Be Excellent To Each Other

Time to buy a Puma.

Heh. Yeah.

Get a puma

Is it not somewhat undrivable with the two broken springs?

Did they let you take it home again?

It is sat in the garage and he is pricing the job up...

I think k it is the cat which will be painful, and the abs Light.

Sweepstake!

£160 parts, £300 labour (I'm assuming the ABS fault is a sensor).

I think 200 parts, 250 labour.

Or 90% of a puma...

Wait - is it a Ford garage?

No. Independent place that does up minis and beetles.

You'd best wait and see what happens in the Puma's MOT next week.

My obd2 readers says it is a sensor fault. P500 Code

Springs and fitting £140
plugs, oil and air filter should see it through emissions £120
passenger door £60

They will trace the abs thing.

It needed new oil and plugs and filters anyway.

School me on butt connectors and crimping when it comes to car wiring, guys.

I've got a Dension Gateway MP3 jobbie to plug into the 650. It requires a 12V feed, so I'm basically wanting to come off the power supply for the CD Changer for this.

Rather than using Scotchloks (the results of which I've seen in the dashboard of my Celica when everything started going crazy with the electricals until I got a guy to fix it) I figured I'd chop the power connector for the CDC off, then join it back together with a butt connector for both the 12V and GND wires, with the ones for the Dension coming out of one end.

This is a sound idea, right? It seemed to work OK other than there not being much room for manoeuvre within the car itself so I ended up pulling the crimps out while trying to wrestle the CDC's power connector back into the unit.

I might try again tomorrow evening but see if I can remove the glovebox to give me more room, but if butt crimping (lolzors) is no good, what's the alternative?

Chocolate block connectors?

I seem to recall doing something similar to this with my dad when we were installing a new stereo (with subs and amped 6x9s) and an alarm on my Fiesta (my second car, bought it off my mum).

Was a bit fiddly with some of the shorter wires but once done, it worked well enough.

Sounds like a daft question, but would speaker wire (stranded core) be suitable for extending the wires coming off the power connector that I've removed? (which are also stranded core, and look like speaker wire to me)

I assume it'd be fine given that it looks like what's already in the power connector, but if speaker wire is going to be unsuitable for carrying power I don't want to cause any problems...

Not much room at the car side to wrestle them in, and would probably foul the CDC at the rear when I try and reinstall it.

It's certainly not ideal, but as long as the draw won't be too high, speaker wire will be fine. What are you connecting to it?

Electrical wire is so cheap you should probably just go an pick up a few meters, but unless you're wiring in a high-power head unit or your lights or something it should be okay.

It'll be powering the CD changer in the car, as well as the Dension Gateway unit that I've bought. Both should be fairly low loads, although in theory the Dension can charge USB devices so that might put it into high-draw levels?

Will nip into Maplin at lunchtime and see if I can get them to sell me some suitable wire.

Can't you just solder the wires together?

No, there's not enough movement in the cable that's still in the car to really give me much room to work with a soldering iron without risking damaging the trim in the car - although apparently if I can remove the glovebox I can pull the cable down further and that'll give me more scope.

Basically, what I'm taking from this is that BMW are a bit stingey when it comes to cable length.

Just twist it together and wrap some insulation tape round it. It only needs to last a month before you get bored of it and sell it anyway.

The man has a point.

I once bodged a 3.5" hard drive into an amiga 1200 like this. Not only with the power cable (from the floppy drive), but with every individual wire of the ribbon cable. It worked surprisingly well.

I managed to pull the offending cable down from behind the glove box which gave much better access to the connections on the thing.

As a result, I now have a fully working MP3 and USB player in the car complete with A2DP Bluetooth audio. So now I just need to decide whether to stick to playing music from my phone, or whether to try and dig out one of my old iPods and hook that up permanently.

Abs fault was..... alternator charging at 16v causing the light to come on. New alternator needed

Ouch.

Should have bought a Puma

Mot Test pass!

Finally!

That holds big car's mirror on.

I saw a Ferrari limo today in Bradford. It had the region F12 Fat. I was quite amazed. It sounded good

I saw a Tesla Model S on the A556 near Mere today. Didn't know what it was as I didn't recognise the badge, but Mrs. W saw what it was. Looks rather swish.

Went to Prescott hill climb today. Some lovely French oddities there.

I assume you're referring to that guy's trousers.

I suspect they are M&S rather than French. My dad wears very similar ones

Ooohh that black one is ripped off in GTAV.

I’m not convinced.

That one looks more like a Lamborghini Espada to me

Especially when you consider the name.

That's not a great angle, I'll go into the game and find one and and get a pic, the headlight configuration is the clincher for me.

Does anyone know what the make and model of the car is in Zoidberg's pic? The site I lifted the GTA image from lists the influences as:

Pigalle by Lampadati
Influences: Alpine A310, Maserati Ghibli

It’s a Citron, I think. It’s got the look, and it’s parked with others.

I even got it resprayed black so it's the same colour....

Some innocent people died to bring you these images.

It's a Citroen SM

So if you Google Citroen SM, and then look at my pics of the car in GTAV there, that's what it is - it's a Citroen SM.

The headlights/number plate configuration is a dead-ringer.

The front end is fairly SM-like, but the back end is totally different.
Like most GTA cars it's bits from a number of vehicles mashed together.

Now exhaust is blowing on big car. Fuck's sake. hopefully I can patch it with a tin can later tonight. It is very noisy.