had the same thing with my soul,
chronic chain suck,
new chain, new rings still the chainsuck.
noticed i had very low tension in the rear mech, itd done ~3000miles on 2bikes.
replaced the mech and was amazed at how much tension was kept in the chain – no more chainsuck..

seem to be lots of tales of chainsuck on inbreds and souls, given these are normally built with bits off existing bikes i wonder how much chainsuck is due to tired rear mech springs.

pyramid selling scheme…!
given economic downturn wont we need less driving instructors for a while ?

debt averse yorkshireman, £60k mortgage ~40%LTV.
clear the credit card every month.

dont see the point in buying flash tat as a hobby..

the only value in a K&N or other chav filter is the little sticker you put on your bumper/window so the rest of the world knows your a gullible fool,

snake oil,
balance bands,
digital speaker cable,
all rubbish..

foam oiled filters when excessivly oiled are known to irreperably damage MAF.
too lttle oil and it dosent filter = cylinder bore pitting.

change the paper standard filter as indicated in service interval job done.

throttle blade on petrols is more of a restriction unless your at WOT hence filter is of irrelevance 99.9999% of time for road use.

with diesels fuel = torque, a tad more air without fuel will do nothing on a diesel.

diesels will generally be limited by injector flow / pump flow prior to inlet air restrictions being of any concern.

2 adults, 2kids 10/13yrs ~ £130 – £150 /week..

how i managed on £30/week inc beer as a student ill never know..

given fuel duty raises so much income for the state and as result allows lower income tax, how much would income tax have to rise to remove fuel duty ???
anyone find any data on the web,
and if their is such data, would you vote in favour ?

if you can get past the sensational headlines youll find that their are major delays in france, switzerland etc, etc airports and trains all having issues in europe..
Europe in winters quite cold shocker…

nwilko, I certainly can’t compete with your winter driving experience and since I am a firm believe in experience being more important than theory I’m on a hiding-to-nothing with this, BUT your argument for “why” simply does not stack up. You’re suggesting a car that starts to spin with non-winter tyres on the rear cannot be recovered OR I have totally missed your point.

Forget the argument about different tyres on front and back for a moment. If the back end goes on a FWD car it is because it has lost traction and counter-steering can correct it because it allows the rear wheels to find traction again. Many of us on here will have had to do that at some stage and not necessarily in winter. If you have 4 winter tyres on and the rear end breaks lose, what do you do? Counter steer. There’s simply no difference in what you have to do. A tyre losing traction is a tyre losing traction.

Winter tyres on the front allow you to get around much more easily than no winter tyres on. They don’t give you carte-blanche to drive “normally” and I agree you need to be careful on the bends AND know what to do if it all goes wrong. I would rather be moving carefully than just be stuck not going anywhere at all.

as for this…

unless you think driving like a rally driver is appropriate for the public road

Regardless of what I’m driving and with what wheels, if I need to drive like a rally driver to avoid a spin/crash/accident then of course I will. If more people on our UK roads knew some of those skills we wouldn’t come to a standstill at the first sign of the white stuff…

…and of course if they put FOUR winter tyres on

final comment,
if youve got winters on the front and normal on the rear the car has grip/traction biased towards the front, if the snow & ice can only offer a fixed amount of friction you will always reach the point where the rears loose traction before the front, how can you reverse this relationship once the rears are sliding, more braking will increase the spin, more throttle will potentially straighten the car and increase speed which means you now cant get round the corner that caused you to loose the back in the 1st place.
Counter steering / steering where you wish to go is valid for recoving from a skid but is more suited to RWD.
The reason youve lost the rear on that corner was that 2weeks ago you fitted winters on the front with oodles of traction that got you moving too fast for the amount of grip your rears can generate, kaboom hello ditch/tree….
FWD with winters only on front is similar to lift off oversteer in a 911, a knife-edge..

Re sheet ice the only thing that works is studded tyres that can bite, but these are destroyed on dry tarmac and destroy the road surface + creating dust/health issues.

re second hand winters if the sipes (multiple cracks if you like) on each tread block are not present (their not full depth of each tread block) the winter tyre has massively reduced grip than compared to its new state, (you may be wasting your money)..

either fit 4 winter tyres or dont bother.

nonsense

If you have a front wheel drive car with winter tyres on the front and the back end goes there is a good chance of counter steering to prevent a spin. If you’ve got more traction with the driving and steering wheels you will have a more controllable car even if the back wheels have “normal” tyres still. That’s an assertion based on experience.

think about it,
your front tyres being snow/ winter will always have more grip than youre rear normal tyres. The rears have lost traction and the cars now spinning, counter steering the front will not increase the friction between the rear wheel that has no traction, you cant apply power to the rear wheen to get it rotating at the vehicles speed as the fronts are the driven wheels.. Front wheel drive cars are deisgned with understeer as its safer, the premise being you use the correct amount of speed for the road conditions in the 1st place, if you loose the back end your boned with FWD (unless you think driving like a rally driver is appropriate for the public road)..
If you put your better tyres on the rear it will be less likely to break traction than the front hence safer (the steering wheel acts at the front), but you will need to drive at a speed that keeps traction at the front IE slow the hell down. If you want to drive safety on snow / ice and keep traction fit 4 snow tyres. Danger with winter tyres at front and FWD is you get traction to reach a nice high speed in a straight line then turn in to find the rear has no grip and exit the corner backwards.
Ive driven on snow extensively in the arctic cirle & Northern Ontario with normal tyres, specific winter tyres and also studded tyres fitted to all 4 wheels on high powered RWD saloons, FWD hatchbacks and lumbering 4×4’s in each case the driver needs to slow down. Finally try taking skid pan course and get the instructor to just break traction at the rear (needs a rig)and see what you can do to recover in a FWD car, its all a big mess in your pants by then.

either fit 4 winter tyres or dont bother.
if you only fit to the front cos your FWD, the rear of the car/van will break traction prior to the front leading to a spin. if you fit to the rear only youll stay in a straight line but gain no grip to get moving.

most recent upset seems to revolve around “promised low final payment”..
all along its been clear that the scheme would flout financial regulations if the hirer was given a “promised / confirmed” final payment. If you ever recieved an official final payment confirmation (ie in writing) at the start of the scheme then by UK law you took out a loan and your employer / scheme provider (as appropriate) must meet financial regualtions of a financial institution (ie reserves must be held to outweigh the loans offered, think recent banking collapse triggerd in USA). Given the prohibitive cost of meeting this regulation the scheme has never promised final payment levels up front. Some misselling has gone one with sales pitches along the lines of “you may expect to pay around xx% of the full price”, but clean as day you never got an offical guarantee of final payment prior to the end of your period. Ironic really that someone would justify a £1k commuter as it only costs them an expected £500 and yet when they find it may cost them £850 its suddenly a stupid purchase / someone else fault. Scheme has been raped from day 1. No one needs a $1k bike to commute on so why should we as tax payers subsidise people to buy bikes to play on (even if we are all cyclists)..

saftey function is a watchdog on the control system and thats the point here. the saftey systems are being turned off to allow the clunky remap to give you more performance. But i expect everyone that has had a remap had that explained to them at the time they handed their cash over (or more likely not) so they are (not) aware that their ickle black box now relies on them to step in and correct a software issue that makes the car runaway from them.

minibus can be harder to insure if >8seats as standard.
kombi most versatile but expensive
velle more trim to damage with bikes n kit.
adding seats / windows limits your insurance options.
if you go for a panel van if you get the version without a bulkhead the twin pass seat does fold down to access the rear should you wish to use as occasional camper, bulkhead versions normally have a fixed seat back.
http://www.vwt4forum.co.uk for loads of t4/t5 info.

vitos rot. Mk1 vitos poor for porous blocks & head issues engines generally made of cheese.
Mk2 vitos still rot.
Merc electrics famous for almost being french.

think of the runaway toyotas in the USA recently,
part of the safety within your ECU is the system that is monitoring delivered torque to requested torque, the manufacturer has spent a great deal of time making a safe system and yet the bloke down the road offering a “custom” £300 remap can do a better job. Modern diesels are very easy to remap for more performance, but for £300 what work has been done to verify the safety system is still operational. IE a software error may not be detectable once youve remapped and the result can be a runaway vehicle..
PS these custome £300-£400 remaps are normally available from a franchise sales service, most competing companies are offering similar remap gains hence its questionable what is “custom” about the vast majority.

cyclescheme and your employer or whoever is running the scheme for you has had to revise massively upwards the final valuations of the bikes,
as both the individuals using the scheme, and any company running these schemes was avoiding a large amount of tax by devaluing the assets worth at the end of the scheme. This is why so many serious cyclists with N+1 bikes invested in the scheme for N+2 bikes..
You don’t need to spend £1k on a bike to work, if you made a handsome profit in the past well done, if you ever for a moment thought the tax man wouldnt clamp down on this tax loophole wakey wakey..
The scheme may now be less popular for serious cyclists but may still support those that actually have a need of a cheap bike to commute on, as was originally intended. As for bike shops that have survived on poor service and high turnover through the scheme – a few may go to the wall.

“world storm”…….
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a while later…

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ive stocked up on 2000 cans of baked beans and 150kg of dried milk
and im chargin my 300 car batterys as we speak…
hope the storm dosent hit till mid next week as im in the lakes the w/e biking.

:lol:
“what tyres for world storms” ?

single file,2abreast,3,4..
doesnt matter,at the end of the day position yourself in a way which forces the cardriver to overtake you safely.
the moment you “assume” the car behind will only overtake when its safe to do so may be your last..
sod holding em up, yourlife is worth more than them getting to the next queue of traffic 10seconds sooner..

my screen protector hinges of the base of the screen and also includes a handy qwerty keyboard..
its a netbook..
dont get ipads,always wondered how you protected the screen in your busy latte lifestyle, looks like ipad = fail.. :lol:

re “highway code”.. most of teh code has no legal standing anyway..
lights / bells on bikes you need road traffic act & construction and use legislation, and theres no chance plod will know any of it..

converted an ex-aa t4,
great on fuel 33mpg town, 40+mpg mway
1.9td’s need thrashing.
petrols = regular fill ups.
2.4d = SLOW (better with a 1.9td)
2.5td both tunes v.good
watch for clutch / dmf on 2.5’s (£400 to fix)
cambelts at 60k for 2.5’s (£400 – £600)
avoid already converted vans on ebay (as prev poster, many unsafe & being sold at vastly inflated prices).
T5’s, avoid first few years (electrics & gbox issues)
T5’s (130bhp +) driveshaft & gearbox / DMF issues not uncommon.
T5 1.9td – camshaft failures.
Bongos – watch for expensive cooling issues.
If you can’t convert yourself – be very carefull what your buying..
Alloys on T4/T5’s many with car spec wheel’s and tyres that are not rated for the weight of the van, potential saftey & definite legal issue.
Best of luck.
PS theirs only room for 2 in a van..
Poptops = £3k tent stuck on your van.

slow,
drinks fuel,
no elbow / shouler room,
side impacts dont bear thinking about,
leak,
cost a fortune to service,
chassis rots,
steel bodycappings rot,
great fun off road, rubbish on..
a toy..

skiaflex 221,can be found in white, used on caravans for sealing external fixings. 521 is used to stick car windscreens in.. Its a setting polyurethane adhesive, pretty thick stuff and will stick anything to anything. clean off excess with meths..
its watertight and should hold a showerscreen in place no probs.

we had a huuge fireplace with mantlepiece that was an old railway sleeper.
despite prior owners (that built the stupid thing) painting it with numerous (ie really think) gloss paint, you could still smell creosote from the end grain. If you went on hols for a week the moment you walked back in the door you could smell creosote..
thankfully ive removed fireplace now.

XTR…
wtf makes no sense on this bike.. not a race bike, why blow a fortune on racers XTR thats overpriced and underbuilt.. all mountain my ar*e..
£4.4k is justified by the buyer as their #1 priority is how much it cost followed by its XTR you know..
nuts, so much for a recession..

spent £6k on a caravan 5years ago.. £6.5k if you count the load intrest.
costs £400 a year to store inside a secure facility.
£140 to insure
£100 – £50 to service and on running repairs each year.
£40 cc membership.
have had 30-40nights away for a family of 4 each year.
pitch fees normally £20-£25 per night.
if i tow to cornwall it adds <1hr to journey from midlands.
has space for 4 with heating etc and we all get to take bikes & toys.
not better than camping / hotels just different.
van should last another 5+ years (till kids dont want to holiday with us anymore)
dosent get used at weekends as its not worth the hassle, weekends we camp easier for a short break (for us)..
as for hassle towing, try it.. your driving will improve no end, braking distances, lane position reading the road like youve not done before.. also get an insight into how annoying us car drivers are to HGV’s..
if you find yourself wound up by caravanners try reading some of the self help tips on the depression thread it may help.. :lol:

i found the rockies less inspiring that the Euro Alps, thing with the rockies and rest of the USA is theirs so much space no one cares to make a effort, buildings, roads, towns all boring lifeless places with no character.. Euro Alps are compact enough that people care and make an effort..

if they refunded fuel costs in a private car, would they have a legal responsibility to check your cars roadworthy.. NO
absolute carp…
unjustifiable rubbish.
about what youd expect from an entity that creates nothing whilst consuming energy to sell, erm nothing.. oh the irony..

id expect facing etc and an hours labour £40 + parts.

dont disconnect battery, waste of time.
limpmode is only active on the journey that the fault was detected.
if you had a warning lamp on the dash when driving this was requested by the ECU due to a fault being detected.
get a copy of VAGCOM from ebay and a USB dongle to connect a laptop to your car. Install Vagcom, setup driver port (will need to identify the USB dongle as COM1), connect to port on underside of steering column, turn ignition ON and search for engine control module, read fault codes DTC’s.
Search on web for SAE fault codes using the 4 didgit code you read from your ECU and this will tell you whats wrong.
The google for repair process, if u can fix yourself do son, if not ask garage to specifically repair to your instructions.
If you go to garage without info chances are your wallet will be randsacked and a lot of unnecessary parts replaced.
PS > dont clear the fault code until you believe youve fixed the issue.
Once you believe the fault is repaired clear fault codes (with ignition ON but engine off)and use for a few days to see if it reappears..

if you cant do your own maintenance – AVOID !!!

if your going double, fit a specific double front shifter. the ultegra is a stupid fits all purpose double or triple shifter but the shifter internal ratchet is plastic. If you down shift to the smaller ring and accidentally try a further downshift the ratchet sheds its teeth and is useless. (i know from experience having broken mine in about 10mins riding up and down the street to check it was adjusted right). absolute rubbish..
ps the shifter ratchet is non servicable.

anywhere around coventry / warwick / kenilworth.. flat, clay soil + horses = life sucking mud if its rained in the past week and horrible cut up hoof shaped chos in summer. some nice lanes + pubs if youve a road bike though.

doh, yep their 130mm travel..
2008 soul.
fork seems soft, and hence seems to pack down on bumpy descents,
no preload adjustment hence i have to wind up the blowoff threshold on the damper on the top of the right leg, this then makes the fork less supple on smaller stuff.
dosent seem right effectively adding damping to cure what i think is a spring rate problem, but arent the springs linear ??

am i better with an air sprung fork ?
is it worth spendning money on forks that are already several years old (2nd set of seals in stanchions thus far).

any ideas ??

how about if it were possible to only have the brake pedal override the engine if the accel pedal is pressed down a long way (ie so far the brakes would otherwise not be able to stop the car) this would allow you to still left foot brake and have the engine still respond to your right foot whilst feathering the brakes with your left.
When left foot braking your use the brake pedal and accel pedal totally differently to how you use these controls when you having a fit trying to stop the car when the accel pedal gets stuck / held down.
Both pedals have electrical sensors so its not too hard to have software make the decision is this left foot braking (ie ok) or is this a panic brake event (simples)..

pipes copper, boiler heat exhchange copper..
CH pump impellor is normally alloy,
only the rad's will have any steel in them so what use is a magnet ?
modern practice of small bore pipes is more of a problem (but cheap to install).
get your system replumed with proper sized pipes (and no manifold rubbish) flush your existing rads and boiler and add some corrosion inhiitor to the system when you fill.

one that cr*ps in its owners garden and not on the trail :lol:

beware of cheap T4's and T5's on ebay, their is high demand and its not uncommon for ebay to have a number of repeat dodgy adverts looking to scam your ebay account details. as previous posters suggested brickard and t4forum are highly recommended.
If your low on budget a T4 is more basic (ie less electronics to go wrong) than with a T5 and hence a better bet..
Would recommend some reading / lurking on either website and seriously consider converting yourself Or make sure you know what you want exactly, their are many offering impressive looking DIY / PRO conversions that have dodgy electrics / gas / water no insulation etc, etc but look great.
Also make sure wheels & tyres are upto the weight of a van and not just cheapo car tyres, watch for cheapo lowering springs that leave you on the bumpstop..
Love my T4 loads more practical than an estate car for me.
T5 too pricey, and dont by an early one, as with any car the first couple of years is a bit pants quality wise compared to the run out of the old model.

Keyless ignition designed to require 3seconds push when the car is moving before engine is stalled, this is deliberate and prevents your kids messing with stuff when your driving and causing a crash.
Gearbox on the lexus was of the non mechanical shift type, ie like the stupid i-drive BMW thing = confusing..
Dont understand why you would not be able to select "N" even under load as the gearbox requests torque from the engine relative to accel pedal and drivers gear selection. If you select "N" the gearbox should request a reduction in engine torque and speed limitataion, this would override the accel pedal input (no sane reason why this is not the case).
The most important question that is being missed so far is;
When we had a mechanical link between the driver and the throttle their was no capability to offer a safe failure mode to the driver should the throttle stick open.
Today with us having electronic engine / gearbox / braking control it is possible to offer a safe failure mode by comparing brake input to accel pedal, this can be done in a way that still allows left foot braking / track use but still gives the driver a way to slow the car.
Regardless of if the cause of your stuck accel pedal is the plastic in the pedal Or a footwell mat, or inadequate space around the pedal IT IS POSSIBLE to offer the driver a way of overriding the accel pedal.

Pressing the brake pedal with full effort in a +200bhp vehicle when at mway speed will only result in masssive brake fade. stalling the engine is bad as you then loose steering and brake assist, surely overriding the accel pedal is the way forward.
such a system may be found on a car/van having a certain german engine control units.
brake servos not as effective today as in the past, modern engines dont support much vac.