Rust Collector

I’ve been buying a few bits recently. Today I was pleased to get the obligatory Proton, which I wanted to match the 1:1 scale one on the drive I got the Civic too as I picked that up before I noticed the Proton. Some other bits I’ve bought lately: Welly boot included for scale and definitely not just general toddler detritus that I didn’t tidy away. I’m enjoying spending my pocket money on these rather than beer as my son loves them and we can both enjoy them together. I’ve stopped procrastinating over my model kits as well. Apologies for the crap lighting, but here’s my first body shell sprayed with primer, paint and clear coat. Lots of orange peel and a few dust spots, just like my efforts on the full size stuff 🤣 perfection is the enemy of getting things done though, and I’m happy to live with imperfections if it means that I at least finish a model. I can make better attempts once I have more experience, for now I’m just enjoying the process. I’ll paint the body trim satin black next, then proceed to paint the 50 million odd tiny parts.

Mk1 Micra with 247,000 miles on the clock and the footwells 2 foot deep in delivery tickets.

I would be able to make space for it. If I had of pulled my finger out and sold something else like I’ve been meant to for the last eternity then this was one of the cars I had earmarked to buy as a replacement project because I’m a fucking idiot I reckon behind the foibles there is potentially a really nice car there.

Bit of a mad day yesterday, as covered in the grumpy thread. It finished up with my mrs having to go back to hospital as she had some bleeding and the maternity triage wanted her in as a precaution. Shes fine, but it meant that we left home at 6pm yesterday and I wasn’t home until 1am. I then had to go pick our son up from my parents at 7am because golf/horses. It was properly weird coming home and going to bed without my mrs or son there. I’m glad I have the dogs as their company helped me relax and fall asleep. I’m currently waiting to see if my partner can come home or if they’ll be inducing the birth, fingers crossed she comes home.

A bloke I know and his mate who worked at a 24hr garage decided to scratch all the scratch cards behind the counter one night as they’d decided that they would definitely win a decent prize out of all those cards. It was about 4 grands worth of scratch cards that they got through. No prizes for guessing how that worked out for them.

Yes indeed - just waiting for the written offer, but I have accepted the offer made on the phone. Probably not a topic for the grumpy thread anymore, but the conclusion has more context by being in here 😅

Shows what I know then. The mrs thought her water broke this morning, so we scarpered up the hospital as she wanted them to check if the baby was indeed on the way. It was a false alarm, so we ambled back home and picked up child number one from my Dad on the way. Whilst sitting in the Disco of Doom outside my house, having a breather and thinking what the fuck gathering my thoughts before returning to work, my phone rang. 'Thank you for your time yesterday, I'm phoning to say congratulations' Not what I expected at all, but I'm happy to be proved wrong once again. Thank you all for the kind words and advice thus far, it's greatly appreciated despite me being a despondent wanker 😂

I felt like that was me yesterday, I thought I'd prepared well but I hadn't anticipated the broadness of the questions asked but how specific to technical functions of the role they'd be. Although in my situation I don't stack up well on paper either as I have shit all professional development to show in my current role other than people having to take my word for what I've done. When I found out I'd got to interview stage for this new job I was proud of myself for sticking with the application rather than binning it off on that Sunday evening. I wish I hadn't bothered now as it just resulted in a bad experience and I'm even more fucked off with my current situation now. If I hadn't of got my hopes up about making a change then at least I could have stayed in my previous complacent/accepting mindset. I'm sure I'll feel better about it later, but at the moment I just want to be a miserable, self pitying wanker and lament on the fact that I feel I've wasted the last however many years in my current role 😅 At least I've got paternity leave coming up in the next few days.

Briefly looping back to interviews; if you had an interview via Microsoft Teams at home then would you use the blurred background or would you leave your house on show? My house isn't a shit tip, but my computer is in the living room so despite being tidy and clutter free it kind of feels weird that they'll see that. I've only had interviews in person at dull grey meeting rooms before.

If someone owns the car and is using their trade policy to keep it insured then it would be expected to show on the MID, as your policy normally requires you to update the MID with your ‘stock’ so that they can keep track of what you’ve got - my tradex policy definitely required this. Yes, if it was being picked up and test driven/delivered to an MOT etc. at the bequest of a customer then you wouldn’t add it to your policy and it wouldn’t show on MID if the owner didn’t have it insured, but that doesn’t get round the question of why the DVLA aren’t chasing the registered keeper for taxing a car with no insurance. I got in the shit with the DVLA a couple of months ago for having no insurance on a taxed car that was crashed and has since been laid up in a field… I should’ve marked it SORN but was too lazy and disorganised to sort it and was confident they wouldn’t chase me up as they do fuck all about expired tax. Turns out they definitely do come after you under their continuous insurance requirement!

It would still show up on the MID if it was on a trade policy.

They were already bent so I didn’t feel too guilty about chucking the stands under there and I wasn’t going under it so wasn’t too stressed about it falling. I’d normally find somewhere solid underneath like you say, but it was dark and pissing down so fuck rolling around on the floor to have a look 😅

Time for a roundup of recent work completed! The Lada needs the floor welded up before I put the gearbox back in. So naturally, I have sourced a gear knob from our very own @jakebullet and fitted that instead. I’ve also bought a few cans of paint, before deciding Fiat Bossa Nova White is the closest match without putting much effort into looking. Ignore the tide line, it was some rust on the swage line that I mainly sprayed. I’ll sand all the shitey stuff back once the weather clears and paint the car a more uniform colour. The aim is not to get anything particularly presentable, I just want it to not look like a completely fucked rust bucket. I also definitely wasn’t running it without a working windscreen washer system. However, here is a plastic bladder that I installed to contain washer fluid. Moving on, the E class clicked over 180k. And I missed it. It was rewarded with a carpark special headlight alignment Theres always time to do it right the second time. Next up on the Mercedes I will be replacing the prop shaft centre bearing, as currently the prop shaft convulses like it is possessed by satan. That’s a job for another day though. Next we have the XM, which I drove to the farm in anticipation of putting in for a ticket. On the way there, I discovered that the ABS would kick in just before you came to a halt, causing the car to creep and me to shit my pants. This was caused by the air gap on the ABS sensor. I solved this by attacking the sensor bracket bushing with a hacksaw I then liberated the front wheels And had them shod with the finest pair of part worns that £45 could buy These were then thrown on the car And after a short test drive, it was confirmed that a) the ABS was behaving now, b) I need to fit the rear ABS sensor (balls) and c) XM’s are handsome bastards even if they are constantly broken Last but not least, all ‘harr harr the neighbours hate me’ joking aside, I did leave the LS430 dumped halfway down my road since Christmas and I was losing sleep worrying about how fucked off the people living near it may or may not be. So on Thursday I went nuclear and called my dad to give me a hand, and we towed it to outside my house where he saw the Pontiac. Luckily, the part of him that cares about what cars I buy has finally died, and he wasn’t fussed at all. Part of me feels bad about that. Today he came back and we pushed it on to the drive, and if I needed proof that my direct neighbours don’t hate me then I had that in the form of the nice chap two doors down coming out to lend a hand pushing. My Dad stuck around, and despite him having no interest in cars whatsoever he pitched in and we tackled this together To remove this And be left with this Me and my Dad don’t really share any common interests at all, and so we have never really spent much time together. I really enjoyed working together and chatting the last couple of days, and so to be honest I couldn’t be happier that my incredibly hard to access starter motor shat itself. That pretty much brings everything up to date. Tomorrow I plan to pull the old starter and bench test it, and assuming it is as fucked as I think it is then I’ll replace it with the new* one. I need to order intake and throttle gaskets and then I’ll be ready to put it all back together and hopefully use the LS again before the ticket expires. *edit* Fuck me, has it really been that long?! I feel like I’m getting less and less productive by the day.

You can sign up to the Telephone Preference Service to try and cut down on the amount of cold callers, I've done that at my place of work as I was sick of my team having to answer several cold calls a day. https://www.tpsonline.org.uk/ I still have to tell the odd one or two who call up to fuck off, but it's miles better than it was before.

I'd be up for spending some tinkering time on it if it would help you out mate. It looks a really lovely little thing - if I could give it a home, I would. Pandas to Pandino is on the bucket list.

FWIW from my experience last year, I put the Insight down as a value of £2,500 on my insurance with Admiral as I reckoned that's about what it was worth - I'd seen them advertised for more but I didn't reckon anyone was buying them for that. The independent assessor who handled my claim valued the Insight at about £7,000 which Admiral then paid out on less the salvage value and excess. It really wasn't what I was expecting, but shows there must be some level of thought and process in how they determine values.

I was chatting to my Dad last night, he's been in the NHS all his working life and was a senior manager for some time. His advice was to stick post-it notes round the side of my laptop screen with short notes based around the answers I'm expecting to have to provide. 'Just make sure they can't see them on the webcam' 😂

I wonder that about the health of trees and plants too, they come out of their dormant period early because the weather improves, but then we get periods of cold weather again which I can't imagine they enjoy.

That's a really nice model, whoever that lands with I reckon it definitely needs to come out the packaging and be displayed nicely. I'm not in the loop with model cars anymore, is Greenlight a current product or are these out of production?

I’m up for this, I think I can do either day. I should try and finish the XM off in time for the meet.

Would be splendid if you could pass on the details too please. That’s not much more than I pay now, so would be interesting to see what they come out with. Going back to a trade-type policy would make my life so much easier. I used to be in touch with a really good bloke at Clegg Gifford but he’s moved on and it’s not been the same since…

It's infectious! I couldn't help checking the classifieds: https://ostatne.bazos.sk/inzerat/161503759/starozitne-radio-tesla-talisman-307u-po-kompletni-renovaci.php Phwoar!!

Phun Phact: Grandmother-in-law RC worked for Tesla in the days of the country being Czechoslovakia, she had the pleasure of working on the solder baths. She says she recalls working on a lot of video and audio recording equipment.

I did a few more quotes and the pricing doesn't seem to be impacted much by whether it's me or my partner running the car, and whether I'm on or off the insurance. The prices on any normal-ish cars seem to have gone up to about £800-1,100 per year, although the oddball stuff like the Lada is still markedly cheaper. Having compared to what we pay currently, the policies on the Land Rover, Lexus and Mercedes have all approximately doubled for either myself or my partner. I'm still waiting for my renewal price from Admiral, but from what you're saying it looks like I've still got a bit of time to go which is poor on their part. At this rate I may as well have another crash this year to get some return on my investment...

Just out of curiosity I got a quote to insure my mrs on the Lexus. It cost a shade over a grand, the same as my quote. Out of further curiosity I removed myself as a named driver, to see how much damage I was causing with my claim in tow. It cost £70 more with me removed, so at least I don't feel as guilty now.