The new news 24 thread

[reb]

I swapped the "gold" bit of metal in my ear for a bit of clear plastic. This is to coincide with going from gold to clear glasses.

 

I'm not sure I'll keep it that way because it looks a bit shit, more like some kind of horrific boil than a piece of jewellery. 

[HMC]

[Dyslexic Viking]

Tomorrow it will be 2 years since I bought this, amazing how time flies.

[richardmorris]

Out  walking this morning  and stopped to collect an essential order on the way home.

[Boycie]

1 hour ago, HMC said:

To tcut or not to tcut ...that is the question

[richardmorris]

Dunsfold aerodrome and the South Downs from hydon’s Heath and hambledon.

[320touring]

@blackboilersuit came over today and we got the Oxford fuse panel stripped and cleaned,

plus the new 50amp alternator was fitted. Though it will likely need a new bracket  for holding it at the rear. The one on the 1800 B series I have may work.

Got some of the wiring tidied up and removed the external voltage regulator.

New alternator happily putting out 14.2v with everything switched on.

 

It was even able to move today😁

Many thanks to @blackboilersuit!

[Lankytim]

I found some air holes on the Wife’s Jazz while working on it last week, the MOT is booked for Monday but fortunately a friend came to the rescue and with the hot metal glue gun a piece of Rover P6 panel  found in the scrap bin was grafted in! Fingers crossed for Monday! 

[lesapandre]

Did that white Rolls Royce sell - has the ad gone or have I just missed it somewhere? Always nice to hear how these things end.

[MikeR]

today , I think I found the altar to the car god ....

 

its in the bombed out church , Liverpool ..

[Ghosty]

All your Civic are belong to us.

 

Would any of you be surprised if I said I organised this?

[reb]

Just did an insurance quote on the V70 (yes, I should have probably done that before now), £85 a month. About £20 a month more than it was before I sailed through a wall. My dedicated car budget is £140 a month, so between that and tax I won't exactly have a lot left over for fuel! I can probably make savings elsewhere to the point I can brim the tank once a month, giving an incentive to drive frugally.

I am quite excited to be back on the road soon! Just waiting to hear back from the DVLA about my licence renewal now.

[New POD]

On 10/08/2024 at 18:46, reb said:

I swapped the "gold" bit of metal in my ear for a bit of clear plastic. This is to coincide with going from gold to clear glasses.

 

I'm not sure I'll keep it that way because it looks a bit shit, more like some kind of horrific boil than a piece of jewellery. 

This post is useless without before and after pictures. 

[IronStar]

Car museum I was in yesterday had keychains of two cars I own in exact color of those cars. Did a purchase.

Only minor detail is that my E21 has twin headlight setup, even though it’s 315.

[reb]

6 minutes ago, New POD said:

This post is useless without before and after pictures. 

For before imagine this but shoved through my ear.

After:

[Jazoli]

1 minute ago, reb said:

For before imagine this but shoved through my ear.

After:

Why?

[reb]

1 minute ago, Jazoli said:

Why?

An old friend of mine was a tattoo and piercing apprentice and needed to practice. I'm not going to say no to something for free that would usually cost £40+

I used to have more but an extended hospital stay led to them healing up.

I suppose the real answer to "why" is "Why not?"

[reb]

For the first time in a very long time I have more than one £50 note at the same time.

 

I feel like going to Tesco in the morning and trying to use one to buy a Freddo.

[High Jetter]

3 hours ago, Ghosty said:

All your Civic are belong to us.

 

Would any of you be surprised if I said I organised this?

CRX & an Aerodeck, any early ones?

[wuvvum]

Well bugger me if I didn't actually manage to fix some stuff this weekend.

With my new 3/4" drive extensions, universal joint and E11 Torx socket I finally managed, after much buggering about upside down in the footwell, to get the power steering motor bolts loosened off on the Z4.  Then as suggested on various BMW-related websites I tapped the ring which sits 'twixt motor and steering column round by about 10mm, then retightened the bolt that's actually vaguely accessible just to hold things in place.  Took the car round the block and it was absolutely fucking horrible - steering was like treacle and it was making weird crunchy noises.  Back home, back upside down, bolt loosened off and I tapped the ring round 20mm in the opposite direction.  A test run showed a definite improvement - it's not perfect but it's noticeably better than it was.  The real test will be tomorrow when it's supposed to be properly hot, but now that I know what I'm doing any adjustments should now be a 5-minute job.

I also managed to track down the wiring for the missing second horn.  I had kind of given up on the horn situation until some twat in an Insignia cut me up last week - I hit the horn and, rather than an arrogant two-tone German blast, the noise it emitted was almost exactly the same as my old Citroën AX.  Really not befitting a car of the Z4's calibre.  So I've dug the wiring out, lengthened it slightly and fitted spade terminals, and I'm going to buy a generic horn off eBay to restore two-tone goodness.  Might be a bit more expensive than I'd anticipated though as all the cheapest horns on eBay seem to be advertised as being 300dB, and I refuse to buy those because the sellers are evidently cunts.

The Getz has had an issue with kangarooing on a very light throttle ever since I bought it.  I'd previously eliminated the fuel filter and the EGR valve as possible causes - the only realistic option left was the accelerator potentiometer.  These seem to be quite hard to come by and rather expensive when they do crop up, but last week I spotted an accelerator pedal assembly on eBay for 26 quid delivered - it was cheap because it was for a LHD car, but I wasn't bothered about that as I only wanted the pot.  It was delivered yesterday so I removed the pedal assembly from the car, swapped the pots over and refitted it.  Pleasingly it does seem to have fixed the issue - it was always a bit intermittent but I've done quite a few miles now and I've not managed to make it do the kangarooing thing, so I'm going to call that a win.

The Merc was originally fitted with a Comand sat nav head unit, which was pretty much dead.  Secondhand Comand units for facelift W203s seem to make what I consider to be daft money (3 figures), and I wasn't sure I wanted to fit some random Chinese Android unit, so I bought a basic CD radio so I could at least have choonz.  Then last week I saw a Comand unit listed on eBay for £35 delivered.  It was listed as untested but returns accepted, and the seller had good feedback, so I decided it was worth a punt.  It turned up on Friday and I fitted it today.

That'll do.  It has a few dodgy pixels at the bottom right of the screen but I can live with that.  Now I just need to buy a map DVD so I can enjoy seeing what the road network was like in 2006.

I was hoping to get the parking brake working again, having bought a new set of springs for the shoes, but upon examination the rear brake back plates are not really solid enough to take the springs - and also I don't have a big enough pair of long-nosed pliers to fit them.  So I'm going to have to buy a new pair of back plates, which is another expense (albeit not a massive one) - in theory you also need to remove the hub to fit them which often entails replacing the wheel bearing, but I found a video on YouTube where the chap cut the new plates strategically to enable fitting round the stub axle while keeping all the structural bits intact.

I was also intending to have a crack at fixing the chip in the windscreen with one of those resin kits, but I didn't get around to starting until fairly late in the day and reading the instructions it said the stuff needed sunlight to cure, so I'm going to leave that until tomorrow and have a crack at it in my lunch break.

The other job I'd been intending to do was to rig up a push button start for the Volvo as last time I used it it wouldn't start on the key.  Today though I tried reconnecting the original exciter wire to the solenoid just to check it, and it turned over on the key absolutely fine.  So that was a bit of time saved.

The Toyota failed its MOT on Friday.  Not badly, just bent rear trailing arms.  I was somewhat pissed off though as it was me that bent them, by being a twat and jacking the car up in the dark without being able to see what I was doing.  I've ordered a new pair - in theory they should be easy to do, just one bolt at each end, although the handbrake cable bracket has to come off to access the bolt at the body end.  I did have a look this evening but decided that the bolts looked like they would benefit from an overnight soaking in Plus Gas, so I gave them a liberal squirt and I'm going to have a crack at getting everything loosened off tomorrow evening, so fitting the new arms should be a quick job once they arrive.

[stuboy]

Erindoors has been away this weekend camping with her dad and the stationary engine lot.. she sent me some pics too share..

[Ghosty]

1 hour ago, High Jetter said:

CRX & an Aerodeck, any early ones?

Shuttle, not Aerodeck in 4th gen Civics.

It's a 4th gen Civic stand - though one of the people on stand has a 3g... no first or second gens about the entire show.

[EspenO]

1 hour ago, stuboy said:

Erindoors has been away this weekend camping with her dad and the stationary engine lot.. she sent me some pics too share..

Love that colour. Exclusive to the GTI 16v, I think?

 

[High Jetter]

6 hours ago, Ghosty said:

Shuttle, not Aerodeck in 4th gen Civics.

oops, yes I see it now. Shame, I really like the shape of their earlier models.

[brownnova]

One out! 

Saab (sort of) vert goes off to a fellow Shiter! 

[ruffgeezer]

13 hours ago, Ghosty said:

All your Civic are belong to us.

 

Would any of you be surprised if I said I organised this?

Good to see you on the up matey. Looks a great line up!

[beko1987]

14 hours ago, Ghosty said:

All your Civic are belong to us.

 

Would any of you be surprised if I said I organised this?

Are they the spare cars you've collected so your always one step ahead of the next thing to break? 

[andyberg]

Booked tickets and hotel for Retromobile in February. Let’s see if the French can do a car show better than the NEC. Shouldn’t be too difficult. 

[wuvvum]

14 hours ago, wuvvum said:

I was also intending to have a crack at fixing the chip in the windscreen with one of those resin kits, but I didn't get around to starting until fairly late in the day and reading the instructions it said the stuff needed sunlight to cure, so I'm going to leave that until tomorrow and have a crack at it in my lunch break.

Well that was an unmitigated fucking disaster.  I got the kit set up on the windscreen, cut the top off the little bottle of resin and went to squeeze it into the kit, but nothing came out.  I assumed it was viscous and needed some persuasion so I squeezed harder, whereupon the bottle burst and splattered its contents all over the windscreen, where it immediately began to cure in the hot sun.  Some of it landed in the pressure cylinder on the kit so I thought I'd have a crack at doing the repair anyway, but it seems there wasn't quite enough in there as the resin has only half filled the chip.  So I gave up and spent the rest of my lunch break scraping resin off the windscreen with a stanley knife blade.  

I could buy another kit and have another go now I know how they work, but the resin that's already been injected into the chip will have hardened so I'm not sure I'll be able to get any more in.  Still, at least being partially filled in will hopefully have made the chip a bit less susceptible to developing into a crack...

[egg]

New Banksy...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yd66w769zo