Bear's bangers: 'owdy, a van t'do up? Sure, WCPGW

[Bear]

First, no more loose, unsealed offside headlight cover...

Second, I found something I worried I'd lost!

[Bear]

More Audi things while waiting for tools:

The Blaupunkt now matches the manual in the handbook folder:

So...

Illumination!

And autoreverse!

Timing belt? Got it covered!

Had to swap the rubber bit and clips though...

[Bear]

One more job done before the end of the day...

[Bear]

From this:

To this:

Because this is not awesome:

There's a lot of hidden damage under here - so I can see myself visiting a lot of Vauxhall breakers and GM dealer sites - nothing is too expensive if it weren't for fucking Brexit, of course, I may drive to Europe to get parts at some point.

Replaced the bonnet stay guide as well. £2.something for a genuine part vs "a broken clip with a shitload of glue that failed, but has left crusty clear glue on the bonnet paint" - I have a spare one in case it's a design flaw!

[wuvvum]

Did you manage to find a fog / reverse light unit for sensible money then?  They were all £LOL when I was looking, hence the slightly* shonky repair on the original unit.

[Bear]

8 hours ago, wuvvum said:

Did you manage to find a fog / reverse light unit for sensible money then?  They were all £LOL when I was looking, hence the slightly* shonky repair on the original unit.

Not sensible - £125 - but cheaper than I was finding elsewhere. Mostly not sensible because I could get a used bumper with diffuser and all parts (including foglight) for £250-300 - though none of them are quite good enough to just swap onto the car!

It still has the LED reversing light, since it didn't come with wiring, and I'd have kept it anyway!

The undertray piece is the pisser - it's only -$66-99 most places but I can only find one at the moment, used, not well photographed, and £87. I will get one but car breakers seem to be smoking the wrong kind of crack when it comes to pricing of stuff that is clearly broken or damaged - my dad's Kia front bumper is amazing, the car bumper specialist asking £150-200+ for bumpers with cracks and splits all over the shop as bad as the damage to his car was. He was going to pay £1300+ for repairs and I plastic welded most of it, but a couple of brackets are essentially a mashed-potato mountain of tiger seal and optimism. And the outside I put paint protection film over the crack to stabilise it.

Proper bodges, but there's a good two hours of work just removing and refitting the bumper and trimmings on it if you do it carefully and don't break anything. I might be able to stitch an Ampera bumper together but most I've seen are just battered and need paint more than cracks fixing 😕

Crash protection and pedestrian safety are the problem - every Ampera bumper I've considered has lost the perforated breakaway clip section at the wing/arch join so it'll never reattach flush. I do wonder how many are damaged when someone's tearing into the car at the breaker's yard vs already broken from the damage!

[Bear]

Fundamentally Vauxhall and GM were never awesome for spares and support anyway, but now Vauxhall is part of "planned obsolescence masters" Stellantis, little orphan Ampera is doomed when it comes to anything unique or trim 😕

[Bear]

I am pretty convinced that it must be possible to upgrade to Navi950 radio and HMI 2.5 to get CarPlay - just "a lot of work" to figure out the magic combination to make the HMI understand the Ampera buttons and screen size etc.

Looking forward to getting a DAB+ tuner and trying it out- that is supposed to just swap over, no coding needed.

[wuvvum]

The other issue with the undertray is that it's so flimsy (it seemed to be made of some kind of fibrous material) that I was skeptical about the ability of a used one to survive the trauma of Evri.  I wasn't actually going to bother putting the damaged one back on but then it looked like leaving it off might bugger up the airflow under the car (turn the rear bumper into a massive air scoop).

I know what you mean about bumper prices for "moderns" - breakers are still asking four figures for decent front bumpers for the Mk2 Nissan Leaf, and even then those aren't perfect.  Headlights are silly too - 120 quid for a headlight with all the mounting lugs busted off, WTF is anyone supposed to do with that?

[Bear]

And yet that rear undertray... I found it for $31!

But... $208 shipping...

[Bear]

Some things are easy though.

One part from a Vauxhall Mokka or somesuch...

£20

I didn't even need to remove the whole floor but I wanted to clean a bit anyway.

Whassat?

Aha!

Swapped...

Hasn't broken it...

Yeay! More stations (and stereo) - one DAB+ upgrade completed.

I wonder how much of the £20 I'll get back for the old DAB box 😂