Buy a Japanese quartz watch – Seiko, Citizen or even something like a Lorus. Put it on a nato strap. They don’t break and with a nato strap you will never lose it.

Creation watches is the place to buy one.

And if you can live without an analogue watch, Casio F91s are surprisingly tough.

Cheers for the info Matt, got a Halfords Advanced rack on the way from eBay. Looks like it should fit both cars too if needed. :D

Cheers for the heads up on the Thule clip on – what’s different about it that makes it quicker to take on and off?

Towball racks aren’t really an option – you’re looking at several hundred quid per car to get a towball fitted before you even get to having a rack to go with it. And when we get a new car, we need another towball fitting.

Roof rack isn’t an option. One car is a soft top, and the other is an Alfa. You can get roof racks for them, but it’s just wrong :lol:

I definitely can’t be bothered fitting and removing a roof mounted rack every ride, and I’ve been in cars with bike racks left on – the wind noise is terrible.

There are less fires than there used to be, and fires are generally less dangerous because almost everyone has smoke alarms.

Given that there are not unlimited budgets for public services, I’d rather have more paramedics.

The major issue restricting that idea is that you can only cut things so far – you don’t really want a fire engine to be stationed an hour away down the road or on another job when you need one.

As the guys above say, the proper battery test tool uses a BFO resistor to load the battery up and measure what amperage it can chuck out. But it’s a pretty specific tool so it’s only really of use if you sell a lot of batteries.

The home mechanic method is to charge the battery one day, disconnect the charger and leave it overnight, if it’s not got 12.8V in it the next morning, it’s on it’s way out.

A good battery will normally hold about 12.8 volts when fully charged. More if let the engine has just been running and charging the battery.

By god, if anyone on this place was doing crossfit you would know all about it.

As others have said, there’s a lot of emphasis on doing / lifting lots and very little emphasis on form.

I have a mate who does crossfit, he basically lifts anything like he’s got very comprehensive insurance shares in the local physio…

I 100% agree with the OP – my driving style is consistently cautious in town and trying to get a move on out of town, but other drivers do pigeonhole you by what car you’re in and behave differently.

There are a couple of cars that stick in my mind for this – a burgundy Citroen ZX and Mk2 Golf GTIs. The ZX was basically the kind of car that tends to be bought by people who aren’t that interested in driving – you got constant tailgating etc. They are basically Peugeot 306s and can get a move on down a twisty road.

The other is MK2 Golf GTIs. If you get a MK2 Golf GTI within 100 yards of a middle aged man some switch in the back of his brain gets flipped and he WILL try and race you. Regardless of the fact that he’s driving a VW people carrier and was previously quite happy doing 56mph in lane 1 of the motorway, he will suddenly chase you down and sit 5 foot off your rear bumper…

As for people driving like complete gibbons, the best you can do is try and give them room and get around them. Even the little old dears driving a Jazz down the M1 at 60mph who decide they can pull out to overtake that truck without using any of their mirrors… :twisted:

The petrol twinsparks seem to use more oil when they’re revving away. When the wife drives it around town, it doesn’t use much oil. If it’s getting more work with me driving it, it does use a drop. I suspect the silly expensive 10w60 grades recommended for it will help reduce oil consumption.

As for better or worse than any other car, based on a sample size of 1 of each, the petrol MK3 Golf is astonishingly easy to live with in comparison. Nowhere no near as quick, nice to look at or sit in, but it never used a drop of oil and the only real weak points on the car were that the breather system needed a clean out at services, as would the throttle body. And the window regulators pack up occasionally. But servicing jobs were much quicker and cheaper, cam belts cost about £150 to change vs £400 or so on the Alfa. The Golf suspension is much simpler, less problematic and much cheaper to repair when bushes eventually do give trouble.

Alfas are great cars but you will repair it more often than the equivalent VW. And the repairs will be more expensive. But then the equivalent VW is a MK4 Golf estate :|p

They’re very similar under the skin to the 147. So…

The front wishbone bushes go regularly.
The rear suspension arm bushes go regularly.
The cam belt needs doing every 36000 miles on the petrols.
The variator and balance belt need changing every 72000 miles on the petrols.
A service at an Alfa specialist cost £200 or so. Without Alfa specialist history they depreciate like a brick.
The interior is great – the grab handles are a bit cack (peeling soft touch paint) but the rest of it leaves a MK4 Golf in the dust.
The handling isn’t great, but it’s better than a lot of cars.
The CD player will run your battery down if you don’t leave a CD in it.
The petrol engines are awesome, but not massively powerful.
You need to check the oil at least every second tank of petrol – 1l per 1000 miles is common. If anyone selling a car tells you it doesn’t use oil, RUN, DO NOT WALK! They have never checked the oil.
They are very short geared – 5th (top) in the Alfa is geared the same as 4th in our other car. You buzz down the motorway at 3500 rpm. That said, as a result they accelerate very briskly for their power output.
They are small inside – we went from a Golf to a 147, and the 147 is more Polo than Golf sized inside.
Petrols do 27.5 to the gallon when being driven quickly.
The 1.6 is not worth having, get the 2.0. Economy is very similar for both engines.

So, you basically have two options. You either buy a really good one, with full history and keep it up. Or you buy one at the bottom of the market and take your chances. If you buy a good 3.2 GTA it will not depreciate at all if you look after it.

Don’t buy a diesel and don’t buy one without leather. It’s not moral.

You can’t cut box section to make angle / channel – it’s still under tension due to the process of folding it up and will spring out as soon as you cut it.

Bending stainless is also likely to be hard – it work hardens.

I’d be inclined to get some galvanised U channel or extruded aluminium channel in a beefy thickness and go with that. Probably the aluminium as it won’t rust and will be easy to drill and file to shape. In theory the aluminium could fatigue and leave a load of bikes on the hard shoulder, but I’d just go for a really thick extrusion and not worry about it.

Folding up bits of sheet metal will be hard work and unless you replicate the details and any edge folding on the original pressings can result in disappointingly wobbly brackets.

High end brands? Rolex, Patek, Jaeger, IWC, Vacheron etc etc. you think they use Chinese parts

Some of them will. Most of them will have shareholders to satisfy, and there will be things they want to keep in house to avoid making counterfeiting ridiculously easy, but bits and pieces that the average customer never sees?

In retail, anything that can be construed as theft is taken very seriously. As in instant dismissal seriously. Finding cash and making zero effort to get it back to its owner is theft by finding, and in a store there is a reasonable chance of getting it back to it’s owner, particularly given the level of CCTV. There’s also the potential impact for the person who lost the cash – if they’re hard up then a fiver could be very important to them putting food on the table, so morally it’s tight to just pocket it.

I once found cash left in an ATM at a store and passed it on to customer services, and it was reunited with its owner. I also once left cash in an ATM in the office and the person who found it went out of their way to get it back to me.

I use Waze in the UK as its traffic data is brilliant.

Outside of the UK I use Here (Nokia maps as mentioned above) and it’s spot on. Maps can be downloaded offline, and it does work happily abroad.

I do have an old Tom Tom with European mapping which is handy for one thing only – I loaded a big set of POIs onto it so it has pretty much every campsite in France on it. Which is handy if you like to do unplanned journeys and decide to pitch up at the nearest campsite.

Countzero, they’re exactly the sort of glasses that make you look like and odd bod with tints. There are basically three acceptable styles of sunglasses for blokes:

Aviators
Wayfarers
Sports sunglasses. Whilst you’re actually doing the sport on question.

Wayfarers you might just get away with plain glass, Aviators with plain glass make you look like Norm Abram at best…

Anyway, there’s no point arguing when this can be empirically proven. There are no photos of anyone wearing transitions glasses that look good in both tinted and untinted states. Not even on the webpages of the firms who make them.

They look awful. Sunglasses frames have pretty big lenses, wide arms and occasionally a wrap around. Most glasses frames have pretty small lenses.

At best you end up looking like a villain from Indiana Jones.

You also get naff sun protection – sunglasses have big lenses and thick arms to stop light getting around the lenses and into your eyes.

In my book, if it needs wheels it’s not hand luggage :lol:

I fly far too often and I don’t see any reason to spend big money on luggage – it invariably gets knocked about a bit, and there’s no pose value with it.

If you fly with the budget airlines it’s handy to have a soft bag – you can cram them into the luggage gauge if needed, but they attract far less attention from the staff at the gate, so you rarely get checked. And on the flights where there’s too much carry on baggage and bags need to go into the hold, and they always pick all the people with hard bags and small cases.

IKEA do a backpack on wheels which is pretty cheap. http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/50217766/%5B/url%5D

My other go to place would be Decathlon – they do a lot of decent soft bags at fair prices.

Bump for the Friday slackers.

Ant runs his own firm building posh DBR1 replicas and the like. I suspect that a lot of the work you don’t see on the show gets jobbed out – the logistics of doing half a dozen cars in one workshop to a tight timescale would be a nightmare.

They’re definitely all going into the same auction. Either that or Drew Pritchard is a bloody avid classic car auction goer :D

E46 M3, plus a good few grand in the bank for holidays and fuel.

Bump for the daytime crowd!

Cheers, found the facebook page and turned on notifications for it!

Never tried a Kindle Fire but I do have a hudl2 and it’s ridiculously good for the money and taking the tesco branding off takes about 5 minutes. You just install the Google now launcher and that’s it.

I do that sort of mileage, and you need either a diesel or an LPG converted mid to large size car with comfy seats. Ie, a Golf, 3 series, Mondeo etc. An automatic will help with the drive too but obviously some are better than others.

You’d be tapped to try and do 70 miles a day in a city car. I hired a Citigo the other week, they’re hugely affected by crosswinds compared to a large car and you need to change down for hills. That’s before you get to the kit you’re missing – proper seats with plenty of adjustment, xenon lights, Cruise etc.

My advice is to do a spreadsheet to calculate fuel costs over a year for everything you’re looking at buying. You will be spending 2-3k a year on fuel and at least 2 hours a day in the car, and you need to work out a decent compromise between the two.

Landlord. No contest.

Also, for some the guys above “not lager” does not mean that it’s bitter!

I used to deal with this when I finished uni, so the below is probably not quite state of the art but most of it will still stand.

It can regenerate from astonishingly small pieces, 1cm cube if I recall correctly. I once visited a building site where they’d put it through the woodchipper…

It will grow back through tarmac and even concrete on occasion.

As others have said, repeated glyphosate treatment will kill it. The only other real option is to dig the lot out, pay for it to be tipped and the backfill with fresh soil. That’s often the preferred method for building sites where total removal quickly is key, but obviously it isn’t cheap!

You also seriously need to get your neighbours to sort it. I can’t remember precisely but the rhizome network can spread metres so it could easily reappear of the neighbour doesn’t sort it. You can dig a trench and lay a geotextile membrane to stop the rhizomes spreading, but the kosher stuff was around 400 quid a roll.

I would be very wary of them using the wrong grade of oil and a substandard filter.

Last time I was in one of their branches, they had a massive stack of Fuchs oil in various grades.

It’s 10k or 12 months for a reason. Some cars do specify a 6 month oil change for extremely low mileage use, as the level of condensation you get in the oil is very high. You sometimes see this as mayonnaise under the oil filler cap and in the breather pipes on shopping cars. A petrol engine runs pretty rich during the period from start up until it gets to operating temperature, which for your car is going to be most of your driving time. This means there will be more fuel degrading the oil than you would expect.

I personally would do an oil change every 6 months, either myself or somewhere like National Tyres – they generally have an offer voucher on their website and do the job for about the same price as you would pay yourself 5L of oil and a new filter.

As for servicing, I’d get service done every 12 months, but make sure that the garage is actually doing what the service manual requires and not just doing an oil and filter change but charging £99…

I’ve used Tailorstore in the past and found them good. I got a white shirt in one of the better fabrics for about £70. It was very good quality – heavy fabric, good seams etc. You do need to have some time to wait for the shirts (4 weeks approx for delivery) and do some playing around with the measurements. You can also measure up a shirt you already have that fits and they produce a pattern from that.

I also had an M&S one a few years ago in their standard white fabric and it is pretty naff – fit is OK but the fabric is thin and the hem seams pucker. But this is to some extent reflected in the price which is think was around £25-£30.

Another of the online tailors does a free shirt in horrible fabric just to check fit – if you have the time to wait for it and adjust the measurements before placing your order, you should be able to get it spot on.

That said, if all you want is a standard shirt with longer sleeves, the TM Lewins and Charles Tyrwhitt types do that all day long. I’ve found Tyrwhitt shirts to be pretty decent, the non-iron ones almost are, and the standard shirts can be ironed pretty easily. I had some from Lewins and they went straight back – they were near enough impossible to iron.

Next have suits with shorts in!

If a house needed £20k of internal work, I would want it to be something towards £30k cheaper than the equivalent house in ready to go state. £20k isn’t down the back of the sofa money, and you can’t just stick it on your mortgage, so you’ll be getting the work done in dribs and drabs over years. So you have years of living in a building site with some rooms still horrible for much of the time.

Basically, you need more money off than the value of the work that needs doing, otherwise you might as well buy a house that’s already sorted…

In the house I’m referring to, the smell of damp hit you in the face as you walked in, it needed re-plastering and decorating throughout, a new bathroom and kitchen – easily somewhere you could have sunk £10-20k into bringing up to standard.

Which would be fine if it was available for £30k below the going rate and mortgage companies were offering 110% LTV mortgages to fund your refurb work.

It was up at the same asking price as freshly re-fitted houses on the same estate, so it was just a waste of time I’m keen to avoid repeating…

I have one of those in the shed. During summer one in good nick will easily do 80 to 120 on eBay. And that’s the gas pipe version, not the 531 frame.

The 2.0 mk4 is not a GTI. It was badged as a driver in the rest of Europe. Bear in mind that the MK1 GTI had 112 bhp in a light car. The MK4 2.0 has 115 in a much heavier shell.

The 1.8t was the only bona fide MK4 GTI, but even then I’d sooner have a Leon Cupra

I don’t understand the reliability worries. It’s 125 bhp per litre. Nothing different to a 2 litre 250 bhp petrol turbo, which have been around for ages.

Wait for halfords to put them on sale at 200 quid is the cheapest way.

Also check measurements when comparing products, some of the cheaper tool cabinets are cheap because they’re tiny!

Trading standards are busy dealing with products with genuine safety issues. I’d forget about that right away – the guys who deal with complaints know how busy trading standards are!

At this point you’ve had some advice to change bits but you’re not actually out of pocket.

I would chalk it up to experience to be honest and use another dealer. If it were brake pads or discs where wear is easily measured then you could really kick off.

With bearings you could measure play, but bushings are a bit harder to assess.

If you really want to stick the knife in, write to the UK chief exec and explain that they thought it was going to be warranty work.

The ancient glow worms seem to run forever. The modern combis am to pack up pretty regularly. Often the pressure on the system has dropped or something which just needs messing about with some taps on the bottom of the boiler, but as a landlord that will generate work and phone calls for you.

I suspect they’ll make their money back on the discs. Most of the time you might as well change the discs when you do the pads. Changing the discs is very nearly as much work as changing the pads, so you’ll end up having them do it at the same time.

If memory serves all pads now need to be within 15% of OE performance. Depending on the car, 15% less braking might be fine, or it might be a bit marginal.