Be Excellent To Each Other

I like black wheels personally. I think they make a car look harder. You definitely need to drop that a bit Zardoz.

Cheers, done a few other bits of faffing, calipers, smoked repeaters, debadged... Stumpy aerial

Yeah, I'm going to drop it I think JC. My cousin has offered to help.The eibachs for mine are subtle, 25mm / 30mm and supposedly keep penthouse of comfort. Can't go to severe as the TDis have low sumps compared to the petrols.

Heh, penthouse.

I wish he'd hurry up and get it sorted because while he's driving it, I can't

I thought you'd sold your Celica when you got your beastie Beemer, Gaz?

I'd be keeping it!

I wouldn't let him sell the celica even if he wanted to.

I considered it, but I couldn't bear to part with it in the end.

And now, of course, as Jem doesn't-quite-outright-say, I'd lose my dingus if I sold it now.

I should paint my plastic hubcaps

Take them off and get your steelies banded.

Is that a thing?

Google

Heh! Excellent Jem, fast lady.


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Slightly OT but kinda relevant; this reminds me of when, about a couple of years back, some young lady in an Evo FQ360 (I think) absolutely whupped my arse in the Boxster S-Black (and I mean *humiliated* me; I was ten tenths, drifting the car all over the place and if I say so myself, I'm a reasonably handy driver). At the end of it, I caught her up at the lights.I'm not sure what she was expecting but I tipped my hat, gave her the thumbs up and blew her a kiss. She laughed and then, as the lights turned green, graciously motioned for me to go first, with no hint of being patronising, just a "I've beaten you, dad, but fair play to you old man, you gave it a good shot". What an amazing lass; man, she could drive and deserved every inch of her impressive steed.

Well, today I learned something

Sorry, I would have posted something more informative myself but I was on my way home.

S'ok

Z, you're such a Barry boy.

Weirdly the Civic drives loads better when it's got a working clutch. Think the garage are ignoring me, so I'm going to read the warranty fine print when I get home. It's booked in anyway on Monday for a new rear wiper motor and to look at the (now nonexistent) engine light - the garage who did the clutch gave me the code and cleared it, it hasn't come back yet… the code refers to the catalytic converter it seems.

Pff, you don't need that.

POWAR!

Be good if you can get the cat replaced under warranty, fingers crossed.

I wish I could get our cat replaced under warranty...

Brief Merc update.

Things still to be fixed:

Parking sensor and heated passenger side wing mirror. I've said I'll wait until they have both of these and take the car back in once, rather than one visit for each thing. It was going to happen last week but the glass for the wrong side arrived so they're now waiting on the glass again. I've got used to parking it without the sensors and don't give a crap about a heated passenger side wing mirror, but I will get them fixed just so the car is 100% in case I decide to get rid, and also because I'm very OCD about these things and shit not working properly annoys me.

Niggles to be sorted:

The aftermarket connector/bluetooth kit which cost me over £500 for purchase and installation is currently sat in BYPASS mode and doing precisely fuck all, because it doesn't remember where it's up to on the USB key and goes back to the start every time the engine is turned off and on. I raised a support ticket with Dension and they eventually (after some prodding) suggested that (1) I revert to an older (!) firmware and (2) The unit requires constant rather than switched power.

I rang the company that did the installation of the the kit and explained the situation and Dension's response, and they were like, 'Ahhhh right, drop it off with us next Wednesday please' - I take this to mean they installed it with switched power, rather than constant power....

Other than that it's all working fine (famous last words....), and also seems to be settling down to a very acceptable 37mpg. About 650 miles to a tank as well, so I'm not visiting the pumps very often.

Did Gaz tell you about the time we did a track day in the Celica and he left fingerprints in the door because of my driving? One of my proudest moments, that.

No you're not.

</pet peeve>

'Very particular about these things', then.

Excellent

I suddenly like you even more than I did already.

I levelled up to "intense dislike"? Awesome

I've got another one as well, but I can't remember what that is.

Cool story bro.

I like him less, because my pet peeve is missing opening tags.

SMITE!

</bothered>

Your face is malformed xml.

that's not how it is man.

I'm not there yet? Damnit!

</keeps grinding>

Got home from work to find the touch-up kit had arrived, can't fault them on speed of delivery considering I ordered it on Wednesday evening.

Not going to be arsed with it tonight though. Tonight is for Tesco SIMPLY CHARDONNAY and finish off with a pizza at around midnight, tomorrow I will have a fuck about with the touch-up kit. I'm really not very good with things like this though, but I'll have a crack at it.

If it goes monumentally wrong there's always a professional body shop.

Haha that restoration is one of Mrs JC's faves

Well it's not exactly a masterpiece but it's better than it was, I think I need to get a couple more coats in there to sort of fill it out to the same level as the rest of the paint, although it's debatable if I'll be arsed or not - it is at least the right colour now.

The trick with filling scratches like that is to fill the hole and more with paint, then buff it so that it blends in. And that will take more than just one quick application.

That may turn out to be considerably more faff than I'm prepared to commit to. I have done a second application but it doesn't seem to have helped much.

I may stick on, 'it's the right colour now, it'll do'.

The rubber buttons had melted off my remote locking/alarm dongle and the spare is the same but also held together with sellotape, so I thought I'd buy a refurb kit from the manufacturers. It's looking much better now!

Did you ever get any joy with the clutch or did the garage stop all communications in the end and leave it at that?

It's in with them at the moment for the rear wiper and cat issues. They've washed their hands of the clutch saying their warranty is "return to base" only. Much hand wringing and apologies and how unfortunate it was I wasn't nearby.

I'll wait for the warranty to run out and then think about options.

That's a bit shit and I know you didn't have any choice but to get the clutch sorted elsewhere, but it did kind of give them a get out of jail free card on it as well.

Hopefully it'll be plain sailing with the car from here on in (Or you get rid.....)

It seems like a long time since I've seen a key with the remote bits on a separate fob. How quaint.

Orange

Its been nearly 5 years since I actually used a car key. My Hyundai had one built in the fob for emergencies, but any rentals I've had (and the current car) don't even have that.

I swapped my fob bits into a new casing that I bought from ebay and needed to get the new key blade cut. The guy in the shop insisted that I'd been ripped off as you need to reprogram transponders and he didn't have the necessary equipment and no-one else would apart from Citroen. He still cut the key for me put insisted firmly that I was wasting my money.

When I got home, I flipped the transponder out of my broken key with a screwdriver and stuck it in the new one with blu tack. It worked fine.

True story.

2002 represent. I don't even have air con.

No fob.
No air con.
Manual windows.
Code for the radio cassette player on the dashboard due to a faulty earth resetting the ECU every so often.

2006 represent!