Luxobarges_Are_Us

waste of time. You'll spend £350 or whatever and ages to swap engines and the like, and then you 'll have people asking you why it's had to have a new engine at 74k.

I suspect that webuyanycar may be an excellent idea for this bag of shite.

4 quid for a cassette?

 

seriously?

Surely it's 10p for the cassette and £3.90 for posting it or something.

Is there any way of checking whether the RS mudflaps would fit a Mk3 Granny? I bet fitting them would keep my wheelarches from rotting for another thirty-eight seconds, plus I already have RS wheels and a daft boot spoiler.

Billy, I've already made it quite clear that, even if I didn't think there was a threat of things getting really nasty in the banger thread, I thought that you did the right thing in locking it because you suspected they'd get worse. It's perfectly possible for me to have faith in your ability to judge the gravity of a situation without having to agree with your viewpoint 100% of the time.

We obviously hadn't thought about it in advance- this saga has proven that different people had different expectations of the 'report' function. It's good that we're having this discussion so that we can, sort of, be on the same page.

I've been a mod/admin on a couple of forums and my philosophy was always what I say it is. IE so long as it's not spam, porn or just downright offensive my reply would be 'thanks for your input, however....' and that seemed to keep the peace. Maybe at most I'd PM the person concerned to 'have a polite word' but very rarely did I ever actually have to DO any moderation.

That's the best way of doing what can be a very annoying job if you let it become so.

Yes, you obviously handle it correctly. However, it's an easy trap to fall in for somebody who hasn't thought about it in advance.

Well, I've probably said what I want already, but since you're asking I'll try again.

In no way is this meant as a slight on any members, ex-mods, you or anyone else, OK?

 

Leave it alone and stop fucking with it.

 

With all due respect Dave you're still quite new to this board and while we're all hugely appreciative of the work you've done in getting the old girl through the MOT and fixing it so new bods can join up, you do seem to want to tinker with it rather a lot...

For years and years this place has rolled along just fine with virtually zero input from any management and that's the way a lot of us like it.

 

I often think of a forum being like a pub with its selection of friends, enemies, even cliques and yes, while the occasional fight breaks out sometimes it soon gets forgotten and things get patched up and we move on. It's not perfect but it works most of the time.

That's how AS used to be and that's how I'd like it to stay please.

 

Moderators?  Appoint a few people to help with the new member admissions/spam etc and have as a last resort if (and only if) world war 3 is kicking off, like it did with that Amercian fella a couple of years back. (Team blitz, or am I thinking of someone else?) otherwise leave everyone to their own devices.

 

 

And you can know what you can do with your fucking swear filter, don't you?.....

+1 on that. Moderators should only get involved only where there's a real threat of things getting nasty on a large scale. Tedious threads and the odd off-the-cuff remark don't fall under that heading.

I think studebaker and others underestimate the pressure exerted on mods from people reporting things they don't like. Mods need to be firmer in telling people that this is not really their remit.

I also support the 'hide thread' option.

I'm sure we'll go back to normal soon enough- don't dramatise things, everyone can struggle with change at times.

Yeah. I had to tell the Insurance they were being ridiculous. There's no way I'd be giving Britney a lift - I already had Jon Bon Jovi, Paul McCartney, Elton John and Madonna in the cortina so there was no room for anyone else.

And Elvis Presley in the boot.

I agree with studebaker. There is no need at all for the mods to perceive any criticism as something like a personal attack- if anything, mods are new to moderating and there's bound to be a bit of a debate around where the lines are drawn. It would be much worse if people didn't say anything and started talking in pairs behind others' backs or, worse still, leaving the forum altogether. I think we're more than capable of chilling out and just  having a good chat about it. Even if we disagree on certain points, at least we'll understand where each other's coming from.

I of course fully subscribe to the ethos of no/very little moderation, so I disagree with Cavette's decision to lock the thread. On the other hand, I think that he did the right thing in the circumstances (receiving a mountain of reports and not being totally sure about how to handle the issue). Some of the responsibility also belongs to the people who had made the reports in the first place, because they put mods into pressure!

I'd be surprised if you could go much lower than £500. My cheapest quotes (31 with 6 years' NCD, no points etc) for modern policies seem to start at about £650 for anything bigger than a Seicento, but a couple of things I've found is that sometimes there 's a comprehensive policy with a daft excess (like £1000) which works out cheaper than your normal TPFT, plus you can also play around with 'where the car is normally kept'- I have come across policies who are cheaper if you park on road than on the drive.

If you can't get classic insurance, a motor trader policy seems like the most sensible solution.

'Gulf war veteran'. So you went to defend the independence of a totalitarian Emir from a totalitarian military dictator. Laudable.

56mph instead of 65 and a set of gripless energy-saving tyres can easily lift 26 to 30.

That 505 has Mr Bo11ox written all over it. Please save it!

If I was in charge of marketing for Toyota/Peugeot/etc, I'd make sure this went viral across the Middle East, and possibly other places, too.

Top bombing, Mr Glover.

You have almost two months to prepare it for offroading @Shitefest 2013!

Classic car status is not a guide to whether a car was any good when new.

For all its advanced looks, technology etc, the Citroen CX is still pretty much firmly in shite territory. You can't give old Toyotas and Mazdas away (apart from a couple of exceptions which are seen as GR8 4 DRIFTN), even if they were infinitely more reliable than the 'bona fide classic' Triumphs and Hillmans (Hillmen?) against which they were competing.

Rubbish! I'm likely to be holidaying in Mexico/Venezuela then. Although my tickets are flexible in theory- I shall see whether there is any possibility of changing them.

spend the money then bin it, best of both worlds

That's it. Part-worn tyres and then scrap it if/when it fails MoT.

All old Ford prices seem to be on the up, I watch the Mk3 Cortinas just to get an idea to what mines worth and some of the prices they reach is quite bizarre, there was N plate 2000E recently with poorly fitted front wings, damaged interior and missing a number of parts after a poor respray that got to £2400 before getting pulled for example, even boggo Mk4 Escorts seem to be increasing.

All? Not really- I'm sure that the mk1 Focus will attract scene tax earlier than the mk3 Granada. There's a certain amount of corrrelation going on with the fact that I own an example of the latter.

We've done this discussion before. Consensus is that there is no rhyme or reason when it comes to quality- there are a few brilliant ones, some who are absolutely horrible, and most of them are somewhere in-between. Of course, that makes them poor value on average.

Highlight for me has got to be the Greek Ford dealer who did a major service and was briefed to check all the rubber bits around the car 'as the car had been standing for a while and is going to embark on a trip back to England'. We had barely made it as far as Dijon when a radiator hose blew up, and the 14th July celebrations meant that a new part couldn't be obtained for ten days!

I'm fairly sure that attended service was cheaper than self-service when I started driving in the late 1980s, although there was only about 3p per gallon difference between the cheapest and most expensive stations anyway.

 

 

 

55p a litre sounds good, is there a list of LPG only stations anywhere?

There's filllpg.co.uk which has a map of Britain with stations and prices (both LPG-only and petrol stations which sell autogas). It's user-updated, so it may not be accurate 100% of the time, but it's good enough for me!

Attended service is still very common in the UK for LPG. Usually those LPG-only forecourts are cheaper than petrol stations which also happen to have a gas pump (55p attended service near Manchester, 64.9p self-service Morrisons Hale).

How true is it that all tyres are produced in only 6 factories or summat, and WhanKyng SpamChucker OMGTI tyres are just the same as Dunlop or whatever.... is that just a myth trotted out by tyre fitters when they're trying to shift a batch of far-eastern barely-round monstrosities? "Yeah mate, these are just like Goodyear, made in the same place, but they're three quid cheaper"...

 

I can't see that massive names like Michelin would let their production lines and technology get used for all sorts of crap, but then surely all these little-known companies can't afford the production line, certification and whatnot just to bang out a couple of hundred tyres a week.

What happens is that a lot of the Y.U.NO.STOP tyremakers are either subsidiaries or business partners of Michenentalyear. When the big brand releases the PetrolSaverWithNoGrip 4, it sends the tread design of, and perhaps a bit of specialist production tooling related to, PSWNG3 to the budget brand. The maker of the cheapo tyre then goes and sources some slightly cheaper raw materials. As their R&D costs are negligible and the materials a bit cheaper, they can sell their tyres for 40% less than the big brand. The driver of the 2001 Clio would never pay £80 a corner anyway, so the big brand doesn't lose any market share.

I think some of the big companies have a chain that's 3 or even 4 companies long. So, when Michelin get rid of a model, it probably gets passed to BF Goodrich, when they're done with it they send it to Kormoran, and by the time it reaches Ningbo Chewing Gums Factory it's already 12 years old.

Conspiracy theories usually seemed to be peddled by weirdos and Americans. I'm not sure if MFI were chasing Lady Di, or that her chauffeur had been injected with PP3 battery juice, I just know she died in a car crash. I'm pretty sure this (thread) story is just bollocks and the bloke had an ordinary crash.   

I agree re this particular story most likely being bollocks.

I posted it because I think that the possibility to mess people about in such a sort of way either exists already or will in the very near future.

Peugeot 504. The market for them is pretty international, and there's still plenty of demand for them as an everyday car in many parts of Africa and Near/Middle East, but some of the prices take the piss.

I got part worns put on the back of the XM yesterday due to skintness. One barely used mitchelin pilot sport, and 1 barely used Junya on the other side.

 

£30 all in, pleased so far, even if one of the beads had to be hammered onto the rim! 

Bloomin' heck- them Chinks are so bold nowadays, they're churning out cheap fake copies of American imperialism!