davidwort

didn't know that!, usually get my stuff through TPS in Milton Keynes.

you can stunt them to a certain extent, but it's more likely they'll die from some problem, having said that my sister has a goldfish in a regular rectangular tank, not very big perhaps 18" 40 litre ish tank (pretty small whatever) and this one fish is now about 20cm long, 6 or 7 cm deep and just keeps growing. Goldfish seem to be able to cope with pretty poor water conditions, but after looking at the variety and small size of alternatives to goldfish if you just buy a 10 quid tube heater, I don't think I'd ever have goldfish again.

Err, is that really your tank in the pic?, do a quick web search, bowls are not only a big :nono: but goldfish are messy, grow far too big and need a massive tank in relation to tropicals, they're best off in a pond IMO To keep water quality even half well balanced, you need something approaching 40-50 litres and even then you need to change 1/4 of the water every week or so if you are keeping more than a couple of (cleaner) tropical fish. Sorry to be so blunt, but it's true.

yep, I wasn't going to put bright orange building sand in there :) I'd read that playpit sand was OK, but would probably have gone to a proper fish supplies place, need to get some more food and a few other bits and bobs at the weekend, will see how much the shop wants for aquaruim sand. I'm still hankering after a 150-200 litre tank, but being a little sensible it might be later this year I like the look of: Juwel Vision 180 juwel180.jpg[/attachment:2u7rqw0b] bit eye-watering in price!, probably look second hand

Adjusting camber, just loosen the lower 2 strut bolts slightly and pull/push as required, there's at least 4 degrees of adjustment there from what I've found, probably more, you can certainly get more than 3 degrees negative as that's what Jason's car had on it when he rolled up :) Anyway, laser aligned last night on the proper kit at the garage, from my woolly garden string I'd guess-timated 1mm out on toe before I gave up adjusting on Sunday night, in fact it was actually 2mm out (was 12mm before I started!), but with fishing line rather than thick string I reckon I'd have got it bang on, so it works, perfectly doable at home on the garage floor :D I'm struggling with the calculations now, but if I follow the toe calculations here I reckon on a 15" wheel, 2mm out is 16 minutes out and 1mm out is 8 minutes out. The Bentley says both VR6 and 4 cylinder is 0 deg toe +/- 10 minutes, so using a fine bright fishing line etc should easily bring you within the margin of error specified for the car... which is nice 8) anyone want their alignment done? :lol:

might well look into getting some, I prefer the more natural look of it too. I agree with the pets at home comment, every time ive been in there, there's been dead fish in the display tanks. Stay clear imo also. One thing pets at home ARE good for are the frozen foods. They're small trays divided into sections. They're perfect. I must admit I have seen some dead fish in their tanks, the rest looked healthy though, although :| all I've actually bought from there is the frozen daphnia :) and a fry net/cage to stop the bigger fish eating the new fry, the fish came from someone at my work who was giving away all his fish, I only took what I researched would thrive in our smallish tank but at least I rehomed some rather than buying from a petshop :)

50mm = 535 805 903 C

looks nice, how do you clean sand though :scratch: apparently in the far east a lot of tanks are run for the plants and fish are only added to aid the growing environment for the plants :)

get some more negative camber on there, VR is about -1 to -1.5 standard, saloon car racing uses about -3 IIRC :) I don't know anything about a suitable setup for the corrado track wise, but it's worth finding out what the mk2 track day chaps use in terms of toe and camber though, I bet they have them toeing out (instead of parallel) and more negative camber than spec though. It's something you could adjust at the trackside if you are driving the car there and back too.

I do like them, real little characters, but I will stick to seeing how we get on keeping the Mollys and Platys for a while before attempting anything more, I need something calming like this for bad days working on the Corrados :)

there's also an early and late 4 cyl front cross member, the late 4cyl cars have a shield for the PAS and Alternator belt low down and only the late front beam has the bracket for supporting this, late one could be used on an early car without the shield though. Wouldn't be surprised if there are some other minor differences, nothing to stop you using them, but jsut a few niggles if you get the wrong one.

well this week started well, Jen drove the 8v into the garage wall scraping the paint off 6 inches of the new wing I painted :mad2: still, at least I have the kit to repaint it now :roll:

So far we have fed them the usual tropical flake food, plus some defrosted frozen water daphnia a couple of times, they love those, even tried some crushed peas which they seemed to have a good go at :) We aquired a couple of plastic plants, but I nipped out to pets at home and bought 3 different live plants which look much nicer, I've also got some test strips and some stress coat/dechlorinator and have done a partial water change and hoover a few times. The Mollys in particular are plucky little things and have a good nibble at you if you put your hand in the tank to move plants etc. Would like to get a tasteful larger tank for downstairs and will probably stick to the livebearer varieties we have for now they seem pretty hardy but characterful and fairly placid as you say. I remember a mate having cichlids which did nothing but shift the gravel about, amusing but very terrritorial and you can't have many unless you get a mega tank.

Bought my son a 50L tropical tank for Christmas and courtesy of a chap at work it has a few Guppys, Platys and Mollys in it and already a number of small fry :) I'm already eyeing up some 2.5 to 3ft tanks on e-bay. Like most hobbies these days there's a huge anount of information on the web that's helped me (and my son) start off and avoid a few of the common newbee mistakes, learnt about the Nitrogen Cycle for starters. Can watch the fish for hours, they're a great antidote to the tech filled world that makes up a lot of our lives :D I know there's at least one or two tropical fish experts on here, what do you reckon? Will pop up a pic of the little critters in a bit. here we go: P1010729.JPG[/attachment:33zw52xk]

nope, FWD 1.8T, which is probably why it still feels so good, engineered for V6 diesel but only running a 1.8T :shrug: very impressed how well everything has stood up, none-the-less.

well possibly, but my dad's A6 avant (2000 plate) has 190K on it now and is still on the original shocks, nothing else has been replaced bar a cloudy polycarbonate headlight lense and a siezed rear wiper motor, it's been the best car he's ever had, he hoons it about too and I've driven it recently, might not have the best road feel in the world but the front double wishbone setup holds the road very well. On-topic - doesn't bear thinking about what might have happened to a mum and kids in a little hatchback, with this sort of cretin allowed to drink in public still :censored:

I reckon company cars in a lot of cases, the whole UK car market is skewed by the company car thing here, one of my neighbours was commenting that his wife's run around was almost ten quid more to fill up, which they do once every two months. His own car is filled up for nothing (by his company) several times a week :roll: I suppose his firm might eventually go bust, but for now fuel prices don't seem to be directly affecting him at all. another friend has a new Octavia VRS every six months (works for Skoda) and a massively subsidised 2L TDI golf for his wife new every six months too, in the past they've had a string of TT's all on cheap lease from his work, but a baby is now forcing her to slum it in a 20+ grand golf :( and the other thing is that a lot of the population have seen big improvements in standard of living and disposable income in the last 10-20 years so there's a long way to go for a lot of people before they are down to only being able to afford essentials. I'm not saying there aren't a lot of people struggling, it's just there's a huge middle class with plenty in their pockets still. Me, the only time I've ever got rid of an old car is when it rusted to pieces, I like to and have to get my money's worth from them :)

That's OK if you have properly set up alignment first, trouble with us is the cars had had a combination of new shocks, springs, topmounts, wishbone bushes, different wheel sizes and tyres etc, all replacing tired worn stuff, even a removal of the subframe in my case which is pretty hard to get back exactly right even if carefully marked.

yeah, the slightly worrying thing is you can see just how out of alignment the front subframe/wishbones and rear beam are, very visually with the string up! I'd imagine that would be major grief to correct though as it must be a combination of the position the front subframe gets bolted up in (there does seem to be some adjustment there when I had my 8v subframe dropped) and the rear beam bush position in the rear beam and mounting brackets for the beam to the car. Odd thing is although my valver is way out, looking down the sides of the car you can see the difference in the tyres to the body, nearly 20mm I reckon, it doesn't affect the handling or tyre wear, camber and toe are bang on. All three cars we tried are out, the other two by less, about 10mm front to rear. It's like my sketch below: alignment1.jpg[/attachment:2zj5qkni]

(Corrado is up to 1200Kg or so) Why am I not surprised Lidl customers might need scales that go up to 400Kg each :lol:

good post Jim :) , was thinking about this myself, on my 8v mine was getting a little reluctant to release and I adjusted the screw/cable nr the nearside headlight and the release is fine now but it does squeak a bit, will have to 'have a butchers' and grease things up a bit more :)

Get your point, we were just impressed with ourselves for learning something new, which seemed so obvious after we'd done it. Today I measured up my valver (which was set up on laser 4 wheel alignment kit) and our technique seemed to give the right measurements on that. I then did the same on my 8v (which I know is toeing in like mad after doing loads of front end work) and not surprisingly found the leading edge/rim of the front wheels was far further in from the string. Then set about the track rod on the drivers side to adjust things up, miscalculated at first as Jason had 17" wheels and mine are 15" :roll: but a couple of gos later I have it down to 1mm out, or rather 1mm toeing in, best I could get without spending all night in the garage too, so we shall see on Tuesday because I'm popping into the garage and measuring it up on the MOT ramp with the laser alignment gear, will be interesting to see how far out I am :)

right, we had a go at this today and here's the proof :lol: a little bit of GCSE trigonometry to work out the camber for the 17" wheels and then set to work on adjusting the camber ETKA Corrado.pdfcamber_1.jpg[/attachment:1qkx1muh] this was handy: http://easycalculation.com/trigonometry ... angles.php so, armed with the info that we need the top rim of the wheel roughly 4 to 5mm further in than the bottom we set to with a spirit level and a couple of bolts to raise it clear of the tyre sidewall. Bentley manual states 4cyl corrado 40minutes negative camber +/-10, so half a degree or just over. stromlaufplan_gamma4.pdfP1010719.JPG[/attachment:1qkx1muh] Corrado92.pdfP1010720.JPG[/attachment:1qkx1muh] we started off with the top rim about 2.5cm in from the bottom, mega negative camber, must have been nearly 3 degrees at least :lol: once the camber is about set then we attacked the toe (none of the three of us knew what we were doing :scratch: ) but with a little searching on the web for the above mentioned technique :salute: RowanVW :) http://www.negative-camber.org/jam149/t ... nment.html http://elantragtclub.tripod.com/elantra/id554.html using 4 axle stands to run a piece of string down each side of the car at wheel centre level we set up a reference by making sure the front and back rim edge of both rear wheels was exactly 50mm toe.jpg[/attachment:1qkx1muh] then we measured the same distance on the front wheels the values we got showed a lot of toe in, front wheel front rim measurement to string was about 13mm both sides our front wheels were like this: / \ passat climatronic wiring diags.pdfP1010721.JPG[/attachment:1qkx1muh] climatronic wiring-Golf from May 01.pdfP1010722.JPG[/attachment:1qkx1muh] 2.8l 24v Climatronic system.pdfP1010723.JPG[/attachment:1qkx1muh] our initial measurements showed offside front wheel 29mm rear rim edge and 42mm front edge nearside wheel 28.5mm and 37mm with the bigger measurement at the front rim edge our wheels were pointing inwards, so we lengthened the track rod ends to get about 37mm all round lastly we moved the steeing wheel round a few splines to make that central we did get some pull to the left when driving but that was a problem with the nearside camber not quite right and another attempt at that got it nearer, double checking the toe again with the string just to be sure our camber tweak hadn't affected toe, it hadn't. As the track rod is closer to the hub than the wheel rims we discovered that 8mm of movement on the track rod end gave about 21mm at the rim, so this helped us get the right movement on the ends to get our front wheels parallel. Hopefully that should do the trick! If nothing else it must have got the settings much closer to spec, in fact it's probably quite accurate. Careful monitoring of the tyre inside and outside edges and pull left or right when driving should certainly show how good we got it. If both outside edges feather we know there is toe in, inside edges toe out.

found this: viewtopic.php?f=23&t=94767&p=1096308&hilit=vr6+turbo+clutch#p1096308

somewhere on here I'm sure Kevhaywire has discussed this, sorry can't remember where.