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leafsprung

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Everything posted by leafsprung

  1. 'WINDFORCE'! 'Catchpower'!
  2. There's no series with 'light' steering, but I'm sure you appreciate that already! The width difference between 7.50 and 235s is so piffling that in a Series you just won't notice the difference. I've lost count of the number of Series I've driven over the years, all with different tyre combinations and I've never found the steering in any to be unmanageable (compared to factory fresh stock set ups) and I'm not exactly a circus strongman. On my first Series 3 I went from a mismatched set of mainly ancient road biased all terrains on the original swb rims up to 1 ton rims (£20 each from a stall at Billing c.1998!!) with 235/85 BFG Trac Edge. The difference was really unnoticeable.
  3. 235 85 16 Insa Turbo Ranger (BFG A/T copy) on lwb rims. Get past the remould stigma and they're actually a decent shout. I ran them on my daily Defender for years with no problems at all. The wear rate was very good, there was no cracking or separation and road manners were indistinguishable to new stuff, probably ever less of an issue with leaf springs. The carcasses were all identical internally too. I always wanted 7.50s on my Series for originality. They're fine if you need mud plugging ability or the old school looks. Not great if you are dailying it and want any kind of braking ability in the wet or are on a budget.
  4. Boilers gone on the blink. Grrrreat. Switch on 6 month old super digikals WiFi enabled immersion heater and that's stone dead too. FML. Day one of Xmas holiday to be spent waiting for the plumber to come and tell me it's fuckin fucked m8 and parts won't arrive till the middle of January, then bodging in the aged old immersion and probably having some catastrophic cock up in the process requiring a new cylinder.
  5. I recall one hot Sunday morning adopting a similar position in my Gt6 (for reasons long forgotten) when the then Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, walked past to get the Sunday papers from the Shell garage opposite us (he lived round the corner). He was wearing a particularly 'period' pair of short shorts and my inverted position gave me a view even the strongest of all eye bleaches has failed to remove.
  6. They state its a 2 1/4 'turbo' diesel, (not turbo obviously) and it has the hand throttle quadrant on the bulkhead as late series 3 diesels should plus the extra switch panel set in the middle of the dash. That's correct for the 1981 date. Certainly an odd one. Maybe they've stuck the rear tub and bumper off an old one and just not bothered to remove the plates?
  7. Alfa Romeo Gt Junior 1600 FOR £3000 Like that moment when as a youth that really really attractive girl once held your gaze just long enough for you to think "maybe she does fancy me" but then YOU DID NOTHING ABOUT IT AND WILL STILL BE REGRETTING THAT FACT ON YOUR DEATH BED! Well, something like that. So I'm told.
  8. Rickman Ranger (?) Camper. This was in a private scrapyard at a boatyard with other CF fragments and entrails, Rover P4 and Jags various.
  9. My Golf mk4 was comfy and mainly reliable but had endless electrial issues and the interior creaked constantly. The current pre-dpf Volvo XC70 shows no signs of giving up. 145000 and going strong. It's comfortable, quick and far more economical than a car of that size has any right to be (diesel obviously). Spares are plentiful and maintenance is a piece of piss. The autobox of doom thing is over-hyped if well maintained and not abused. Its 18 years old and the only thing with rust is the exhaust.
  10. Awesome. Didn't Practical Classics do a resto series on one a few years back? 2005/2006 ish?
  11. This feller is always worth a watch. Shows the value of proper trackers for expensive gear and how quickly the 'baaandits' strip cars down.
  12. HiCaps had a heavy duty chassis made with actual decent steel. Mine was a D plate but even ex-farm fresh was immaculate underneath, just a tiny bit of grot on the X member in the usual mudtrap which didn't warrant a welding session.
  13. Same here. I stopped with the Night breakers as they've never lasted longer than a couple of months in my Volvos (DRL's obvs) and were too expensive to keep replacing. They made no difference at all to illumination in the old V50 which I think was more to do with the optics of the lights than the bulbs. The current XC70 still chews through most bulbs in about 12 months still so tend to opt for the long life varieties.
  14. The spit of my first car/van and as much as I'd like it, HFM?! https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/195275693053?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=Lr7Lz52FQvS&sssrc=2349624&ssuid=31yn6j0frz2&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY
  15. Memories of a college mate's absolutely identical one (minus a drink induced the roof dent). Four up being thrashed through the Milton Keynes roundabout maze after a fellow back seat passenger gave the internationally recognised hand gesture for 'wanker' to the tail gating truck driver. Cue a very British and therefore utterly shit re-enactment of Duel as a loaded Astra 1.3 was found to be wholly ill-suited to a drag race with a lightly loaded 7.5 tonner.
  16. Echoing everything that everyone else has said so far really, they are fun to drive but not so much on faster roads. The standard seats aren't the most supportive, maybe better if restored perhaps, and the fug stirrer wasn't up to the job of heating and screen clearing in winter. Address those three and I reckon they're hard to beat. The main annoyance I found wasn't really a fault of the car but the attitude of other drivers. The assumption that old car equals slow moving target to be beaten still prevails, and I'm sure is common to other marques too. Almost without fail there was some prick overtaking for no reason, pulling out, cutting up or desperately trying to get past at the lights. It just became tediously predictable. The appeal of an utterly bog standard looking sleeper with 150+ bhp became quite strong.
  17. A nice little explainer as to why when its hot here it is harder to cope with than in 'hotter' countries.
  18. Is there a reasoning for tyre condition being such a low bar in the MOT rules and regs? Surely we aren't overly paranoid about old cracked tyre safety? I recently sold on an aged relative's Renault Commodus still wearing its 11 year old factory fitted tyres which were cracked to feck and hard as stone. It was the classic old persons shopping car. One weekly trip to the Lidls a mile down the road, the rest of the week it was sat outside rain or shine. The aged relative wouldn't pay for a new set as 'it's just passed its test'. The advert made clear their condition and I tried to encourage the purchaser to budget for some new ones but similarly as it had a ticket and 'loads of tread left' they were satisfied. In went the kids and the dog and off they went, cheerfully reporting later that it 'drove well at 70', (notable because it had never been above 40 in its entire life). My tyre OCD meter blew a fuse.
  19. Ah, the Lidl's Maybach. Mother-not-really-in-law had a nearly new dizzle back in the mid-2000's and as others have mentioned it was a steaming heap of crap. Limp home mode was almost permanently engaged and despite multiple trips to the dealers it never got resolved. It eventually got WBAC-ed at a very surprising price considering the games that company were playing in their early days. It was also 50 shades of grey, and not in a good way. It was a strange concept which should have worked for more rear seat comfort for grown ups but in reality just reduced practicality, unless you were a couple needing to drive another couple around in weird poverty-luxury. Therefore it's clearly a perfect study for these pages. Well done.
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