It looks pretty like the Orlando kitchen from Wickes, but their blurb says it’s cam and dowel construction, whilst mine is held together entirely by Confirmat screws with no cams in sight.

Additions to existing stuff doesn’t need require bringing the old stuff up to regs. Otherwise we’d be rewiring our houses every time we wanted an extra socket and there had been a regs change since the last rewire.

Adding a circuit for a shed to your existing CU shouldn’t be a problem assuming there is a circuit they can use on the consumer unit. Wanting to change the whole lot sounds either like looking for work or being very cautious about interpreting the regs.

I’m not a sparky, but I’ve just looked into pretty much the same thing with a CU that was fitted last year.

The “eventually” could well be 5 years away, so I’d like to get cabinet doors that match.

You may never know what went on.

I’ve seen “don’t shit where you eat” situations go badly too many times. Particularly with married women. For all you know the husband’s got jealous, belted her around the front room and her route out is a harassment case.

Electric showers are rubbish.

I’d suggest a thermal store for the hot water and a mixer shower. That way you get mains pressure hot water and don’t need to switch to a combi boiler. You could just switch to a combi, but they tend to pack up a lot more than the old simple bookers with a hot water tank, even if it’s just the system losing pressure due to old rads and pipework.

And 5k is definitely mickey taking territory.

Oh and don’t mess about with tuning boxes, resistors or valves to stop the sensors seeing the real boost levels. Noobtune isn’t much dearer for a remap.
And the B207 engines don’t have sludge issues, the B2x4 engines in the 9-5 did.

The 2.0 Vectra Turbo is basically a Vectra with a slightly detuned SAAB B207 engine.

The shopping list is:
The correct NGK plugs. PFR6T-10G is the SAAB specification. Don’t take equivalents from anyone else, you need NGKs. The car uses the plugs to monitor combustion and needs to have the ones it was designed for.
Decent oil. GM Dexos 2 or Mobil 1.
Check the thing is boosting right – bypass valve diaphragms can split, and on the high boost SAAB engines the intercooler can balloon a bit. From memory Evo 7 ones fit fairly easily if you want to upgrade.
Shell v-power, or 5l of gun wash thinners in the tank if you’re feeling tight. The engine management system monitors knock and can take advantage of high octane fuel.
Lastly, Noobtune can usually find an extra 40 or 50 horses for not much cash.

Beyond that the modifications get spendy – the downpipe and cat become limiting factors.

I probably should have mentioned that I really don’t like lining paper. Other than the badly adhered paint, the walls are pretty decent.

Having done a bit of car paintwork over the years, I’m happy I can manage to hide a couple of layers of paint under matte emulsion. I just don’t want the whole lot to start peeling off the walls once it’s painted. :lol:

The other odd thing is that I did a test patch today to see if the feathered edges did work, and if you started picking at the areas that had been painted, the old paint was a lot more plastic and peelable. Is it possible that the solvents in new paint leach into the old paint and soften it up?

We had one. For one spell I was doing a thousand miles a week in it. Flat out everywhere. Never missed a beat. It had done well over 150k when we got rid and felt like it would do the same again.

Anyone from the daytime crowd got any ideas?

9-3s are decent cars if you’re looking at 03/04 onwards – you have to remember that they were priced in the same ballpark as a 3 series. This meant that they didn’t review that well when they were new, but now they’re half the price of a 3 series they’re very good value.

A lot of the running gear is shared with the Vectra C, and the SAAB parts business still exists, so parts availability isn’t a big issue. Rear suspension is different to a Vectra C, with rear wheel steer designed in so they corner pretty well for the size of car they are. Not as good as an E46, but decent enough.

I’ve had mine for about 35000 miles. Running costs aren’t dirt cheap but they’re not ruinous – rear calipers go (they’re the same as Vectra C ones, I’ve changed both mine) and exhausts aren’t cheap as it’s not a common car. All the brake parts are common sizes so they’re cheap enough. A 20000 mile service costs £40 in Mobil 1 plus about £30 in filters if you go for pattern parts, which is about the same as any other modern quickish car.

Engines are cast by GM but with SAAB input to the design and SAAB engine management to make the turbocharging work. The 150 models can easily be pushed up to 200bhp and the 210 bhp models can go up to 250 without any physical modifications. Noobtune can do this for much less £ than you would expect. The engines and engine management systems were used in some Vauxhall / Opel models so again, all the bits are still available from GM.

All the diagnostics are done via Tech 2, which again is a GM piece of kit so you don’t have to hunt high and low for a specialist to find someone who can read codes.

The seats and general ergonomics are great, they’re nice quiet cars and they go well. Mine is a heavy convertible, and it’s quicker from a rolling start than a new 420D, which I think is a pretty good go to £ compromise. They’re also pretty safe – 5 star euro NCAP which is better than you get from most cars in the price range.

The main downsides to the car are that the 6 speed GM box isn’t the nicest and you can get through £180 worth of Continental tyres pretty quickly if you give it a lot of stick, but again, that’s common to any powerful car. They don’t have much of an “image” which I quite like, as people let you out at junctions :lol:

The

You go to Tesco?

There’s a lot of rubbish being posted on this thread.

1) Take the longest term possible. If you need a lower mortgage payment using a longer term because you’ve changed to a lower paid job or your other half is on maternity pay, the bank aren’t likely to bend over backwards to help, so take the longer term whilst they’re offering it.

2) Over pay as if you’re on a shorter term. The 10% overpayment you’re allowed is 10% of the balance of the loan – ie, if you take a 150k mortgage, you can pay off £15K or so in overpayments in the first year.

3) Fixes cost more for a longer fix. As others have said, view a fix like an insurance policy. Again, think about if you’ll have kids or want to get a job that’s less aggro and less money.

4) Overpay. Overpay. Overpay. If you overpay, most lenders will not shorten the term of the loan unless you ask. So if you need to stop overpaying, you’ll have the benefit of a lower payment than you would have had if you’d never overpaid at all.

5) Have I mentioned overpaying?

My main piece of advice would be to get a decent flight.
1. If work aren’t offering business class you want a day off after the flight. And a better employer :twisted:
2. Get a flight out of the UK as late as possible. If you need to change flights, try and do it in Western Europe. With luck you get a long flight that starts around midnight that you can sleep most of the way through.
3. If you have to change flights outside of Europe, go with Emirates.
4. Take a pair of boxers, socks and a t-shirt in your hand luggage.
5. Get some nice earplugs to help sleeping on the plane. You’ll get some on the plane with an eye mask, but decent earplugs are much comfier.

If you wake up at 4am, go to the hotel gym, exercise and go and have breakfast. Gets any last bit of jet lag out of your system.

Spending a small fortune getting drunk in Wan Chai? Although if you’re going for work the people you’re meeting there may fork out for as much drink as you can stand.

Bruce Lee statue is cool, the ferry across the bay is decent for the sights, particularly at night. TST as a place just seems to be full of people offering “copy rolex” on every corner.

You can apparently get shirts and suits made up cheaply but I’ve never done it myself.

Oh and on certain nights of the week you get OAPs ballroom dancing on some of the pedestrianised streets.

Ladies market is full of tat. If you want any hooky clobber head over the border to Luo Wu station shopping centre and be prepared to haggle.

The peak has decent views for a visit too.

I wouldn’t really recommend it. I and a bunch of other people I worked with got deleted in the last property crash. I swapped industries completely and I wouldn’t do ecology again.

1) It’s very hard to get a job. I’d spent a few years doing really grim jobs, and I was pretty motivated. I graduated top of my year at uni and was the only person to have a full time job lined up for when I left. Starting pay was £17k around 10 years ago, when a typical grad job would be 20-25k. The general expectation was that you would need to do a lot of voluntary work to gain experience before you could get a paid job.

2) It’s hard work. It’s not hard manual labour, but it’s a lot harder than a lot of jobs. Reptile surveys? Better be on a site damn early to catch things whilst they’re still trying to warm up. Bat surveys? Better not like sleeping. Newt surveys? Better not like sleeping and enjoy getting wet.

3) The hours are pap. Almost every decent summer evening where you would like to be out on your bike or in a beer garden are spent doing fieldwork.

4) The level of expertise / experience needed to progress is pretty high. In a lot of industries, if you turn up reliably, breath through your nose and not your mouth and don’t make any big cock ups, you’ll be promoted reasonably quickly. Most senior / management level ecologists are pretty expert at what they do, and that expertise was tough to gain.

The business is largely reliant on the building industry, and new sites coming on stream are the first thing to dry up when things slow down – bear in mind that most firms will be working on sites for years ahead of actually beginning construction. As a result the industry is very up and down. The fact that a lot of people are basically willing to work for free even during the good times means that things are very grim when companies start laying off.

I would expect the best jobs are in the public sector, as you’re protected from the cycles of the property market.

Assuming it’s a standard cable operated handbrake, you’ll be needing a wind back tool, as the world and his dog said above.

I had one very similar to the one you linked to. Lost some of the parts to it, so I got a 15 quid ebay universal kit which has a dozen or so different adaptors for different pitches of wind back pin, as well as LH and RH threaded windback tools. I’d go for the ebay kit every time – the wind back tools are overbuilt for what they do and a big kit will have a decent chance of fitting your next car.

And I ended up replacing both rear calipers, and the handbrake cables as they were seized into the calipers.

If there’s a good way of removing hand brake cables, I’d love to hear it! Heat melts the outers, belting them tends to just mash them about, clamping them in mole grips crushes them…

I read an article in the Guardian last week that mentioned that someone is raped every 4 minutes in South Africa. Wouldn’t be my first choice for a holiday.

The 1.4tsi has a reputation for going pop. I only know one person with one, and I joked “has the engine blown up yet?”. He’d paid over a grand on engine repairs.

Buy NGK plugs. They’re the best make you can get. They will be pre gapped and come with cardboard tubes on the end to stop them getting knocked. In theory you could check but in practice…

Coil packs generally last years and mount straight onto the plug. Normally secured by a small bolt and then just pull off. The top of the plug is ribbed so the coils can take a bit of pulling off.

The trickiest bit may be removing the old plugs if they’ve been in there for 60k. Some cars (ie Mk1 Ka) are buggers for seizing in plugs. Have a Google and see if yours is. If it is, spray plus gas down the plug holes and let it sit for a while. And take care undoing them!

I deal with product testing at work, but electricals aren’t my area.

SGS have an authentication tool where you can check if a certificate number tallies up to the product it was issued for. In theory you could also email them but if everyone’s emailing them…

The other question is what it’s been tested for – I could test a hover board for the wear rate of the the tyres and go around legitimately telling everyone it’s been tested by XYZ world renowned super strict test lab.

As others have said, you need someone to so some pre press work for you. Why not post the file with the majority of text blanked out so people can get an idea of how much work there is?

If I were you I’d start by getting a template (probably Adobe Illustrator format) from a printer and a decent photo / scan of the painting and laying it all out properly (ie file set to print resolution and dims) in a drawing or photo editing program. And start from scratch with the text in your new file.

You may want a digital proof before it goes on press if you’re fussy about colour matching. You lose a lot of colour and contrastwhen a full colour photo gets squeezed into CMYK.

Grandstand BMX Flyer! I can’t believe nobody else has mentioned it.

Not sure if there’s an actual end to it though!

Oh, and I understand diesels are a lot more efficient on light throttle before everyone starts saying they get 60mpg in a 320d :lol:

The key thing is buying your LPG at the right price – because the headline figure is a lot less than petrol, it’s easy to see it all as cheap and pay silly prices. There’s a 60% difference between me buying LPG at just short of 50p a litre and the bloke above paying 80p a litre. That’s the % equivalent of paying £1.68 a litre for petrol vs £1.05!

If you can’t get cheap LPG conveniently, it suddenly stops making so much sense.

My car is LPG converted and I do around 20k per year.

80-85% of petrol MPG is about right. My LPG costs are typically 11.1p per mile @ around 20 to the gallon, and I pay between 45 and 65p per litre. Driving the same way, I’d be getting 24 to the gallon on petrol, or about 19.9p per mile.

So I’m saving 8.8p a mile, or around £35 a week. I was doing around 31 to the gallon before I had the car converted, which would have been a saving of around £20 a week.

As a comparison with diesel, I drove a delivery mileage 320d which did around 32 to the gallon. Or 15.2p a mile.

So overall, I’m happy that it’s saving me cash. And the purchase price of a big engined petrol + LPG is less than a diesel.

The upsides are:
1) Petrol levels of refinement.
2) Cheap running costs.
3) No foul stuff coming out the back of your car.
4) None of the massive diesel specific bills – £1200 injectors, DPFs clogging etc.

The downsides are:
1) Range. I fill up 2-3 times a week, and you need to know where to fill up. My local pump advertises 54.9p a litre, but they have a loyalty scheme that means they average out at 49.9p a litre.
2) You lose some power on a vapour system.
3) Complexity – most LPG systems use the heat from your coolant to vaporise the gas, and intercept injector signals from the petrol ECU. This means joints in plumbing and wiring.
4) Your spare wheel well has a tank in it. The tanks aren’t light.

All in, I’d have another LPG converted car, but I’d go for the biggest tank I could fit.

Dunno but it’s got a Murcielago / Focus side repeater so that may give a clue to the donor vehicle.

Or it could just be a cheap and neat looking type approved side repeater on a kit that doesn’t use any Ford parts :-)

Apart from that it was reliable all round, clocking up 80k miles over 3 years….

27K a year in a 500???

Ignore the bloke telling you to get a Mk1. They’re nice cars, but I wouldn’t want to try and use one as a daily.

1) That’s a great price for a MK5 GTI. I’d snap his hand off because you’ll be able to make a profit if you don’t like it and can be bothered doing a private sale.
2) The seat can be fixed. MJ Interiors have a good reputation and trim a lot of Golf show cars. Equally there will be uphosterers locally who redo seat bolsters every day of the week for local car dealers.
3) Golf GTIs don’t really seem to be depreciating.
4) I wouldn’t worry too much about the economy. Unless you do seriously big miles the difference between 30mpg and 45mpg isn’t that many £ a year.

Amy of the daytime crowd got any ideas?

You’d be tapped to buy a satnav now.

Just buy a half decent phone, a brodit clip on mount and use Waze. Gets fantastic live traffic info and saves me masses of time for free.

Tomtom do the best sat navs in my experience, but mine must be 7 or 8 years old now. Had colleagues who had Garmins and the navigation was very very poor.

From memory, Albany Assist are accident management, not loss adjusters.

Anyway, whoever you deal with, expect a “trade” valuation from Glass’ guide if the cars getting on a bit, any options to be missed on the valuation, and a write off point around 70% of the car’s replacement value.

I’ve posted on this subject many times, briefly worked in the assessors business, take a look through my posting history if you want more info.

Decathlon do a good range of town bikes. We got a nice one with an 8 speed hub for about £400 a couple of years back. Everything on it is solid – good rack, proper chromoplastic mudguards, barring the V brakes which are a bit cheap and nasty, but can be changed pretty quickly.

I thought the Pendletons looked great in photos but seemed quite cheaply made in person.

Edinburgh Bicycle Co-op stock a decent range of practical step through bikes.

The other thing I’d consider is an electric assist bike – it might help keep her cycling longer / further / more often than she otherwise would.

High mileage Vauxhalls are horrendous to run. That’s why every other minicab is a Vectra. :roll:

It will most likely have a drive by wire throttle, I suggest getting onto Vauxhall and SAAB forums and asking if anyone has a “tech 2” diagnostics machine and can pull the codes off.

I’d chuck it at an MOT and see how you go on the suspension. It can crash and bang for a very long time before it starts failing MOTs. You should keep your suspension sorted, but if you just need a stop gap and don’t know how much is w wrong with the car, just put it in for the test.

Weedkillers are like medicine. Nurofen is Ibuprofen. Roundup is Glyphosate. And they’re required to list the active ingredient and dosage on the pack. And often the active ingredient is out of patent protection.

So very often the cheap Wilko version is exactly the same. You just need to read the back of the pack.

The commercial versions are normally higher dosages of the same chemicals.

You seem to get the full spectrum of recruitment idiocy at grad jobs.

Surprise numerical / reasoning tests.
Additional rounds of interviews being added on ad hoc.
Entire recruitment schemes being binned.
Bizarre interview questions.
Application forms that are more work than most degree modules…

There’s probably more but that’s what I can think of off the top of my head.

I regularly use http://www.easyairport-parking.co.uk/ about once a month or so. Valet parking and usually reasonably priced if booked a little in advance. Let them worry about flight delays, don’t book contingency either side. You just ring them when you’re through passports / have your bags.

Luton isn’t too bad to get through security and there is no forced march through a shopping mall. There is relatively little food air side, the best you can hope for is pret. Or buy M&S food before you go air side. The best hot food in the place is probably burger king before air side! You can get away with being at Luton an hour before take off. You can’t at Stansted.

The worst airport is Stansted. Audit is always a rugby scrum, can rage ages to get through and then there is an enormous weaving path through a duty free shop. And you’re still 20 minutes from the gate once you get past that!

I got a Brodit bracket that slotted around an air vent. I then got a £5 phone holder off ebay, and took the clamp off that and attached it to the brodit bracket with some 3M adhesive strips.

It’s rock solid and cost about £20-25. And I can stick any phone in it, rather than having a specific mount for a specific phone.

Does anyone have Office Professional 2013 working on Windows 10? They only list Windows 7 and 8 / 8.1 as compatible…

This article really struct a chord with me:

To grasp the dead-end jobs boom head to the carwash

That should really be “To grasp the money laundering / exploitation boom, head to the car wash”

Think about it how many guys wash how many cars an hour at £3 a time. There isn’t enough money to pay wages in the business.

So, you’re left with a few options of how it works – either you’re dealing with at best an explotation scenario where people are paid less than minimum wage, or at worst they are coerced and in a slavery situation. Or, a business which generates a large volume of cash payments is an excellent place to launder money.

The only thing that surprises me is that nobody seems to think about how it works.. That the Guardian missed it too doesn’t surprise me though :D

Boccia watches from Amazon look like they may be a decent option – sapphire crystals and titanium cases at less than 100 quid.

Bit of a Nomos / Junghans Max Bill vibe to some of them:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B0027WLUXA/ref=mp_s_a_1_29?qid=1439760443&sr=1-29&pi=SL75

Mainly dress style watches so maybe more vulnerable than diver style watches with thick cases and crown guards.