OV9

Beany is busy running Twitter at the moment, he'll get to fixing EVO magazine when he's done with that.

Carlos wrote: Fri Jul 28, 2023 6:33 pm GT86 is in lovely condition and still under Toyota Warranty for another 2 years so should be a relatively safe purchase for her.



I'm looking forward to it myself, more than quick enough to have fun. Not sure why I've read that it needs more power!

That's a very tidy looking motor she's gonna be well popular

But only with one friend at a time

That's a stonking first car - congrats to her and hope the Dad-Worry is minimal Carlos.

tim wrote: Sat Jul 29, 2023 8:48 am Beany is busy running Twitter at the moment, he'll get to fixing EVO magazine when he's done with that.

Exactly, we've all agreed that I know everything and everyone else is wrong.

At least after I've had a bottle of wine.

...that was a foot tall and topped with cork

Can't believe I manually entered a unicode character for that

Seats out for a wash & blow dry.



Predictably disgusting.

Yeah yeah yeah... they're not going back in, are they? Well, maybe with beaded seat covers and a taxi spec steering wheel wrap.
Is there enough space for a "My other car is a Peugeot 406 Coupe." sticker? (Slightly o/t, would a 406 kit have Mincing Lion badges?).

I'm always amazed that people don't spend proper time and money cleaning cars for sale particularly at that end of the market!

That's clearly hasn't had a wet vac in a very long time

X5 fail.

Heated seat switches turned up, pulled the rear air vents off, no wires / plugs.

Then decided to try the horrible job of removing the entire centre console to see if they’ve been tucked out of the way somewhere.

Nope, still can’t find them.

However I did swap the non-working front ashtray power point with one from the old airvent panel so that now works, and tidied up the wiring which was stopping the flap on the rear vent opening so that all works now.

Had a quick look under the rear bench and couldn’t see any spare sockets, if they’re anywhere I assume they’ll be under the carpet. The loom was all there for the seat backs/ bases, there’s wires going to the right fuse / relay location at the back of the car.

Annoying. Will wait until I swap the seat bases over which will allow me to lift the carpet and have a look.

Turns out they’re attached to the loom which runs off under the carpet under the back of the passenger seat.

Pinched the relay from the headed rear screen and they’re all working



Pulled apart the spare drivers seat I’m not going to use, just to see how they’re assembled before I attempt it on the good ones.

Wonder if I can retrofit the pneumatic lumbar support to the compact

Carlos wrote: Sat Jul 29, 2023 2:53 pm I'm always amazed that people don't spend proper time and money cleaning cars for sale particularly at that end of the market!

That's clearly hasn't had a wet vac in a very long time

You say "that end of the market" but tbf I'm at the rock-bottom end of this end of the market The car had been washed & hoovered and looked good. No problem there. Today I was updside-down under the dash removing some wiring (old hifi / iPod) and noticed it smelt a bit... not bad, but dusty with a good dose of air freshener. That stuff works its way into everything. So seats out, some of the trim out, blast all the nooks & crannies with compressed air to get the dust moving, wet vac all the carpet. I'm part way through doing the frunk too. Decent weather today for drying it.

Side note - the leather is in very good condition for the age & mileage, hardly any wear on the driver's seat. I cleaned the steering wheel and a load of red colouring came off revealing that it's pretty worn. I'll switch it for the MOMO that arrived today and decide how bothered I am about having the "correct" steering wheel. A retrim isn't disastrously expensive to have done.

I've also been doing some stupid little jobs that are normal "old cars that have had a few different owners" things but nonetheless feel a bit disappointing.

* Having pulled most of the carpet out of the frunk to un-wire the aftermarket amplifier, I noticed an unplugged plug going to the latch. Plugged it back in. Later on noticed that the car now gave a "frunk open" warning. Huh ? For some reason the logic deployed in designing this thing was that open circuit = good thing. It's normally t'other way round as a failsafe. The plug goes to a simple microswitch on the mechanism. I tweaked the arm very slightly with some pliers and all good again. And the frunk courtesy light came on. It wasn't working before. I can only assume that the slight wear on the microswitch was causing the light to stay on and drain the battery, and some frigging rocket scientist decided the best solution was to unplug it instead of spending two seconds with some plier to actually fix it

* There's an aluminium foot plate in the passenger footwell, held on with four allen bolts, one was hanging out, wouldn't engage. So I loosened off the other three, gave it a wiggle, tightened up all four no problem.

* The battery is behind that panel. Both battery terminals were sitting high up - proud of the battery terminal - with the clamp mashed up and over tightened. Extra washers added to one of them presumably because they thought it would tighten it more ? And the retaining clamp wasn't tightened up so the battery could wiggle about a bit and had been rubbing on the trim panel.

* The a-pillar rubber trim wasn't sitting straight about halfway down. I tried hitting it but to no avail. Peeled it back and there's a bolt there securing something, that hadn't been done up at all. Sticking out maybe 10mm. Tightened it up, trim now fits fine again.


These are all nice easy fixes thankfully. It just goes to show though, that just because you can afford a GENUINE 406 COUPÉ it doesn't mean you're more mechanically proficient than someone who can't afford a GENUINE 406 COUPÉ.

406 coupe. Call yourself a Ferrari fanboy?

Good job I edited before anyone noticed.

Got the Mini out of the garage for the first time since 2019 - the dust could have qualified it as a barn find!
The tractor mechanic that my Dad uses swapped the clutch slave cylinder for me (it seized from lack of use in lock down).
Ran rough initially round the fields with the kids, which I think is just the old petrol. Started to clear after 30 min
, so gave it a short run out. Very little touches this for enjoyment on a country road - 60 feels like 100.

"Compact"
+ Webasto, lovely

Jimexpl wrote: Sat Jul 29, 2023 9:32 pm Got the Mini out of the garage for the first time since 2019 - the dust could have qualified it as a barn find!

More pictures of the Mini please....

Matty wrote: Sat Jul 29, 2023 11:02 pm

Jimexpl wrote: Sat Jul 29, 2023 9:32 pm Got the Mini out of the garage for the first time since 2019 - the dust could have qualified it as a barn find!

More pictures of the Mini please....

I hardly have any on my phone - I’ve owned it since 1999, so most photos of it are pre-digital!

Here’s one the summer that I bought it. All original other than a Stage 1 kit. It had been in the same family ownership almost from new, c70k miles. The following week the steering failed in a multi-storey car park…
The engine gave up about a year later, so had it rebuilt by M.E.D to what was about a Stage 3 spec 1330cc, and the last time it was on a rolling road made 104hp at 6-6,500rpm and 101lbft.
Usual mini suspension upgrades. It’s a bit of a survivor, with almost all original bodywork and paint, but is definitely a 10ft car these days, and will need a resto at some point.

The steering ‘failed’? Nowadays is read that as the power steering failing but how did it break on the Mini?

Jobbo wrote: Sun Jul 30, 2023 6:50 am The steering ‘failed’? Nowadays is read that as the power steering failing but how did it break on the Mini?

The splines had worn out where the column joins the rack, leading to comedy arm twirling and no change in direction while enthusiastically driving up the ramps between floors in the car park!

Balls.

Back in the winter the x5 dropped a cylinder, was just a coil pack, bought one from euros to fix it and decided I should probably get a couple in stock just in case.

Of course I never got round to it and today it decided to drop no5.

Haven’t bothered swapping any over to check the diagnosis ( it’s raining ) just ordered a set of 8 and some fresh plugs too as I’ve no idea when they were changed.

Fleet update. Macan has passed 2000 miles and had its first hiccup yesterday; the PCM screen in the dash stayed blank. Not sure what was wrong; my wife was passing the Porsche dealer anyway so she stopped in and they fixed it. Probably with some secret method of rebooting it, since turning the car off and on again didn't fix it.

Audi is doing a nice job of being quick, economical, relaxing but also quite fun to drive - while I did like the comfy ride of the Allroad, the pleasure of driving the S6 more than makes up for the slightly firmer ride. Which isn't particulaly harsh; it's not like old-school Audis. Even in Dynamic mode with the suspension stiffened it's actually OK (or are the dampers still variable in that mode, I wonder?)

Anyway, the Audi has a couple of minor annoyances, having reached 6,500 miles:
- Air con decides to turn off for no reason. Just the drying/cooling functionality but it confuses the climate control and allows it to steam up. It seems to come back on by switching the a/c button off and on again so I'm not sure if it's a software issue, a sensor or perhaps not enough gas in the system. Will book it in; with hindsight I realise it's been doing it since new but it wasn't so warm out when I got it and it was just a steamed-up car one day which gave it away in the first week of ownership.
- There's an annoying squeak noise from the plastic below the dash display. It's a cheap-feeling piece of plastic; I guess Audi didn't expect people to touch that bit but they've ballsed up by using plastic which chirrups away
- The front splitter is a bit lower than it was on the Allroad so it now has a slight scrape underneath from a high kerb. Barely noticeable but you can feel it with your hand. What's particuarly annoying is that I have front cameras and parking sensors and thought they would have come on automatically as I drove slowly into the parking space. They did at the moment I heard the scrape In fact, I still haven't worked out when the handbrake automatically applies itself when you park and turn off the engine (sometimes it doesn't) and when the cameras automatically come on (sometimes they don't).

One other thing on both: Carplay on the Audi is great, lovely high-res screen with Google aerial view maps but the Carplay buttons aren't scaled up to match the size and resolution of the screen so they're a bit small when trying to touch them. Carplay shows up the in-built nav which also has Google aerial view but the images don't seem as high res, and the traffic data (which I think comes from Google) doesn't cover anything below A-roads, so Google Maps via Carplay is simply more useful.
In contrast, the Macan has a similar sized screen but only allows Carplay to take up a window in it, about 2/3 of the whole screen. It's bizarre and there are third parties who will allow it to be full screen.