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Dead_E23

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Everything posted by Dead_E23

  1. I drove the discourtesy car a few times and recall that the gearstick was angled backwards and was much too long, which placed the gearknob uncomfortably far back in the car and the clutch pedal was such a long way from the floor that you couldn't pivot your foot from the heel. It was a shit thing to drive.
  2. FSO were imported by a company in the same offices that did Mazda in Tunbridge Wells, and Weller Wheels were based a couple of miles away on the town's industrial estate.
  3. I was friends with a car dealer who had one in stock for months that he just couldn't shift. He eventually started lending it to customers whose cars were in for warranty work, where it had the advantage of making them super keen to come and get their own car back. We used to call it the 'discourtesy car'.
  4. It's got nothing to do with the environment or any nonsense about air quality. It's all about funding TfL.
  5. Yeah, I bet the average end user would have the permissions to edit fields like the manufacturer name in the DVLA database so that it updates all the records. That sounds really likely.
  6. I think they put scrubbers in the chimney to catch all the nastiness and paint the building a modern colour to make people imagine that what goes on inside is all unicorns and kittens. Is your drill a fancy variable speed job, or one of the single speed on/off variety? They were pretty wank, and because they were so expensive I remember there being a whole family of attachments to 'turn your drill into an xyz' that fundamentally didn't work. My dad had a B&D hedge trimmer, which although purpose made, was very obviously based on a drill and it was both tiny and shit. I have a gigantic petrol thing that I got in Aldi and probably paid about the same number of pounds for, fourty years later, and it's a beast.
  7. I read somewhere that it's actually more effective to recover the energy from recyclables by incinerating them than it is to recycle them in the conventional sense. There's a lot of bullshit around recycling anyway. The preferred solution is 'source reduction', which is newspeak for going without. People have become so accustomed to having abundant cheap shit that 'source reduction' isn't a particularly palatable option. I was just thinking earlier about how affordable power tools have become compared to when I grew up and any kind of tools were fucking expensive. I wouldn't fancy going back to that!
  8. In the late '80s I watched an Alfa 6 go through Shoreham car auction and make £50. I was a skint student and didn't have a spare £50. I haven't seen another before or since.
  9. Keyless entry seems to be a pretty pointless feature; from what I see on the hilarious Nextdoor app it means you have to use a Disklok or your car will inevitably be stolen. I'm surprised insurance companies will even cover keyless cars.
  10. I find it rather amusing to speak to unsolicited callers in a somewhat disrespectful manner and then make them end the call. Here's how one went recently: *ring ring*. "Hello?" "Oh hello, it's about your recent accident". "You fucking stupid cunt! You made me stand up!" "I beg your pardon? That's very rude" "I was in the middle of something, you cocksucker. If you don't like the way the call is going I suggest you hang up".
  11. I will nip back to 2013 and tell myself to try that. You can see where I'd attempted to split the swivelly ring thing off using a new, sharp chisel that got completely chewed up.
  12. This was quite deeply recessed into an alloy wheel so I'm not sure there would have been room. I suspect that was also the reason why I didn't weld a nut onto it.
  13. I had to remove a McGard wheelbolt by drilling the head off it because the key was too soft to turn it. Turns out they are hardened, so it wasn't easy to do.
  14. I'd bin those mcGard locking nuts whilst the key made of chocolate will still undo them.
  15. The junction for the M62 from the A1 at Castleford is like that, as is the entrance to the M6 Toll from the M6 westbound.
  16. ...but I see you at least got a couple of Jubilee clips out of the deal. Save those!
  17. Just to raise the bar back to 'horrendous', the motor trader friend I mentioned above once bought a Metro that had been in a BIG side impact with a motorcycle that had completely smashed in the driver's side of the car. He tacked a cover sill over the buckled one, held a door into the aperture and tack welded it into position then put a big baggy seat cover on the driver's seat to conceal the buckled floorpan. Into the auction it went, with 'drivers door does not open' in the description.
  18. My brother once bought a Hillman Avenger from a bombsite car trader known as 'OneEye' only to discover the front wings had been repaired with asphalt. It was a 1500HL and for some reason went like the fucking wind.
  19. But you could park loads of LDV Convoys on it and then it would look BOSS.
  20. My employer's offices have aircon controllers like that in the meeting rooms. I suspect there's a trick to them, because one of our super-brainy consultants spent ages fucking with one and the meeting room was at 24C by the time we were done. The next time, a colleague managed to get the room like an ice box. This is one of the reasons why I hardly ever go to the office.
  21. Just remembered another story about my pal the dodgy motor trader. I was loitering outside another traders premises one morning when I spotted him in his smiley Transit beavertail and he pulled over for a chat. He had an absolutely hanging Maxi loaded on the back covered in moss with holes in the scuttle you could have put your hand through. I asked him if he was on his way to weigh it in and he laughed and told me it was going in that night's auction at Eastbourne and he'd pop back with it later to show me. Sure enough, he reappeared that afternoon with the car sporting a fresh coat of paint concealing a ton of wag that he'd shovelled into the holey panels. I'd watched him using body filler before, and he was so skilled with it that it only needed the smallest amount of sanding down. Caveat emptor!
  22. I used to hear about people quieting noisy gearboxes by adding a nylon shirt, but have never seen it done. I can't even remember the last time I saw a nylon shirt, for that matter. Lots of rwd gearboxes used to feature postcard-sized cover plates held down by half a dozen bolts. I'd imagine if you popped one of those off you could insert all kinds of nefarious temporary cures. Either that, or remove the gearshift assembly and stuff it in that way.
  23. My boss used to buy some right shit out of that place to fill up his px cheapies section, but apart from various clonks and howling wheel bearings they usually drove ok. I remember one that had a tremendously noisy autobox that sounded like it was full of shrapnel attempting to batter its way through the casing and I had to knock it into neutral upon spotting a police motorcyclist and coast past him in case the racket should excite his curiousity and result in him discovering that I was not displaying my trade plates (which were usually tossed in the back so I didn't have to worry about them flying off en route)
  24. Eastbourne auction used to sell delicious egg & bacon sandwiches, served by the lovely Claire from a greasy kiosk. It was such a shame when they moved to posh new premises.
  25. Shoreham auction was well known for having terrible entries, to the extent that the traders I knew wouldn't buy stock there but would occasionally visit just for fun. It's also the place where I saw the only Alfa 6 I've ever seen in the metal. It made £50 and to my chagrin as a skint student I didn't have £50. Probably dodged a bullet there, in retrospect.
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