Be Excellent To Each Other

The CV boot is the rubber flexible covering that protects the joint. Here's one:


Jack the car up (no need to take the wheel off) and have a look. They have a bellows shape and generally split at the bottom of one of the folds. Once they go (and they always do) grit gets in the joint and then you're pulling driveshafts off.

This sounds more like a bearing. Is it like a low-pitched "whuh-whuh-whuh" sound, increasing in volume and speed as you move away, and merging to a constant "whuuuuuh" by the time you're up to 15mph or so?

Again, with the car jacked up and the wheel still fitted, hold it firmly on top and bottom and rock it back and forth against the hub. Repeat with your hands on the left hand right edges. If there is more than a few mm of play, the wheel bearing is gone. If it's quite badly gone you can get an audible clunk out of it too. It's not expensive or difficult to change.

Discs and pads are pretty easy to change, require few tools, and it's quite hard to go wrong with them.

No, as far as I can tell the sound stops altogether once I've got up some speed.

I'm going to be trying to paint my brake calipers and the disc guards when I get the car back, which will be interesting considering that I can't even change a bloody bulb on the thing I've been told that I don't need to remove the calipers to paint them, but I probably will do anyway just so that I can do a proper job.

Unfortunately no Haynes manual exists for my car.

15mph is remarkably slow in a car.


What the fuck do you drive?

He's got a new Celica. I don't know what's up with Haynes manuals for new cars; there isn't one for my Picasso either that I can see. Maybe they don't put them out for a few years after the car ships, as there can't be much demand until the car is well out of warranty.

This generation of Celica has been around since 1999 so I would hope there'd be a manual by now.

Plus cars are bloody tricky now.

Ah, I think it's the three years old, MOT and warranty time limit with Haynes. Obviously, they don't do ALL cars, even then. But most people with cars under three years old are buying on tick and stick to the urban myth that having the car serviced by a franchised dealer is better for the car and is a requirement for the warranty to remain intact - which isn't the case. I think you get the same fuckwits working on your car whether you're spending £35+vat an hour at a local grease pit or £125+vat per hour in a Audi/Beemer/Merc dealers. They might have better diagnostic equipment - but I still think a decent independent specialist is much better than a dealer. Anyway - we're both spoilt in knowing the same dirt cheap soopah mechanic, aren't we Rich?

Anyway, before I get totally off piste, the point is that Haynes is all about self servicing and it's mainly certain cars of a certain age. I have faith in your deductive reasoning to be able to work the rest out yourself.

Ah, but Toyota's are considered about as reliable as you can get - which if it's anything like Honda it's frankly bullshit. Basically, I don't think this generation of Celica sold all that well and Haynes would obviously take that on board, as it takes some sales to recover the cost of producing a manual I would have thought.

It's particularly unusual in my case because Celicas are known as enthusiast cars, and there have been Haynes manuals for every other generation as far as I'm aware.

Getting your 1999-2002 Celica serviced at a proper Toyota garage can be vital if you ever suffer from the oil consumption problem that plagues the engines in the lower-specced model. Toyota extended the warranty on them to 7 years or 120,000 miles but only if you have a full Toyota service record.

I've just remembered actually that I have a 12 month warranty for my car with 9 months remaining, so I might take it to Toyota and see what their opinion is of the noises I'm hearing.

Another thing has occurred to me - which may be more relevant to Richard's MultiPregnancyVehicle is that quite a few cars platform share nowadays with simple cosmetic differences being the main differences. Maybe there's a manual that covers one of the platform sharers that would do the trick for simple stuff like what you're experiencing.

I do laugh at Haynes manuals, I bought one for my old Passat and when I got to the sections of tracing wiring problems or removing the engine and gear box, I thought that a car being of an age that it's likely to need this work is going to be worth so little it beggars belief that you would be so skint that you wouldn't simply buy another whole car for the same money as it would cost to fix.

Haynes manuals are really a product of a bygone age, when cars wore out faster, cost a lot more to buy second hand, and were a lot easier to work on. You can see the shift in Haynes manuals in the late 90s, when they took out a lot of the hardcore stuff like gearbox reconditioning or crank removal and started putting the rather babyish "spanner rating" on each task to show relative difficulty ratings. I think they are struggling for an identity now, although they are gamely trying new angles (like the computer and washing machine manuals, or the ones dedicated to car audio).

They should really tap into the foreign language market if they haven't already. There are stalwart vehicles that are still being maintained by enthusiasts, like 2CVs or Beetles, but if you go to places like Turkey, the number of MKIV and V Cortinas on the roads is astounding. Fiat 131/2 derivatives are even more common.

The advent of cheap finance at the end of the 80s start of the 90s caused a car buying frenzy that's just died on it's arse. You don't really see many 20 year old cars on the roads, largely due to how badly built a lot of them were and how cheap it was to buy newer better built cars. The credit crunch has really really badly effected the motor industry as they can't organise cheap finance to keep pumping out new cars on tick - the percentage drops in new cars sales makes for very sobering reading. I wonder if there will be a resurgence of maintaining older cars, what with all the stupid fucking vehicle taxations the government seems hellbent in introducing as well as the aforementioned lack of cheap money to broker PFCs and leases for new cars.

I keep meaning to ask for this for my birthday or christmas.

This is a good point. I wonder if they do that.

The other reason for a collapse in second hand car sales is the glut of available models as reliability improved throughout the 90s. Consider the Omega, or your Passat: it's very easy to get a car for £500-1000 and run it for 35k miles now, purely because whereas 100k/8 years was once a death knell for cars it's now barely even middle aged.

You would hope so, really. There are plenty of places in the world that are poor enough not to be able to do anything other than maintain an old car for years.


It's not a collapse in sales of second hand cars, more a collapse in home maintenance that is the point. There are oodles of decent affordable cars out there - even more so at the moment.

Just buy it mang!

I suspect you can get them for all sorts of weird and whacky stuff nowadays, like Saturn V rockets and space shuttles or Steam Locomotives, or Tanks even. I know they've branched out into all sorts of merchandise to record bags, mugs, T-shirts etc etc.

Yup. People simply have too much disposable income to bother nowadays, or they like think they do, and buy a new car on credit.
That and it's beneath them to get their hands dirty.

I am intending on buying a Ferret scout car so I'm hoping they've done a Haynes for it...

I don't know why it is but those skills really are dying out rapidly. I see it all the time in my friend's skateboard shop. Kids come in asking to borrow a tool, teenagers, and then have to ask you which way you turn it to loosen the nut. I blame computer games.

It would appear that you've never changed one on a Range Rover

Speaking of Money Pits, new blog shopping list update! Eep!

Could be. I had Meccano and Technik Lego before I had a C64. These days you can't even get meccano, Lego is shit, and it's up against Xbox 360s and Nintendo DSs.
Down with computer games.

Really? That would be cool. Do you have to do stuff to them or can you just rive them on the road as is? I don't imagine they're a hugely comfy ride though.

I've seen restored, MOTed ones going for a reasonable 6 to 7 grand.

They were well-liked by crews (so my books tell me), so they can't be that bad ride-wise.

Is this just for fun or have you lost your marbles and are buying it for roaming around the post-apocalyptic landscape?

A little from columm A, a little from column B.

For something that weighs in the ball park of 4 tonnes, what's the fuel economy like

My Civic had to go in for Service #2 on Friday. The service alone was £220, but then it turned out that the front two tyres were at the legal limit and had to be replaced, as did all the brake pads! Like an idiot, I let them do the whole lot, when really I should've got the tyres done elsewhere (Honda do discounts on their parts at main dealers when the car is still within warranty, so the brake pads weren't too expensive). Slightly worryingly, there was some sort of problem with the bump stops on the front suspension too (showing my lack of knowledge about cars here), but they fixed that under warranty. All in, it's just cost me £670! And that's on a car which is still about a fortnight away from it's second birthday. And they used the lowest grade oil that the car will take, grrr!

I'd really like to learn properly about doing up cars. I've often thought about going totally mental and selling my car for a relatively cheap '90-'91 Lotus Elan SE (too much time playing Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 when I was a kid), but I think I could only justify it if I was capable of doing a lot of the work myself - particularly as they have to be serviced every 6,000 miles!

It has a 25 gal tank and a listed range of 190 miles, so that's a fairly reasonable 7.6 miles to the gallon.

Better than a Land Rover Discovery, like.

And how hard is it to pick up the 30cal ammo?

Is it a Type-R?

If it is a Type-R, part-ex it for a Lotus Elise S2 or a Honda S2000.

Heh. Mine will have a crossbow. Less DAKKA DAKKA death, but you can't have everything.

This is moderately amusing - a list of ten cars for the post-apocalypse world. It of course includes my venerable little 1950s scout car.

But fudge me, an amphibious *bus*?




They also seem to have made a list of cars with single digit fuel economy, which, as Mad Max will tell you, is Not A Good Thing.

Can I bring along my Tomcat to your post apocalyptic world and be your high-speed scout raider? It'd be easy mount a gun on the top.

Hah! The Terra Wind is awesome:
http://www.terrawind.com/Pictures1%20102web.jpg
http://www.terrawind.com/Atwinterior3.jpg
http://www.terrawind.com/IMG_1721rearinterior.jpg
Loads more pics.

Indeed you can, Grim.... You also have guns, so you're definitely in The Bunker. I'll let my AI know you're on the list:



I tell you, nothing can go wrong with the biological weapons lab.

Nah, a Type-S. The car you buy if you can't quite afford to buy/run a Type-R. But I do have a slightly better job now, so actually was thinking of eventually trading it for either a Type-R, an Elise S2 111S, an S2000 or a BMW Z4. Although I appreciate the last two (especially the last one) are a little 'hairdressers'.

That is indeed awesome.

I'd quite like that pickup truck that Clarkson crossed the Channel in, too.

What? Neither are. The Z3 is the hairdresser car, the Z4 is a manly man's car, and to call the S2000 a "hairdresser car" is patently ridiculous.

But regardless, why does that matter? If it looks good and is fun to drive, what does it matter what other people think of your choice of car?

The S2000 is a marvellous vehicle.

I preferred my Type-R to my boss' S2k in many ways.

I could fucking fit in it comfortably without staring at the windscreen cross-member for a start. I'm dead if I flip my M3*, and that's comparatively massive.

The Z4 was BMW's very manly response to the Z3 being declared hairdressery. I almost went for a Z3M instead of the M3 mind, because I don't care about that (it came down to price, ultimately).

* Think the helicopter+zombie scene from (the original) Dawn of the Dead.

Indeed, it's only the inability to put my gun in the boot that stops me from trading up. I've always wanted a roadster and the S2000 is certainly the best out there for the money as far as I can tell, although the MX-5 comes close in every aspect except power - test-drove an MX-5 hardtop the week before last and it was bloody marvellous fun.

There won't be any fucking petrol so you better learn to ride. A donkey, probably.

Again - Japan, please stop with the making fucking tiny sports cars! After the hunching cramp of the old MX-5 (same "I can't see and my back hurts" problem as the S2k, but moreso), I very much doubt I'd be comfortable in the new one. Grr.

I have this problem with the Mazda MX-5. A mate of mine has a souped-up Mk 1 which I've had a bit of a go in, and I got to drive around the latest Mk 3 at the British Motor Show a few months ago. With both I found the top of the windcreen right in my line of sight.

I got to sit in an Elise S2 at the same show (but am yet to actually drive one) and felt much more comfortable in it, even if it is a bit of a shit to get in and out of.

Interesting. How tall are you? I'm 6'3" and had no problems like this in either the S2000 or the MX-5.

I'm 6'2" but have 30% too much spine.

I also don't have online the awesome picture of me passengering in my boss' S2k around Oulton Park. Roof down, and fully 3 inches of my helmet above the windscreen crossbar.

Sometimes I'm glad that I'm a 5'7" quasi-midget.

FTFY

F-FTFY

I'm bang on 6', but have short little legs and an extra-long torso. I'm like proper deformed and everything!

It's a girls car, though, like the TT. Although the new TT isn't as bad.