probably numbered and the BBC needs to figure out what it needs to do to survive as the industry evolves, an issue which stretches far beyond the success or otherwise of TG. Between the likes of YouTube for more subject specific viewing and the plethora of streaming services out there now, live TV at least *in our house* has really become quite irrelevant. The only thing I think it's been switched to for in the last 12 months has been the most recent episode of Dr Who - and that was purely because the timings happened to work out, otherwise that would have been streamed through iPlayer at a time that suited us anyway. I know that's not going to be the case for everyone, but it's surely becoming more of a widespread normality as time goes on.

Haven't done a massive amount of digging, but the listings I found when I had a rummage the first time around all either stated that they were exchange units or were listed as out of stock. Imagine any place that does custom rads could make one up, albeit probably for a price. Given there's some damage to one of the end tanks on this radiator I reckon a lot of places would likely refuse it as an exchange item - so will just be getting it repaired locally and source a separate oil cooler when I get to that stage I think. The recore (with uprated core) Vs replacement costs weren't vastly different anyway.

Clutch switch will be there mainly to disengage the cruise control when it's pressed for vehicles so equipped. Apparently if you can find the appropriate stalks it can be enabled in the ECU via VAGCOM. Possible the ECU alters fuelling/timing when the clutch is dipped too to help smooth gear changes.

Had a chance to look into the lack of heating in the P4 today. Initially couldn't get any water through the heater core. Poking a screwdriver into the feed immediately revealed the reason for this. The valve itself was also well and truly gummed up. Eventually, after a good 15-20 minutes digging and generally faffing about with it I managed to get a decent flow through it. Turned out that the linkages were also adjusted wrong, so the valve wasn't opening when the heat control was set to high. I then faffed about for a while getting it bled - there's no proper provision for bleeding the system on these and the heater is the highest point on the system so it's a bit awkward. We now have...some vague suggestion of warmth. I suspect I may need to bleed it a bit further or poke the linkages a bit more. Progress though. I also want to see if I can get hold of the cable and get the flaps for the windscreen demisted vents open. I'm not inclined to dismantle the whole control assembly to try to reconnect it, but if I could just get the demisters open and just leaving it that way would make sense at this time of year. As Abby was in the office today so I didn't have the Peugeot on hand it drew the short straw for daily duty today. Still enjoying this car. Hopefully I can get it equipped with more or less a fully working heater tomorrow.

Rectangular ones like the stock ones originally on the Road Runner?

Hard to believe they were still fitting them with generators in the 90s!

Oh bugger. I guess it must have just started to go right before I sold it - that apparently spurious needle lift sensor error it flagged up just before I actually put it up for sale must have been the start of it. Fingers crossed a secondhand replacement can be sourced without too much of a headache. Drop me a line when you do find one as I'm happy to contribute towards it given the thing started acting up literally the day after you bought it!

That's exactly what my plan is. New radiators seem to be basically unobtainable, pretty much everywhere offer them on an exchange basis - hence my plan to just get mine repaired. A small cooler tucked away somewhere in the void between the valance and the rad will do the job just fine. That's a little ways down the to do list though. I'd rather have it done before we're out in 40C weather again though!

Things on the sills were Vactan followed by paint - which then reacted terribly with something that was already on there. There was active rust developing there when I started though, so it did the job. I'd always planned to come back and make a tidier job of it - as with many jobs on that van. Why to manufacturers insist on mounting ECUs outside? Especially in places which trap moisture? Hopefully that damage is just external.

Will have to have a dig then! Likely left disconnected when the drivetrain was last refitted. The lack of a transmission cooler is something I spotted a few weeks ago as the radiator is a manual spec one. So I believe the ends of the cooler lines have just been joined together, though it's hard to see - will be clearer once the radiator is out (it needs repairs either way).

Or convert it to use a more conventional battery by changing the terminals? Or is the battery totally boxed in on these which would make that difficult? Adaptors exist to let you connect a top post battery to sidepost style leads as well. Fitted quite a few of those to cars belonging to a friend up north who has a penchant for US things, and plenty had side post batteries, because GM.

Turns out there are two breather lines attached to the tank, I'd not spotted the one to the left. Some quality metal work by whoever put the speakers in evident there too - which I found when I stabbed myself on it. Turns out that the breather line on the right is blocked somewhere. The tank fitting is fine, but I can neither blow through nor suck through the line which vanishes into the car. The one to the right on the other hand is properly open to both atmosphere and to the tank. This arrangement is quite different to the setup shown in my manual, likely as this is a later car. I think based on the fact that we clearly do have one working and emphatically not working breather, I'm just going to make my life easier and steal the tank port for the clogged one entirely for my return line and to cap the breather line off in case they are connected together elsewhere behind the tank and it ends up being a route into the boot for fuel vapour or raw fuel. Also found this floating around in the back of my engine bay not attached to anything. Anyone know what it would originally have been connected to? The top of the loop where it sat when in situ can be seen here. I'd originally thought it was a breather for the gearbox or something like that until realising it wasn't connected to anything.

That's a bugger with the sensor being so hard to find, especially given how bloody many models it was used on all the way from 1994-2010... List shown at the bottom of this page. Might be a call for some old fashioned scrap yard pillaging - if you have one anywhere near you anyway. Given how commonly used it was, hopefully finding one on a scrapper won't be too hard. Have to wonder if that 46/08 on there is a date code, hinting that this has already been replaced at some point.

A plan has been hatched to deal with our fuel return line problem until such point as we go in to replace the in-tank assembly. Which given the fuel gauge sender is also dead I've decided to just get done. As such there's really no point in faffing about trying to clear the return line orifice - which if it's as small as I'm expecting probably isn't going to work anyway. I'd had this idea rattling around in the back of my mind since the end of last week, but only had a chance today to have a look to see whether it's a viable solution. The area of my interest. This is the breather line which emerges from the top of the tank. Helpfully a push fit connection on the later cars, the early ones were threaded unions like the rest of the fuel system, which would have probably kicked my idea to the kerb. Obviously I can't just hook the return line up to there as the tank needs a breather. However what I think I can do is use it as an entry point to the tank. That's a pretty large bore line and it simply exits the car underneath (I believe in the vicinity of the offside rear wheel), there isn't a roll-over valve or anything fitted. I established that it's quite easy to thread some copper brake pipe into the tank through the breather line such that it will go a decent distance into the tank, keeping it well clear of the breather port itself. If I thread that into the nylon line outside the car and run it all the way into the tank there, that gets me something to which I can easily attach our return line to. Pretty simple to crimp the copper line a bit to introduce a restriction to emulate the function of the original orifice if we need to. Aside from slightly reducing its capacity this shouldn't in any way impact the function of the tank vent line - which with the shape of the tank and filler being as they are isn't likely to make any real difference to anything. I might need to fill it a little more slowly, but that's a trade off I'm willing to make. Doesn't involve any mods to the vehicle itself either, when we go in and replace the in-tank sender and feed assembly we can just pull the copper line back out and chuck it back into the "that might be useful one day" pile in the corner of the garage. Just need to make sure everything is properly secured in place and that we make sure there's a drip loop on the bottom of the line where it emerges from the breather in case any fuel gets forced out there during filling the tank (it shouldn't) so we can make sure it drips somewhere harmless rather than ending up dripping on the brakes, exhaust or anything else likely to get hot. Yes, this is absolutely a bodge, which is something I generally steer well clear of when we're even vaguely talking about fuel systems. However I'd like to at least think that this is a reasonably well thought out one compared to some from my past!

Never driven one of that generation, but the previous generation of Riviera was one of the cars belonging to a friend up north (who had quite an obsession with Yank motors) for which I *really* didn't want to hand the keys back for. Just an incredibly comfortable and utterly stress-free way to cover distance. The touch screen was obviously an interesting novelty as well, though I was quite surprised at how well it worked - a hell of a lot better than a lot of current systems I'd say. Though admittedly that's not maybe saying much... I always wondered what they actually had running the show with that as the processing power needed to run something like that and keep it reasonably responsible, especially keeping in mind how many vehicle functions it was involved in, wouldn't have been trivial in the mid 80s. I remember being really quite surprised by how in depth the diagnostic information you could get into for things was for the time. Think you could even view the refrigerant pressures in the HVAC system, though I'm running on a memory that's the best part of 20 years old here so could be making that up. Are all of the vehicle function controls actually built into the unit itself, or are there separate electronic controls with their own smarts which that just talks to?

Can't argue with a clean sheet pass! Well done getting it there.

Guessing that's far closer to the colour my interior was at some point. How many P4s do we have on here now? There's at least three I think.

There we go, as expected just had the angry "you missed your appointment, how dare you?!?" letter from my GP. No, no I didn't. It was a telephone appointment (because that's all you would offer me), and you never bloody called. For the second time in a row. Prior to that you cancelled it the day before. Only a 12 week wait between each of these...it's not like we're dealing with anything which is *probably* fine but might be really serious or anything. Need to phone up our private provider again and see if there's absolutely anything they can do to get around the referral requirement at this point as I'm just going around in bloody circles here, and have been for nearly a year now. Even more frustrating is that they do allow self-referral for some conditions - just nothing that fits for me in this case of course.

That must be one heck of a rarity these days...Must have been in its day, never mind today. Very 80s/early 90s Jag XJ look to the tail lights. Knowing what higher end Jap cars of that era were like it's probably just as if not more comfortable than the aforementioned Jag too. Hopefully we'll see more of it, I'm curious now. Definitely not a car I've ever seen before, or to be honest realised was a model that even went back that far.

Okay, I give up...What IS it? Don't often find myself totally stumped and not even able to pin down the maker, but this one has me at a loss.