Be Excellent To Each Other

Micro yay.

Garage calls to say car’s ready to collect first thing tomorrow and they’d got wrong prices off their supplier for parts so it’s only £766 instead of £849.
Gearbox has had oil change too.

Unexpected cash windfall! Treat yourself to one of these:

https://hobbyking.com/en_us/catalog/pro ... tore=en_us

Did the mr muscle sticky turbo vane clean, swapped the last vacuum line to the actuator (all sexy purple now) and also gave the actuator lever a good clean and WD40.

Car feels great now. Hopefully cured the limp mode trouble doing that.

New clutch feels good too.

My sister has bought a C63 AMG. 6.3 l V8. Well then.

I am envious.

What year?

(2006-2010 cars with that engine have the notorious 'head bolt' issue. If it's not been done it's about £2000 to get them replaced with ones that don't risk destroying the engine.)

Other than that, awesome car, they sound amazing.

09 plate. I dare say they know about that, but I’ll mention it anyway, thanks!

Tell her to look inside the spare tyre too, just in case the previous owner got forgetful and left some goodies in there.

It's hard to get exact stats on the failure rate, anecdotally it seems to be about 10-20%. The problem is when it happens, it destroys the engine which effectively writes off the car.

MB also revised the head bolt design from mid-2010 onwards so clearly they knew something was amiss, but they never did a recall and never admitted any liability when they go pop.

MB put the engine in a lot of cars at the time, there's the legendary tale of the guy in the States who bought a used R63 and had a head bolt fail. The MB dealer wanted $57,000 to replace the engine. The chap went ahead and fixed it himself, but it took him months and still cost thousands of dollars.

https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-cultur ... 00-repair/
https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum ... 824/page1/

You can roll the dice, or spend about £2000 getting it done preemptively by having the bolts replaced.

I’ll have a go for a monkey.

Sweet ride. Please say she lives somewhere with decent roads to enjoy it.

Ystrad Mynach. So... yeah? Not too bad.

Saw a real #HellaFlush Cube this weekend, Vision!

Sadly no pics as I was on the opposite side of the roundabout to it.

I'd have liked to have seen that. I get waved at by other Cube owners you know.. It's our own little exclusive club.

Merc failed MOT. £1200 to fix. Scrapping it!

It looked great, if it's a local I'll try and get a pic if I see it again. Nice blue colour, lowered, looked to have 17/18" wheels gun metal / gold rims.

Made me smile anyway.

fuck a duck. what's wrong with it?

Pussy!

What has it failed on?

Mercedes things.

Bag of arse cars.

Vision, found an essential engine bay mod for your Cube!

https://nissancubeownersclub.com/2016/0 ... /#more-671

It's 16 years old and has done 150k so fair enough I guess.

Steering rack, rear spring, air bag sensor, ball joint, tyre below legal limit.

If I had the cash I'd fix it as I love the car. But I don't.

Ouch! What did you pay for it?

£1500

That's not terrible, you've run it for a couple of years, right?

Not even a year. I got it last July. Plus paid £1250 for a new exhaust not even six months ago.

Aww man, that's a right shitsack. Can you take the exhaust off and ebay it before you scrap the thing?

Can you SORN it until you have the money?

Oh.

Could do, but I'd need to pay the garage to do that, and guess what? No cash. I need to pay £80 to take off my plate too.

Feels like the end of an era. No more lavish spending on cars for me. Cheap and cheerful next. Cheap to buy, cheap on fuel, tax and insurance and cheap to fix. Mondeo-sized. What are my options?

Haha! I will probably never have the money to spend £1200 on fixing a car again. I'm ok with this, but it means getting rid.

When I bought it I was still planning on going back into IT.

You'd be spending that much to buy another car though wouldn't you?

Nope. If I am then I'll be walking everywhere.

Does it have to be Mondeo size?

Would you be better with a little van? Are you still doing the delivery jobs mate?

Vans are too expensive to run. £2-4k a year for insurance.

Try and find an old Honda Accord maybe? The VTECs are unpoppable and on the whole the cars are incredibly reliable.

Friend of a friend is buying it for £460, so that's something at least.

...
A Mondeo?

Yeah, I expected that.

They can get really tatty though.

I see quite a few 6th generation Accords (98-02) driving around here that are still in really good nick, and they must well cheap as onions now.

Don't get a tatty one

Cheap as onions?!

I mean, do. They're excellent cars.

Onions are cheap. Whenever I buy onions I think to myself, 'You get loads of onions for not much cash'.

Honda Accord is the way to go and I say that as an authority on cars because I've owned them all.

(FACT - I owned a 6th gen Accord back in the early 2000s. It was a good car.)

Yeah onions are cheap. Humans on the mainland say cheap as chips, not heard your expression before.

Like accords, like most Hondas really. We had a civic for years.

It looks like I will be carless for the foreseeable. There is nothing decent for under a grand except other luxury barges.

There’s a silver Octavia 14 miles from you on autotrader for £1k.
They will happily do 200k miles.

It doesn't have the cachet of the iconic 'H' on the front though, does it?

You brand every car you’ve owned? Sicko!

Next up - Hearthly buys Arnold Rimmer.

Maths suggests you should also be able to say "chips as onions"