chadders

We've got several horse chestnut trees, at least 2 of which we believe to be over 200 years old.

They're a complete pain with all the sticky bits that drop off, followed by the conkers which can do some damage if they've come from the top of the tree.

But they're part of the garden and provide homes for squirrels and birds so will stay.

Or they're passing the 'problem' along as they don't want to waste any more time on it.

We used to use it on the help desk with some of our 'regulars' who enjoyed complaining. They'd then eventually get a stock answer along the lines that the problem, or perceived problem, would be fixed in the next release.

Probably underbody lift generated at 82mph, like Mark Webbers Porsche at LeMans.

24 minutes ago, horriblemercedes said:

Is there a mode of transport that is worse than trains? 

 

I haven't been on one for years and today is reminding me why

1 hour ago, barefoot said:

Just had the renewal for the T2 - £193 up from £186 with an agreed value of £30,000, although it's time to submit new photographs and complete the daft form again. I see no point fucking about with other quotes, do you?

That's a good price, I'd certainly be happy with it mine is a lot more.

I presume that it's limited mileage.

On 14/03/2024 at 08:31, KruJoe said:

From one of the Facebook pictures I could just make out the reg, and the MOT history looked bonzer, definitely worth a look. Also from the pics I worked out it was parked up at the Alfa specialist near the abandoned church in Denholme. Which is just about three miles from my tame  MOT man. Handy. The plan was to A-frame it the short distance and leave it there, but PW put paid to that idea. The seller (small time trader) was initially a bit miffed when I told him what happened but could tell I wasn't messing him about. He really got me out of a tight spot by making the one hour round trip to pick me up from near Skipton, we had a good chat in his car about all sorts. 

Up at Denholme, all of The Shrew's tyres were soft, as was the battery.  But it started and drove all ok, I think it is mechanically and bodily absolutely sound, just some bits of the interior is a bit tired cracked or knackered, and the seats could do with a good cleaning. I was just a little bit disappointed to be honest, but I was very grateful to the chap, and handed over his full £650 asking price. Only right in the circumstances, I feel. 

It looks completely poverty stricken outside in the drizzle now. I didn't even know these came with unpainted bumpers. But it should MOT without too much bother and at least see me through the season while I continue my search for a suitable 4WD MPV that doesn't have a five figure price tag. 

I had a 1995 2.0 GLX from new as a company car and had loads of trim problems in the 2 years that I had it. In a lot of ways it was better than my 2007 one which was written off due to water leaks.

Weren't those based on pre war BMW sixes?

But even they can have problems in something slightly more sophisticated than an invacare :

"Boeing is being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for a United Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 flight that experienced a stuck rudder pedal upon landing at its base at Newark Liberty International Airport. The flight, UA1539, had operated from Nassau, Bahamas, and experienced the malfunction during touchdown at the New York airport on February 6th."

Article: https://simpleflying.com/ntsb-inve

All it needs is a brief message that tells them that you now own it and here's a recent picture if they're interested. They can then take it from there if they want to.

"I don't know if it's of any interest to you but I own your dad's old invacar and here's a photo of it.

Please let me know if you want any further information"

I clicked on the link, just out of curiousity of course, and my virus checker went ballistic. I assume that it's a false alarm and I'll have to try again.

10 hours ago, barefoot said:

Glynis Barber also starred in 'the wicked lady' and has particularly memorable nipples.

And where's the pics?

You can't make a statement like that and not back it up.

1 hour ago, Dick Longbridge said:

What are the 1.6 tdi VAG engines like? 

We've had our 2013 1.6D Roomster for about 8 years now with no engine problems.

There were a couple of regeneration issues at first but now if it does a few short runs I give it an Italian tune up, well as much as you can give one of these them.

15 hours ago, richardmorris said:

Following on from above, I am grumpy as I spent two hours this afternoon trying to please natwest for a business ownership review.

my watch went off three times to alert me that my anxiety levels were unusually high.

well, yes. If it had said at the start what information would be needed then we could have collated it before hand.

as it was I had to go hunting for sic code ( which was correct but the computer said no so chose another related which was accepted but Is not on the vat certificate) vat registration, registered office, proof of trading address, proof of shareholdings, turnover, suppliers and customers (which surely is none of their business?).

plus printing, scanning, signing a doc about shareholding which they then did not directly ask for, but I sent anyway as the company structure which was asked for. I wish I could bill them as it took two hours and an anxiety attack. And I know they are going to say that the sic code I entered and the sic code on the vat registration don’t match.

( analysis and testing worked but isn’t the real code. But other research and testing didn’t work  despite being shown in the gov list of sic codes and on the bloody certificate).

Asking about suppliers and customers can make a lot of sense if you have an overdraft for example. Say you are heavily reliant on one customer the risk, all other things being equal, is higher than if you have a decent spread of them. Others spring to mind but to me the financial risk one is the most likely, albeit not knowing the legal status of your business.

We have this every year both with the cars on the drive and some of the French doors. They tend to be Robins by what I've seen, being known to be very territorial. Mind you we do have a lot of Robins here.

Or who 'drives' around with a divers helmet on?

3 hours ago, grogee said:

I am visiting family in Lincs. Down the road is Halls Garage, an MG specialist. I popped in to say 'hi' and promised I'd return with the Maestro once the weather improves. They were really friendly bearing in mind we dropped in unannounced. 

It's an interesting little place. Service and repair garage for 'normals' with a forecourt of BL chod thoroughbred sports cars. Nice little 'mini museum' inside. 

Recommended - it's on the A15 north of Bourne. 

They advertise a lot in the MG press and have done for many years as far as I remember.

42 minutes ago, sierraman said:

This is the thing, unless you are doing up something like a Mini or an MGB, where nearly everything is available off the shelf, you are chasing down unobtainable bits on anything a bit rough. That’s why KGF etc have £20,000 Capri 1.6 for sale, it’s the only way of getting a perfect or as close as to one, so people will pay the money. Factor in to that there’s restorations and there’s restorations, there’s some truly skilled people out there doing some restorations where you’d be pressed to tell it from new, the Granada Coupe on here case in point. On the other hand many of them are fucking terrible, last year at Matthewsons auctions they had a green RS2000, from a distance it looked good, when you got up close it was a real lash up, bad welding all over, fish eyes under the paint, loads of bits where the filler hadn’t been applied and finished properly, crap mechanical work like brake pipes sat on and rubbing against body edges. Christ knows what it went for but if it was more than £5k it was too much. 

I ended up sourcing parts from Egypt, Columbia, Australia, Vietnam and a host of other countries for my VW resto, the situation not being helped by it was an early production one and things like the brakes changed after 6 months. Fortunately I'd retired by then so could spend a lot of time searching, it still took about 3 years.

4 minutes ago, sierraman said:

The tax is small beer in the scheme of things if someone’s buying it that’s pulling £80-100k a year. It’s the cost of keeping it at a reasonable standard, so bodywork etc. 

I agree.

My missus will never know the true cost of my 2 restorations, I'd wake up one day with my balls in my mouth if she did. Fortunately I deal with the money side of things here and she leaves me to it.

But true.

But aren't you escorted out of most places you visit?

32 minutes ago, LightBulbFun said:

ok imagine one morning, your helping a fellow Ford owner with their ford, and you look up and see it comes back as a Citroen?!

but you know for a fact, the registration mark is correct, the vehicle is a ford and previous documents and logbooks back this up, but you start to look up some other Fords as a sanity check, and they all come back as Citroens as well!

 

and then suddenly, your very own Ford Sierra, Comes back as a Citroen Sierra instead! despite the fact you have not asked the DVLA to make this change or anything of the sort

and almost every other currently taxed ford you try all come back as "CITROEN" instead

 

surely you can see the problem here, and how its a system wide issue, and not just an issue with 1 particular vehicle, its something they have done on the back end that has affected all Fords 

this is what the DVLA have done with Invacars basically 

 

now of course the right thing to do would be to revert whatever it is they messed up to make all Fords suddenly show up as Citroens

 

so you write to the DVLA asking them what you think the issue is, and  and how it might be fixed

but rather then the DVLA actually fixing the issue, they bodge your Sierra's record, so now its not part of the normal system and starts becoming a problem to use with automated/online tools, services and the such like

 

thats the issue I am facing with Invacar and REV atm with the DVLA, its now an issue 2 fold

 

1: they made made all fords show up as Citroens (INVACAR vs INVACARE)

2: they are not fixing it properly and are just bodging a singular vehicle record instead (removing REV from the coded system and just manually typing in INVACAR rather then fixing root cause)

 

does this analogy make sense? I get that this is a fairly deep technical thing, but I do genuine want to try and make sure people understand it, so they can see why I am so serious about it

 

and im sure you can imagine that if this did happen to Ford, I think you would agree, it would get fixed properly, quite quickly, so I dont see why INVACAR should not also be fixed properly

in my correspondence with the DVLA I did specifically make sure to state that my vehicle record was not alone with suffering from this sudden issue, that I have noticed others affected as well, and that I could provide evidence of this and statements from their registered keepers if required

so the DVLA should be well aware REV is not an isolated case

 

I'm lost.

I have a MGB that I've owned for the best part of 50 years and wouldn't be even slightly concerned if the make was recorded as BL rather than MG, in fact some later ones had BL badges on the wings. It wouldn't affect my enjoyment of it, it's just a reference on a form.

I assume the 'bodge' you refer to is in response to a communication from you, where they've tried to help you.

4 hours ago, egg said:

As I've mentioned before on government stuff like this, often the only way to get resolution is via the complaint route, where it is actually someone's job to sort stuff out. I would do that seeing as you have already made 'reasonable attempts' to resolve your problem.

The Karen meme is partly because there are people like that, but the truth is they also get what they want!

I agree.

To me the key will be how difficult/expensive it is, if it's too much it'll get rejected in my opinion.

I suspect that one of Sheefag's favourite quotes will end up applying:

"Attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, Lutheran theologian (1892–1971) God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

8 minutes ago, LightBulbFun said:

as far as I personally understand it, its just a cockup with the lookup tables, someones taken "INVACAR" and put an E on the end so every vehicle registered under the make code of ZA will display inoccrectly as Invacare, instead of Invacar as they should do

so for example the ULEZ checker 

used to correctly display Invacar

now it incorrectly displays Invacare

and someone espically as Jobsworth could argue "oh you never paid for ULEZ, you only paid for a INVACARE, your vehicle is an INVACAR, thus you never paid a charge for it"

this would be more of an issue if say the DVLA changed all fords to Citroen, but the principle is the same

 

and then the issue with how the DVLA have "Fixed" REV's record by dissosicating her from the coded system and just manually typing in INVACAR

means systems that rely on the coded system may fail

for example my parking permit portal, was able to see REV through the simple registration lookup saving me a lot of faff contacting the council to get a parking permit, it could be all done online

but as you can see when I try a vehicle not on the coded system, it dies a death

so now REV may potential start to fail to show up on these systems also

 

again with TFL for example, heres an Invacar that was never put on the coded system properly, and as you can see it sort of finds it, but note how the vehicle make is completely missing, not a good look is it!

 

the fix is AFAIK pretty simple, someone just needs to go in and fix the look up table, and then for all INVACAR's that are currently taxed or SORN, do a data refresh, there aint many of them! again about 60 (including the incorrectly registered scooters LOL)

(I mean theres about ~7000~ or so on the DVLA but most of those are dormant, tax due 1987 or whatever so those are not affected by this, since they are still using cached data from who knows when and do display correctly still)

 

but regardless of effort to fix, they themselves fucked it up in the first place, they should fix it I feel, and fix it properly

 

hopefully this makes sense  

It does.

It might be their fault but everywhere I've worked there's had to be a cost/benefit analysis for any work. Admittedly it's all been private sector apart from the Post Office though.

I've had to review lots of these proposals but I can't see any monetary benefits in this as I understand it. Sometimes work gets approved without these but usually because of legal requirements or so another system will work 'properly', e.g. a change in data format.

If it's just an easy fix to a look up table it could probably be included in another work package. If it can't then someone will probably have to sign the cost off.

In some ways it'd probably be easier to get the work done if it was a massive problem. I've been out of this field for a while now but let me know if you're unsure about what I've said.

14 minutes ago, LightBulbFun said:

exactly! thats kinda my point with all of this

heres a Data error, rather then fix it properly at the root cause, they just patch it up/sweep it under the table and hope no one notices...

and thats part of one of the reasons why I am so worked up about it, is the simple fundamentals of it, sure in this case its "just" an "E" but the connotations could be much bigger/worse

 

hence why I want to nip this in the bud and actually get them to sort it out properly

So what exactly are the potential/actual consequences?

To fix it are you just talking look up tables or is coding required ?

If the latter it might be a world of pain from a testing point of view, especially, as is very likely, it's interfaced with other systems.

By what you say there also might be data clean up exercise which in my experience is neither simple nor cheap.

19 minutes ago, Nyphur said:

And if it was THAT important, "OTHER" + free text notes wouldn't be allowed in the first place. 

 

In my experience professional people haven't studied for x years, had to pass 4x exams and other tests to do data input. That's an office junior's job and if they can't read the notes they go to someone who can, probably a local admin person.