Henrys aren’t especially cheap (£80 ish), and they don’t really break. That said, the standard Henry works alright on office style nylon contract carpet, but you want one of the powered or turbo brush heads for home use.

For blowing up bike / car tyres once in a while, the cheapest possible compressor will do the job. They’re extremely noisy and pack up quickly under heavy use. Unless you suddenly get ambitious and start trying to run air tools off them, they will do most people.

The Ingersoll Rand machines are awesome, but can be absolutely massive. In a DIY context you would never wear one out. We have an extremely second hand one – it looks to older than the Titanic, but it will happily run tools all day.

Mr Overshoot – can I pick your brains on these? Ours doesn’t shut itself off, which could be a bit worrying if you get forgetful…

Push for cash in lieu of repair. You get paid out the book for the car less salvage value – usually 80 to 90% of book, and it’s not recorded as a wrote off. The car needs to be roadworthy for this – if you’re asked if the tailgate shuts OK, it does. Often if it doesn’t it’s viewed as unroadworthy as fumes could get in.

I briefly worked in the insurance business and have posted about this quite a few times before. Key things are to know what the car is worth in the real world and to bear in mind that most insurance companies starting offer for a write off is 70% of book.

As it’s a no-fault your mate may as well go via accident management, we used Europa who were absolutely fine with me ringing up and saying “I want to avoid a write off, preferably go for cash in lieu and I don’t need a hire car” which is usually anathema for the accident management boys as they make most of their £ off car hire. Accident management gets a bad rap, but I’m happy for them to spend their time arguing with insurance assessors rather than me. And they have a copy of Glasses guide too, so they know immediately when the insurer is taking the mick.

You’ll need to get the same cup size (the big circular drilling on the door) and the same degree of overlay. You get either full overlay (ie, the door sits in front of the upright the hinge is fixed to, half overlay, or no overlay hinges). It should be obvious from looking at how your doors close which type you have.

Where will you be working? At my place, if you rock up in normal conservative business attire, you better be on the board or you’ll look rather odd.

Anyway, the key to looking good in a suit appears to have been missed entirely so far. Make sure it fits! There are loads of great visual guides to suit fit online. The basics are, no gap at the back of the collar, you should be able to o grab the bottom hem of the jacket, shoulders the correct width etc. when you get it off the peg. The find a good alterations place, get the legs and arms taken to the right length, and have the cuff buttons moved. As a rule, a 100 quid suit that’s been picked carefully and had 50 quid spent on alterations will look better than a 400 quid plus suit that’s straight off the rack.

And for the love of god, get some tan English made brogues. Nobody should wear black shoes unless they’re an accountant or in black tie.

Get some form if scan tool hooked up to the car. Even Torque on your phone with a decent Bluetooth adaptor should be able to give you live info on lambda and boost pressure etc. You’re trying to find a fairly minor sounding driveability fault, so something is probably going slightly wrong intermittently. A decent scan tool can monitor the engine’s sensors and give you a good steer as to what’s going on. A fault code reader will only pull up problems that are enough to properly upset the car.

And stop changing bits at random and thinking the ECU might have corrupted. It’s French, but even then, computers are pretty reliable things. You’re far more likely to find a simple mechanical fault like a boost leak of dodgy filter than you are to find that your ECU has gone mad. And if your timing belt was flapping about, it would land on the road pretty sharpish I reckon.

Both Spotify and Deezer are a bit flakey to say the least. Spotify suffers from dementia which means that the playlist you synced to your phone isn’t there any more when you’re in the car or on a plane. Deezer used to lose the odd track, but Spotify loses entire playlists. The interfaces to both are a bit pap – they need to get someone from TomTom in to design them an interface that can be used in a car… The desktop version of Spotify is also horribly busy. And there’s no easy way that I know to transfer your music / playlists from one system to another. There’s also the number of times you listen to a track and go “this isn’t quite right”, and realise it’s because it’s the “Number 1 pop hits orchestra” cover band version.

They’re better than carrying a massive wallet of CDs around, but when you’re at home, a lot the time they’re not as good as going and pulling a CD off the shelf. This morning I had a good 15 minutes faffing around as the laptop wanted to restart for updates whilst I wanted to listen to music. Then the laptop restarted, but didn’t unpair from the speaker…

I suspect that if I were a massive geek with the latest iteration of the iThing on a £60 a month phone contract and a £1k laptop and the time and inclination to fiddle with things to keep them happy, some of these issues could probably be avoided.

The market for 160k cars is pretty narrow, and remember advertised for and actually changing hands for are two completely different things.

I’d spend £600 on a day at rally school for the two of you if your other half is scared of the SAAB. A 9-3 isn’t a particularly fast car unless it’s been meddled with.

Amps don’t really wear out much – I’ve got an Arcam alpha amp that must be 20 years old+ and it’s still spot on, so if you want to cut your spend, you could look for a second hand amp. And obviously speaker stands don’t wear out either.

I’d also add a cheap CD player to the system so that you can listen to CDs. And get one of IKEA’s finest BESTA shelving units as a cheap hifi rack :D

My only other comment would be to not spend £90 on speaker cables. Your connections between the components need to be adequately shielded (ie, not 50p eBay specials) but twin and earth is about as high a spec of speaker cable as you actually need.

Also, for that kind of money I’d be inclined to see if it’s viable to hear the set up at home. And make sure your wife isn’t going to insist on you “hiding” the speakers and cocking up the sound. The best thing I ever did to my hifi was play around getting the speaker positions right.

Always use oil that meets the manufacturer’s spec and viscosity, and change it when you’re told to.

BMW diesels in particular used to be known for doing turbos every 50-70k or so, and one of the major reasons for turbo failure is bad lubrication.

The actual brand itself is far less important. Comma and Tetrosyl produce most of the high street own brand oils. Comma also produce Mobil 1.

The people who run the bottling lines obviously like to run the same shape of bottle as far as they can – as a result you can generally tell who’s buying oil from the same place.

I used to get market research reports every week in one of my old jobs. For the thick end of 3 years, the supermarket trend that Waitrose, Aldi and Lidl were gaining market share, and everyone else was losing out.

This is called “p :!: g in the wind” by all respected market watchers. Basically, no matter how good a company is, if they’re trying to go against the weather, they’re screwed. Can you imagine the rise of Aldi, Lidl and B&M etc. happening during a massive economic boom? No, me neither.

Tesco have got a fair few things going wrong at once.

1) Pricing. Buy one packet of bacon for £3 or 3 for £6 or whatever just does not work in their convenience format stores, which they’ve opened a lot of lately. Maybe in the 150k sq ft warehouse where you’re doing a massive family shop, but not in the convenience stores.
2) Cannabalism. You can barely travel 5 minutes in any direction without finding a Tesco. This means that when Tesco open a new store, they take sales off another Tesco store.
3) Quality. Own label ready meals etc. aren’t as good as Sainsburys, M&S, Waitrose or Ocado, and I’d say not as good as Aldi or Lidl.
4) Profitable customers are going to Aldi and Lidl. The ones with good salaries and company cars who buy Prosecco, ready meals and all the mid / upper tier products that you actually make margin on. And they are completely unashamed about shopping at a “cheap supermarket”.
5) Overseas ventures have gone very badly for them, and cost them a lot of money.
6) Convenience. It’s not convenient for anyone to spend an hour walking around a supermarket the size of an airport. However, this could be said of any of Tesco / JS / Morrisons.
7) They have reached the “try anything” stage of retail management. It’s fairly obvious that they’ve told store managers to try out their own ideas to get sales, which tends to result in a rather odd in store experience on occasion.

£350 a month seems like a hell of a lot of money to drive a Mondeo or Passat estate to me! £4.2k a year.

You should be able to pick up a sensible petrol car for £2-3k and put aside £500 a year if you know a bit about cars. If you get an old diesel, put away a grand as a float on top of that for when the clutch and flywheel goes.

Often the fastest model you can get is the cheapest to run as a second hand car. The bits can be more expensive if they’re dramatically different to the standard car (ie, BMW M cars), but often the fastest model is just a common engine from a bigger model or the turbo boost cranked up a bit. The good thing is that the faster and more desirable models in the range really hang onto their value, so if you go out and buy something like a MK5 or 6 Golf GTI now, in a few years it’ll still be a GTI and you can flog it on as a low mileage car…

I’m not saying that you can get a nice Golf GTI for £3k though. Unless you want a MK2! £3K will easily get you a SAAB Aero estate or a 3 series estate.

All the major courier companies are pushing very hard for work, so there’s no slack time for chasing up mistakes as mentioned by folks above.

Eventually some of the courier firms will exit the market and costs will rise, and click and collect will become far more prevalent.

Henrys are more or less indestructible, but they are poor on carpets when compared to anything with a beater / brush bar, and they’re hard work to shove around.

The Henry is basically the anti Dyson. Stuff your filters, your bagless and your fancy motors, we’ve stuck a massive fan straight onto the end of a massive motor.

Next thing we’ll be getting is one of those little rechargeable uprights.

TBH I’d mention that they’ve scraped your car, that you’ll see if it will polish out but if it needs paint then you’ll have to put it through the insurance.

Going straight to the insurance is most likely going to get you a narked off neighbour who may just deny the lot.

Ideal world they would come round and fess up and make sure it was all made good, but given they haven’t, they’re probably the sort who’ll take umbrage if you demand they make good. Long term it’s a lot less aggro to take a pragmatic approach.

I’ve spent a lot of time using socket sets repairing cars. Not mechanic time, but I DIY almost everything.

Buy a normal 30 or so piece 3/8″ drive set from Sealey, Halfords, Draper, whoever. If Bahco are around at a good price, jump at it. Bahco make proper tools. Don’t go for Halfords purely on the basis of the guarantee – they moaned that the hex bit I took back looked old (it’s been in a shed, not on the mantle!) and wanted a receipt. Most thermal till receipts last for far less time than a socket set, so that’s a bit of a waste of time in my book.

The key things you want are:
[*]A decent grip on the ratchet handle. Sounds dead obvious, but the knurled bar type aren’t what you want when you’re heaving on a stuck fastener.[/*]
[*]Wall-drive sockets. Not bi-hex, not standard 6 point. Wall drive looks like a 6 point hex socket with rounded corners (use google images and you’ll see). They’re far less likely to round off a nut or bolt than standard 6 point as they drive on the side of the nut, not on the corners. Almost every decent brand 6 point should have this – my cheap Sealey set does.[/*]
[*]A complete run of metric sockets. Halfords are brilliant for missing out a size (awesome when you’re halfway through stripping something down and realise that they left the 16mm spanner out!). The only time I’ve ever used imperial sockets is when I’ve hammered them onto knackered metric fasteners. If you want some for that purpose, there will be a bloke with a load of old tools on the local car boot that he can’t get rid of.[/*]
[*]If you’re thinking of working on cars, get some wobble extension bars for working on things that are hard to access.[/*]

After that, you’ll find that you want torx bits, female torx sockets etc. when you work on different things. You’ll also find that you’re using the same sockets constantly – ie, on an old VW, you’ll be using 10mm and 13mm all the time, and you might want odd extra tools in those sizes. My advice is to buy these bits as and when you need them. I’ve got loads of odd bits which are absolutely awesome for doing specific jobs, but the crossover between extra tools I’ve bought and the ones you get in the “MEGA SUPER 400 PIECE TOOL KIT” is almost zero.

It’s dead simple. If you’re not passing anyone, pull into the lane to your left.

Better to be dead in Nottingham than alive in Derby.

Beeston and Woolaton are pretty nice. west Bridgford is probably the nicest place to be in Nottingham but not really an easy drive to Derby.

That said, I’d go for where everyone else is living. Nothing worse than having a works night out and having to cry off due to taxi fares.

Ads pay for the site. Fine, it needs paying for. But STW does seem to have some dodgy ads. Fairly often when I visit the site I get a pop up dialog box with something along the lines of “You have a virus”. I even get it when I travel, but in whatever local language. This is on a new Android phone and my old one, so I don’t think it’s malware. Perhaps you need to check out who is placing ads on the site?

They do commute about, normally following lines of trees or hedgerows. If you need a re roof, it could be they’re roosting in your loft. If there are any lifted tiles or missing ridge mortar there’s potential for them to get in. Small species only need a 10mm hole.

A Damson Oyster has just arrived from Misco. It sounds like it does a lot of weird processing to the audio, and produces a lot of muddy muddy bass. Songs with both quiet and loud confuse it.

Mine will be on ebay in a week or two if you want one!

A mate lives next to a mini Tesco. There’s constant noise from cars starting, revving, doors banging, drunk people using the cash machine etc. Add in the pollution factor and there’s no way you’d get me living next to a petrol station.

Get Perfect CV by Max Eggert. And Perfect Interview if they ring you up.

Fit for purpose is sales of goods act as far as I know – which applies to products bought from retailers and dealers but not private sale. I would expect the usual rules for a private sale of a car to apply – no comeback unless you’ve misdescribed. If you said “100% good working order except for X and Y which are faults P and Q” then there shouldn’t be any comeback at all.

I suspect matey hasn’t had any proper legal advice. Any lawyer would point out that he’d be very likely to spend more than the bike is worth on legal fees, with an uncertain outcome.

Do weights, eat loads of protein.

Fat stores energy. Muscle uses it. All the time. Guess which one your body will chuck out the door first when you start cutting down on food?

The best way to go about it is to go down the gym with the aim of building some muscle and make sure you get plenty of protein so that you recover relatively quickly. Do weights for no more than 45 minutes, write down what you’re doing in a book so you know if you’re progressing. I find it quite simple to make strength gains in the gym, and almost impossible to improve cardio output in the gym. Have a couple of cardio sessions out and about (ie, ride a bike!) and suddenly you’re a lot better on the concept 2 down the gym…

The extra 100kcal per scoop of protein shake is neither here nor there – if your mate wants to lose 1lb a week, he needs to run am average 500kcal deficit every day, so you just have the protein shake instead of something else.

I’ve tried CDex on a couple of machines and never had much look with it.

Any other recommendations?

Dress watch to me means a thin case so it goes under your cuffs happily, no chrono, normally no crown guards, probably no date, rarely any numerals on the face. Something like a Seiko “cocktail time”, an Orient Bambino, or an Omega deville.

That said plenty of people wear big divers watches with suits, and ultimately, most people won’t notice your watch, and even fewer will think anything different of you for it. Unless it’s absolutely massive / gopping. Almost any watch will cost to money in either depreciation or servicing.Ultimately, you’ll look at it most, so buy one you like.

I think if I had 400 quid burning a hole in my pocket, there would be a Steinhart Ocean Military Vintage on its way to me, even though it’s a replica of a classic Rolex diver and nowhere near a classic dress watch.

The C65 has a real Sinn vibe. There are also a lot of Seikos that have very similar cases and are considered Sinn lookalikes. You could potentially get a custom seiko that looks very similar for 100 to 150 quid.

That style of case with crown guards is unusual to have on a dressier watch but you may find it on vintage military or sports watches.

I’d look again at the insurance value. We had a ring made with a diamond that’s probably worth £300, and the setting cost £120. Retail on something like that would be £800-£1000 if you went to a dear jeweller.

No reason why you wouldn’t go and buy a couple of diamonds online and get a new one made again rather than nipping down to the dearest jewellers in town.

£400 for me would mean either buying a new watch with an ETA movement, or buying something vintage. Or I’d cut the budget massively and buy a Seiko or Orient from eBay / Amazon / Creation Watches.

My personal taste would be to try and find a very minimal dress watch with a hand wind or auto movement – A Nomos, Junghans Max Bill, Hamilton Intramatic, Tissot Visodate etc. A bit of a “What would Don Draper wear” type deal :lol:. As a rule, manual wind results in a thinner and cheaper watch than an auto. If I were you, I’d go to a fancy jeweller and have a look at the likes of Rolex, Omega etc. and what their models look like and what styles you like. Most watches are copies of other watches in some way or another, and the last thing you want to do is buy something that’s a blatant Rolex Submariner or Panerai copy without realising it.

ETA / Swatch group are basically the VW Audi of the watch world. They own most of the major watch brands, with the added bonus that they sell engines to other people too. A £3-400 Hamilton or Tissot will have an ETA movement. A TAG Heuer will have an ETA movement. A £3-4k Omega will have an ETA movement. TAG and Omega barely change anything on their cheaper watches, to doing the full co-axial movement on the top of the line Omegas.

A lot of smaller non-swatch makers also use ETA movements – ie, Steinhart, Timefactors etc. Steinharts are fantastic quality watches for the money.

ETA are by no means the be all and end all of watch movements, but it’s an easy rule of thumb that if it’s got an ETA in it, it’ll be OK. I’ve got watches with Chinese movements, which run beautifully, but nobody’s ever going to covet them.

Basically, if you find a watch you like, do a google search for it’s name along with the word movement, and someone will have already covered the question on a watch forum.

If anyone claims that they have an “their own in house movement” and they’re not Rolex, Seiko or Orient, go and do a bit of googling and see how true it is.

Seiko and Orient make watches around the £100 mark, and I quite like them just because they make the entire thing in house. Y’know, like Rolex like to make a fuss about. :lol: Seiko make a lot of fancy divers watches, but they don’t make many nice dressy watches – even the £10k Grand Seikos look barely different to a £50 Seiko 5 Auto… Yokobies (a bloke called Harold, based in HK) has a photobucket site and will basically custom make a Seiko to your requirements, which opens a massive range of possibilities. Orient do a couple of nice dress watches.

Another option would be Invicta – I don’t particularly like the brand, but they use nice Seiko based movements, and the prices are incredible. Because the movements are basically Seikos, there are a massive amount of replacement parts available if you want to lose the Invicta brand.

And if I were to go vintage, I’d be looking for an old Omega, Tudor or Poljot. Old Omegas and Tudors are at the upper end of your price range, but obviously they’ve both got a huge reputation. I’d suggest buying from a dealer if at all possible, or getting on a watch forum and asking the guys there to check out your potential purchases. There are a lot of Omegas that are made out of 3 different watches pieced together. Tudor are basically Rolex’s version of Skoda. Same guts, better prices.

Another option would be to go and hunt out something like a vintage Accurist or similar that would have been contemporary to your grandparents. I would expect them to be using fairly standard Swiss movements and not in the least bit waterproof, but I’ve never had one. There is also a nice range of re-issue quartz Accurists around at the moment.

Poljot were a Russian firm that made some gorgeous hand wind watches in the 60s (also sold here by Sekonda), spectacularly thin movements, but you really want to buy at the top end of the market (£120-£150) from a seller with a string of good feedback. I’ve got a Poljot that could really do with a service and some gold replating, and the work would cost me more than buying a perfect one. Again, these aren’t covetable like the major swiss brands, but prices are on the up.

The Rotary skeleton watches are built around Chinese movements, which get a fettle in Switzerland to meet the requirements for being stamped “Swiss made”. I don’t know if that’s something that bothers you, but the rules are that if more than 50% of the value was added in Switzerland (ie, made in China cheaply, then polished and QCed in Switzerland by expensive labour), the watch makers will stick “Swiss made” all over everything.

If I were you, I’d be looking for something with a nice ETA automatic movement if you’re spending £300+. You’ve got much more chance of it holding value over time, and being serviceable. Or go for Quartz 8O

Tissot Visodate or Hamilton Intramatic. Both have a really nice 60s dress watch vibe going on. Both should be available for under £400 – Hamiltons are always available at good prices from Creation. And Tissot are relatively cheap for a swiss brand.

It’ll be down to rate of sale. If the locals don’t eat much fruit and veg, it’ll take a while to sell through a box of 24 lettuces or whatever. The veg from the Lidl local to us is fine, and about half the price of JS.

I know of a Tesco that’s worked around this problem by having a fruit and veg section about a quarter of the size of what you’d expect…

The 9-3 Aero is ludicrous value for money. You will get through petrol at approx 30-33mpg,but you also get a nice fat turbo shove down the road. The mpg means about £500 a year difference at 10k miles compared with 45mpg from a diesel.

Fat shouldn’t mean lazy these days. The fact is, if you’re working a normal office 9-5 job, you’re going to really struggle to outrun a bad diet. An hour on the bike or in the gym might get you through 600 calories. An hour in wetherspoons or similar can easily provide you with 1000-1500 calories of food.

We went to test drive one with something like 50k on the clock. The interior looked absolutely shagged. It looked like a car that had done 150k. So if you keep cars for a while, you might want to look elsewhere. Residuals are good though!

15 to 20 quid. There’s always a half price tracking deal available on the national tyres website.

I’d only pay 50 quid plus if I were having a car done with full 4 wheel adjustability, camber etc.

Unless you’re ginormous and have actually crushed the springs, all that’s happened is the wadding on top of the springs has compressed. If you don’t want to spring for a new mattress, chuck a mattress topper on it.

Cheap is more likely to last as the wadding will be synthetic rather than natural materials. I’m guessing it’s also a no turn, so there’s only one side to take all the wear?

Better fabric isn’t likely to fix issues like seams puckering in my view. Probably poor qc at one of their factories – ie luck of the draw.

I’ve got some swatches coming in from Tailor Store, will let you know how I go on. 50 quid isn’t too bad if they’re decent – it’s not hard to pay more than that off the peg.

What I’m after a is a psuedo MTM shirt – the online jobs where you punch your measurements and someone in a workshop on the far side of europe gets cracking with a sewing machine. The M&S ones arrive in a week or two.

I’ve got no plans to go to HK any time soon, but if you know anyone decent anywhere in Asia, let me know as there’s a chance I’ll end up there sooner or later. Last time I looked online, it seemed like a bit of a lottery with most of the HK & Shenzhen tailors.