The new news 24 thread

[Stinkwheel]

Fitted an ‘Accuspark’ stealth electronic ignition kit to the mini. 
It’s stealth because the only bit externally you can see extra is an extra wire coming out the dstributor to the coil switched +

For 39.95 it’s a no brainier purchase. 
 

The difference in spark from the points set up is insane. Big fat sparks at every plug every time now. Starts easier and idles much better from cold. No current pics so an old one to fill space / attention 

 

[JakeT]

Lovely day for it. New front caliper on mums Fiat 500. Normally I’d have told them to book it in with my father in law, but after dad’s X5 expired in the summer it’s their only car. Until dads new one arrives. Had to go to the dreaded euronobheads but they actually had the right part in stock! That’s a shock.
 

[PhilA]

Ain't snowing but the weather's not nice. 

Onward and upward.

[PhilA]

Still raining. 

Need new wiper blades. Every part of the car that can, leaks.

[Bren]

Had a tooth out this morning. Dentist had established it was broken on a previous visit - it came out in two pieces - almost a mirror image.

The anaesthetic has now worn off and ibuprofen were required 😪

[richardmorris]

[Six-cylinder]

1 hour ago, richardmorris said:

Yes please, if money was no object I would have one of these.

V16 and so good looking.

(Please keep your window cleaner!)

[Six-cylinder]

DVLA strikes again, in November we changed 13 PLG cars that were not on the road to historic tax class. We did not go to the post office to get them taxed because they were not fit to drive on the road and most were not insured. The V5Cs were posted to DVLA who changed them to Historic tax class, but they also came back taxed that we had never asked for. As they were unfit for the road and mostly uninsured  I SORNed them as soon as we got the new V5Cs.

Today we got a letter from the DVLA asking why we had taxed a car that had no insurance. Turns out 1 of the 13 new V5Cs had not arrived and therefore I could not SORN it and did not realise I even needed to as I did all the new V5Cs I got sent.  Explaining this today has resulted in us receiving a £25 fine as replacement V5C cost for not reporting the missing V5C within 6 weeks.

 

[DVee8]

39 minutes ago, Six-cylinder said:

DVLA strikes again, in November we changed 13 PLG cars that were not on the road to historic tax class. We did not go to the post office to get them taxed because they were not fit to drive on the road and most were not insured. The V5Cs were posted to DVLA who changed them to Historic tax class, but also came back taxed that we had never asked for. As they were unfit for the road and mostly uninsured  I SORNed them as soon as we got the new V5Cs.

Today we got a letter from the DVLA asking why we had taxed a car that had no insurance. Turns out 1 of the 13 new V5Cs had not arrived and therefore I could not SORN it and did not realise I even needed to as I did all the new V5Cs I got sent.  Explaining this today has resulted in us receiving a £25 fine as replacement V5C cost for not reporting the missing V5C within 6 weeks.

 

This morning I received a £50 for the Daimler not being on sorn, I'm sure it is.

The DVLA are saying it isn't insured so there for must be sorned , but it is insured it's on laid up. Apparently, according to my insurance company, the dvla doesn't receive notice of laid up.

Another one to fight.

[richardmorris]

3 hours ago, Six-cylinder said:

Yes please, if money was no object I would have one of these.

V16 and so good looking.

(Please keep your window cleaner!)

I am the window cleaner. It needs doing now but was -2C today! The black with tan looked smart. There's been one in 2cv charleston colours too, but they seem to split the body panels a bit. Not that I'd turn one away!

[comfortablynumb]

DVLA lost the logbook for the range rover of too many wheels.

Because it was already registered to me, I didn't bother paying their £25 for a new logbook, I didn't need one, and I baulked at paying for their mistake.

Then all those blank logbooks ' went missing ', and when they reissued them, I got a new logbook 🤣

Of course, now that's gone back to them for historic tax class, what's the betting they 'lose' it again?

[Rust Collector]

I had the day off today, and so we decided to take the kids and dogs out for a walk. For those that know the area, we decided to go up Bo Peep to see if there was any snow up there - we’d normally go to Firle Beacon, but they charge you to park there now.

We managed to find some leftover snow, surprisingly:

The kids and dogs loved it. Best part of the day was seeing our 12 year old Labrador go mad like a puppy at the sight of the snow.

We stopped at the Long Man Brewery on the way back. It’s apparent that the council and highways agency have been busy gritting/salting the roads:

Best wash that soon!

[Christine]

Your Clio got a pair of front tyres today ..

I saw that it needs brake pads shortly too  ..  

[Rust Collector]

34 minutes ago, Christine said:

Your Clio got a pair of front tyres today ..

I saw that it needs brake pads shortly too  ..  

I miss that car, but I’m glad it’s in good hands with yourself.

It did get front discs and pads for the MOT in 2021 (can’t believe it was that long ago!), think they were blueprint from memory. I’ve no idea if 20k miles is good for pads - I’ve never done enough miles in something to change the pads twice 🤣

[Christine]

Ns front started going flat over a few days , my old lady kept driving it  half flat and it made the  outside edge  wear out . Then the snow ... so i changed it for the spare , which  went flat even quicker .  The method  of  removal of the spare and refitting under the floor  i eventually managed ! Bastard mechanism , ive sussed it now ...  The off side front is now the spare , and the other 2 got 2 part worns today .

 Anyway , she decided to use the Polo for a few days instead , and said she liked it more than the Clio ... Now  i've  had  the tyres done , she's back in the Clio tomorrow . Only the off side outer pad is worn , it must drag a bit ..the others are ok . Suprised the mot didn't flag it up..perhaps it did , i didn't look ! 

[alcyonecorporation]

My Leon is back in the garage, owing to a bad leak from the secondary cooler that sits under the radiator. 
It needed £717-worth of work to the heater matrix and heat exchange in November, which cost me three weeks' work. 

It began leaking in the loading bay last week at my erstwhile role:  they told me that I was expected to make deliveries regardless so I told them to stick the job up their arse, resigned on the spot and nursed it to the garage.
Fuck off am I blowing my car up for 35p a parcel. My mum is ill up north and if I have to go, I need to go. They can call me for 'letting them down' until the heat death of the universe; you get many jobs but only one family, and this supposed 5 day a week casual contract 'let down' had a business loan ready to buy a Peugeot Partner to carry all the parcels. 

That can now be spent on the fucking SEAT, because, and I cannot stress this enough, that job can shit snow out of its mouth until it chokes.  I haven't gone off on someone like that for about 15 years. 

I have a Dacia Sandero courtesy car in the meantime, and start a CIH job at a Chinese takeaway this Friday. 

The writing's sporadic. 

[LightBulbFun]

On 05/01/2025 at 01:39, reb said:

I have been on this godforsaken site for fully one third of my life.

And elsewhere on the internet I have 18 year olds telling me what things were like "on the old internet"

Bitch I've been online longer than you've been alive.

[Spurious]

2 minutes ago, LightBulbFun said:

I was only discussing this with some friends from work. Not one had experienced the joy of 28.8kbps dial up and having to wait until after 6pm for off peak calls.

[High Jetter]

1 hour ago, Spurious said:

Not one had experienced the joy of 28.8kbps dial up and having to wait until after 6pm for off peak calls.

AOL was 1p / min anytime, IIRC. I started with a 56k.

[Zelandeth]

I started out with a hand-me-down 33.6K modem from a friend who had upgraded to 56K.  I remember one of the party tricks I had back then was that when the TCP/IP package I was running on the Amiga back then crashed - which happened regularly because Genesis was an unstable piece of garbage - was that I could reboot and reload everything and get back up and running before the modem had noticed and dropped the connection.  

Thankfully switching to Miami put an end to that nonsense once I finally gave in and paid for a copy.  Ah, back in the days when there were usable browsers out there for pretty much all the major platforms.  Think it was Voyager I mostly used back then, iBrowse being the backup.

Yes I was hugely stubborn and refused to switch to Windows as my main machine until way, way later than would have been sensible.

My main method of contact with my friend groups around the world back then was via IRC.  I still miss it...nice simple experience that was really easy to dip in and out of and which Just Worked.

[wuvvum]

2 hours ago, High Jetter said:

AOL was 1p / min anytime, IIRC. I started with a 56k.

Was it AOL which used to disconnect you every hour?  Could be irritating when one was trying to download a large file.

[Zelandeth]

50 minutes ago, wuvvum said:

Was it AOL which used to disconnect you every hour?  Could be irritating when one was trying to download a large file.

BT l, when they introduced their monthly billed service that did away with the phone charges.  The intention was to stop people just leaving the line busy continually.  

It was really annoying!

[High Jetter]

6 hours ago, wuvvum said:

Was it AOL which used to disconnect you every hour?  Could be irritating when one was trying to download a large file.

Not that I recall, used to be on there for hours doing very important* stuff.

[beko1987]

I started my Internet life on 56k Freeserve dialup @ 1p per min as all the late 90s dial up used to cost. I'm sure my dad was using something called Demon as his provider? 

Then mum had adsl installed via AOL. £9 a month for 1mb I think. Using that on the windows 98 Packard bell I had back then was lightning fast!

Nowadays I was partly forced to get fibre to my house so I can watch more 4k YouTube on the TV without it buffering... 🙄😂

[reb]

6 minutes ago, beko1987 said:

without it buffering

What I've learned from getting gigabit is that half of the internet is run on crumbling server infrastructure that is slow no matter what connection you're on.

[Fat_Pirate]

You're all NOOBS, I started at 14.4K on Demon in '94!  It was all FTP and newsgroups back then, think it was a good 6 months until I bothered installing a web browser.  Everything was such a faff (all DOS programs), I never expected internet access to become anything other than a niche interest. 

[tooSavvy]

Do those of us, from modem dayz, remember the sneaky 'Diallers' that lurked on some..err.. questionable sites 👀

🚙💨

[beko1987]

1 hour ago, reb said:

What I've learned from getting gigabit is that half of the internet is run on crumbling server infrastructure that is slow no matter what connection you're on.

I had to explain to Charlie once why his stupid bloody huge fortnite updates take ages. It's only as fast as the computer uploading is my answer (founded from decades of torrenting mostly... 😂) 

[beko1987]

49 minutes ago, Fat_Pirate said:

You're all NOOBS, I started at 14.4K on Demon in '94!  It was all FTP and newsgroups back then, think it was a good 6 months until I bothered installing a web browser.  Everything was such a faff (all DOS programs), I never expected internet access to become anything other than a niche interest. 

I remember in the mid 90s, 94/95 at dad's work they had the Internet. I remember happily browsing whatever the Web was on windows 3.1 and 95 waiting for dad to finish work! One pc they installed some games for me, Magic Schoolbus was one. Sat in an office full of chain smoking men happily playing whilst they worked. 

If I was really lucky he'd give me one of their ipaqs and I could play solitaire 😍

Dad had it at his house quite early too. I didn't use it much but remember typing a comma rather than a dot and it not working. Learnt to check what I typed that day 👌(sometimes I still remember to...) 

[reb]

I saw a lady on the bus wearing an awful white jacket, the sort of thing that is very cheaply made but tries to look fancy, it was awful. Why am I telling you?

It had the words "Disney Font" written on the back.

The manufacturer evidently got it from an example image for a font pack like this one.