cobblers

Totally understand not wanting to scrabble about under a car doing a clutch, but the gearboxes are only about 30kg, they're not bad. Do you have any rivets? Might be less faff and last longer. Sierra looks flipping great, BTW!

There are some Americans in here now.

There's a nice quiet pub that I come to regularly, about half a mile away is a family campsite which is closed over winter... Until now. Now the place is full of fucking amateur drinkers, kids and fannies that put bunting all over their mazda bongos. It's as if these people haven't left their house for 6 months and the concept of a pub meal and a pint is just completely alien. For example the couple next to me have just moved their table so it completely blocks the door out of the kitchen...

Glad it's worked out! If you'd used that to start with, you could have saved a primer coat as it's designed to go direct onto plastic. I dunno why it's not more popular - seems to be a "trade only" sort of thing. You can tweak the texture by adjusting the nozzle, it's got a little twisty bit on the top. For a fine texture, we use the spare cap that comes in the lid. We do a couple of coats, with about 30 minutes between them. Seems to look better once properly dry, it settles down and looks more even.

Yep that's the stuff we use. Silicone is really a nightmare, even a tiny bit hangs around and will ruin any paint finish that "flows" as it knackers the surface tension, like a single drop oil on a lake causes a flat spot 30m in diameter. A local bodyshop was more or less put out of business about ten years ago when a disgruntled customer smashed a little window and pierced a few cans of trim shine and threw them in, every job that was in progress had to be re-started, and they were getting defects for months/years!

that's 100% silicone contamination, someone has lathered the bumpers in back to black in the past. It doesn't affect primer because that doesn't "flow". If using paint from a gun you can get an additive which prevents this sort of thing. From an aerosol you are in trouble - Either strip the lot off somehow and mega mega decontaminate the plastic, or try a bar coat to bury it and then a less finicky top coat. Some of the specific bumper/plastic paints we use at work aren't as affected by silicone. We use Monofil Vario+ Texture paint and I've never seen it react like that

"No sir, you don't have hepatitis! It's just AIDS"

I think you're warming to them.....

Fucking nightmare, imagine driving 4 hours and ending up in blackpool.

Talking to one of the lads at work, he's in his late 20s. Mentioned how I bought a 106 S1 Rallye for £900 about 15 years ago. He was fairly gobsmacked. Loves em as much as I do. Then a couple of hours later, this drove past my window: Piloted by what looked like a fairly elderly couple (although it was quite dark so I hope I haven't offended anyone) I was in two minds whether to sprint after it and offer them £900 for their "Auld Peugeot" . Then I noticed the plate.... 03 is late for a rallye. Comes up as 1100cc on the DVLA, so it's a replica!! How dare they!

Flipping beautiful morning. Camped out last night. Sheep licked half of the muck off the side of my van as I slept.

Soft mask - use wide tape and roll the edge of the masking tape back under on itself to make a like a "loop". The paint will then have a nice soft feathered edge over the space of a few MM. It makes a much less noticeable repair, and with a bit of compounding it'll blend in even better. The guy in the video here is folding it fairly tight, but if you leave the fold very wide (10mm+) it gives an even softer edge

PC Andrew Linglong says "There's no point wasting money on premium branded tyres"

Same here, I wake up at 5:30 ish most mornings. Start work at 8. I usually leave the house at about 6 and stop off somewhere scenic on the way to work in my van and have a brew and a few biscuits and read a book. It does me a lot of good.

Have you got one of them vacuum coolant filler/bleeder things? I must admit I was sceptical at first, but it really is money well spent. Particularly because you can pressure test the system really easily after filling it, without having to get it hot and take it on the road. Just pump it to 15PSI and any leaks will show up on the comfort of your driveway

I've just got a fancy new phone (samsung s24) and I've not even got around to putting a sim card in it yet and properly swapping things over. it's just been sat on the side. It gets 10+ notifications every day for complete BOLLOCKS bloatware samsung installed on it. Buzzing and beeping away to tell me some unknown celebrity has "called out" another, or to remind me about it's fantastic AI features. It woke me up at 1AM last night to show me a musical slide show it'd made from pictures I took of the terrifying red blotches on my dog to send the vet. The dog we had to put to sleep a few days later. It's the anniversary of her death today and every time I think of her it buckles me. What an absolute heap of shit. The "future" we live in is the absolute worst, I wish I'd ended up in the fork where technology made things better rather than much much worse.

Someone is having a bad day across the road Against all odds they haven't just pulled the number plate off the caravan and driven off yet, which is quite a surprise

Oh, bugger. My Doka had similar minor rust there and it turned out to be quite severe once we picked off the outer panel. Both sides were as bad as each other

Most 83 onwards VW T25s didn't come with intermittent wipers. The wiring is there, most of them have the relay too, but there's a little plastic pin fitted into the stalks which limits the travel to stop you selecting intermittent on the poverty spec vans. So it actually cost them more to make a van without intermittent wipers.

That's absolutely fucking ridiculous, if you'll pardon my french.

Takes longer than that to get an ambulance here!

Having met vulgalour on a few occasions, (and I mean this in a genuinely complimentary way), that he is the only person who could adequately describe what he was likely to be wearing

My dad briefly had one almost exactly the same as this. He had a terminally rotten mazda 626, then a terminally rotten mk2 orion which he cooked the headgasket on and then ripped the entire front panel off by driving over the towrope when they were dragging it back. Sierra came along and it seemed severely luxurious compared to the orion, he was well pleased with it! We went out to the pub to show it off to his mates. The first night he owned it someone cut out the rear quarter glass seal, broke in and nicked the standard stereo, the the following night someone else came back and nicked the whole car. It wasn't insured because that wasn't really something people rushed to get sorted back then. A rover 214 (bucket) and mk2 cav followed. Both stolen.

Went to have a look round a village yesterday as there's a house for sale we're interested in. Parked my van on the main road through it, nice wide road. Plenty of spaces, and I even picked a house with a massive privet hedge to park in front so that the owner was less likely to notice we were even there because I know people can be funny buggers about parking. Really tried my best to find the most considerate place to park, especially since we might end up moving there and my van is quite distinctive. Had a wander round for half an hour, and as we were walking up the street back to the van there's a very angry man stood at his gate, shouting at us "IS THIS YOUR VAN???" from about 50 yards away "I'M DISABLED AND I CAN'T EVEN PARK OUTSIDE MY OWN BLOODY HOUSE!!" he's effing and jeffing and chuntering away as I get in my van. Grabbing the gate and swaying about like that old bloke up on the balcony in Rita Sue and Bob Too. I'm not a fucking mind reader mate! - Bit my tongue instead of offering him the usual various advice people like that need to be given about parking on a public road etc. He'd parked right up close behind me and he was only about 6 foot further away from his gate than he would otherwise have been.

The amount of fucking about it would take to get those headlights to even power up when not attached to the car is quite significant. You'd need a CANbus emulator and a significant amount of programming knowledge. back when that story was new, the equipment would have cost at least a grand, which is a lot more money than an equivalent powered actual grow light setup. Nobody is stealing LED headlights to grow weed with. It might come as a shock to some people on here, but it appears that the sun is publishing a load of bollocks again