Be Excellent To Each Other

12 month MOT
FSH
56k miles
83 bhp
I have aged 40 years.

It should get me to work and back until we sort out a bigger car

Rover 25?

Oh.

I found a Glacier mint in the glove box.

83? Wow

Not a werthers? How odd.

Air vents like an Audi TT.

It's an 11 second car. Which is 1 better than a 10 second car.

The Ka was better than that

Has half the driver's door handle fallen off?

It's the thingy you hold on to. Yes.

Nah. The ka needed at least £400 of stuff doing to get it through the MOT. And was set to explode way before the MOT expired dye to the thermostat issues I mentioned.

A 12 year old Rover 25 with a K series engine is waaaaaaay less of a risk. This was £660

Oh. And the interior lights, clock and MOST IRRITATINGLY cd player don't work. I suspect this is a fuse.

Nice flags, too. Showing off the panel gaps.

Twin cup holders and white dials.

I'd love a decent cup holder

Fuse changed. Lights and clock now work. Cd player doesn't but I'll pop it out tomorrow then change the head unit.

The fan only works on settings 3 and 4 which is something to do with a resistor. I'll just pop the air con on if I get warm.

I have three at the front and one at the back. Which is weird.

How many in your car?

Sex tape?

Also I only have two seatbelts in the back. What's that all about?

Winner

Your k series will developed head gasket problems at 70k and blow up. Jus sayin.

That's 2 years away. Hopefully we'll have actually bought another car by then and this one gets scrapped.

I'm under no illusions about the potential problems, these are mitigated by the service history, how long i expect to run the car and the price paid. £660 for a 12 month MOT is what I've bought.

I thought the main issues with head gasket failure on the K-Series were people not maintaining coolant and oil properly, as the engines have very small tolerances for under/over-filling?

I thought the main issues with head gasket failure on the K-Series were people not maintaining coolant and oil properly, as the engines have very small tolerances for under/over-filling?[/quote]
I think there's a case for increasing the size of the bypass and bleed hoses. My opinion is that the actual gaskets that come with the are pants as they're just a sheet of tin with wiggly bits of silicone on them.

Gaz has bought and sold cars literally on the basis of cup holders.

And.....the battery's flattened itself. It's on the optimate now. I'll see if the one from the Ka fits.

That'll be why they left that fuse unreplaced. It drains the battery.

You might be right, you know. I shall see if the boot light ot glove box light (if fitted) is warm. If not will see if alternator is warm in the morning, if it is, it be draining.

Worst case is it doesn't start tomorrow and then I take the ka in, or it doesn't start after work and I get the train home.

We had the battery go flat and (before it was traced to a faulty Bluetooth module) the RAC man unplugged the glovebox and boot lights because he said they often don't auto-shut off leading to flattery battery.

I took it off charge this morning and it started first time. I also disconnected the boot light. It did the 50 minute trip to work with no problems and no warning lights. Now to see if it starts at 5 pm. ...

The ka battery will fit in it, so that's a relief.

I hope you parked on a hill!

You say disconnected... couldn't you have just turned it off?

Facing down, too!

Pulled the connecting wire out

Couldn't you have just climbed in the boot and shut the lid to check it turns off?

I prefer to point my phone at the light and record a video (of the boot being shut, obv).

Or just fold the back seat down. But since it's Mali he should climb in there.

That's way more thinking than "oh the boot is open as I am putting stuff in it so I might as well disconnect the light".

http://www.toyotaownersclub.com/forums/ ... ant-level/

Is this the same GazChap? I need to top up my coolant and couldn't figure out how to get the stupid cover off either. Thanks

edit: Looking back in this thread, I'd like to point out that mine is normal looking and blue, and not a rallyman's fantasy.

Hah, yep - that's me. Glad my lack of knowledge helped someone else

(my brother always jokes about me working on my car, as I used to have to ask him to change lightbulbs for me as I couldn't get my hands in the gap to reach the back so he'd have to take bumpers off and shiz - this leads to a bulb change as being a "1 spanner job")

And I'm waiting for a train

Oops

I suspect now it is the stereo wrongly wired in so it is constantly on. Obviously this doesn't help me right now, but i feel better for having thought to investigate it.

The storylines of BETEO are getting too predictable and samey. Hearthly with the old merc, Mali with the old Rover.

It's the economy. You think we can afford new writers? Getting a couple of the sub-eds to slightly change up old plots is the best you'll get these days

What about if we charged a subscrip... wait, now I'm recycling old jokes too

Sub-edded.

The end of the Merc tales is almost (hopefully) in sight, it's back in again tomorrow for them to have a third crack at fixing the Parktronic system, they confidently informed me that they now have a full Mercedes troubleshooting guide to follow.

I'm now on first name terms with everyone at the dealership, and including the return to the auto-electrical place to get the Dension rewired, we're into double digit figures for the amount of times I've had to take it back for something, in less than three months. (It's quite good though as it gets a mini-valet every time before they return it so it's been lovely and spotlessly clean, which is handy because I fucking hate washing cars.)

That said, once the Parktronic system is sorted the car will be 100% (for now....), and all done in the six month warranty.

Then again on the subject of the warranty, I had a couple of days off the other week and just for interest's sake I wandered into a car dealer in my home town (notionally because I was interested in getting a brand new Suzuki Swift Sport on their 0% APR offer). Best he'd do on a trade for the Merc was £8000 (!), and he wanted to see it first (we only live about two minutes walk away so we walked over to the house together where the car is parked), and then he had to make a few phone calls to see if he could get anyone who would take it off him - and out of that came the £8000 offer.

He was giving it the patter about how it'd be hard to sell a car like the Merc because you can't put any sort of meaningful warranty on it, I told him that the dealer I'd bought it off had put a six month warranty on it and he just looked straight at me and said 'He probably didn't, you know.'

This does actually tie in with what we'd already worked out for ourselves (me and the chaps at work have chatted around it), if you look into third party warranties for a car of the Merc's age and type (i.e. there's nothing cheap to fix on it), you're paying hundreds of pounds for a warranty that basically doesn't cover anything.

The dealer I spoke to said as much, words to the effect of, 'When you sell a car like that the only thing you can really do is stand by it'. (Apparently eight years old is about your limit for any sort of reasonable warranty, and the Merc will be ten in July.)

As I said, this didn't come as any kind of shock as we'd already worked out that there was no warranty and that me and the original dealer were basically pretending to each other that it existed. (I've never had any paperwork for it.)

In spite of all this, I do rather like the car, and believe that I am minded to keep it for my usual 18-24 months, rather than binning it off after 6 months when the 'warranty' expires.

I had this discussion a year or so ago with Mrs JC about our Mini when it needed a few things done. Over the space of two years it had had new ball joints, new brakes, two engine sensors and a steering lock sensor. Oh, and four new tyres. However, thankfully I was able to convince her that these are all pretty much wear and tear items and hey, we'd just replaced them all so we would be mad to sell it because we'd only be passing the new reliability onto some one else, who then wouldn't have to lift a finger.

Thankfully in the year since the car has ran like a champ and we've taken three quite long trips in it with no issues whatsoever.

MOT is up in July IIRC. But there are no error codes on the car at all so unless something like a gator is fucked we should be fine.

That's kind of where I'm at with the Merc, but I haven't totally made my mind up yet

In a way it'd be a shame to have spent three months or so getting the thing absolutely perfect, just to get rid of it 'cause it's pissed me off in the process. (And it hasn't actually cost me any extra money, because the dealer who sold it to me has put everything right without question, it's just been a lot of faffing about and phone calls and suchlike.)

Assuming the Parktronic gets fixed tomorrow (which is the last thing wrong with it), I'll give it another three months (the rest of the 'warranty'), and if it behaves itself for those three months, I think it'll make it onto the standard issue 'keep for 18-24 months' list - and then we'll see how it goes from there.