Kevin Bacon

With stuff like that I tend to backup all my important stuff and do a clean install of the OS. Have you tried a virus scan to make sure nothing is lurking in the background?

Anyone tried "All season tyres"? They're a half way house between summer and winter tyres I believe, and have sipes in them etc. My temporary Alfa 147 daily hack pretty much needs all 4 tyres doing, but I'll be scrapping it just before it's MOT is due in May. As it's cold I don't want to waste money on summer tyres now and all season jobbies seem pretty cheap. Anyone tried them?

Lol, I can just see a private seller's face when you turn up with VAG-COM, spark plug tools, trolley jack, compression tester etc etc. Spend an hour checking things and then say, "Nah, I'll pass thanks" :lol:

That comes as part of a repair kit from VW, costing ~ £90 for both sides. I really doubt a second hand one will be any good. I've stripped half a dozen working and non working roofs over the years and those parts have always been knackered and it's always the left side that breaks first for some reason.

I saw something yellow under the passenger seat in my Alfa this morning. Upon closer inspection, it was an anchor butter wrapper, still in it's square, unopened shape, but the butter had obviously melted and soaked into the carpet eons ago. Nice! Found a pair of (used) knickers under the back seat of my Cavalier.

Yeah I know people who've had parts shipped to their hotel before, no probs :D Only snag is you need the matching Hella 4RD 933 332-031 relay to go with it, and finding that seems to be a mission as well. I tried to do it this way myself as I didn't want the hassle of another box in the engine bay (there were enough things in there at the time anyway!), but I gave up and did it internally instead. I must admit, everything inside and just seeing a standard looking loom running to each bulb is neat and great peace of mind. Proper fit and forget :D

Best you can do mate - http://www.summitracing.com/parts/hla-h84709001 Trying to finding this sort of thing in the UK is tiresome. I've used SummitRacing before and they're excellent. Maybe some enterprising chap or chappess could import a shed load of them and start producing 'deluxe' weatherproof looms :D

That was the days of 'Personnel' departments. 'HR' is now essentially a business within business and they only seem to care about protecting the company from being sued.

That's the way to do it if you want to keep everything in the engine bay!

Lazy b'stard :D - http://www.pioneer-latin.com/downloads/thf4554b.pdf Page 3. 67mm mounting depth.

I think I'll buy an iPad 4 instead to console my grief :D

Good, you'll need it ;) If you're lucky enough to find a VR6 that's been pampered, you're onto a winner. But you'll have to pay handsomely for it. They are basic and simple cars to work on compared to modern things. There's quite a few VR6s tooling around with over 200K on them, so they can put in the miles when maintained and looked after. It's just not a cheap platform to work on unfortunately. VR6 tax.

The only 'uprated' things about those cheap, schitty looms is uprating your chances of fire or total darkness in the middle of winter. Anything in the engine bay is vulnerable to water ingress. Don't assume for one minute your relays being tucked up behind Daddy battery in any way protects them from water! People seem to assume water ingress comes only from direct splashing. Wrong. The biggest cause of water ingress is airborne moisture. It corrodes up the fuse terminals and gets inside non-sealed relays. The best way to do it BY FAR is build the loom *inside* the car, where the environment is dry and gets warm regularly. There's a wiring loom on how to do this in my gallery thread. The closest thing I found to a proper waterproof relay socket is this - http://www.relayspec.com/Company_listings/c/custom_connector/news/2011/06_13a/BR05-WP%20Brochure5-20-11.pdf but it's in America. No one in the UK seems to have cottoned onto it. Reliable automotive relays are Omron, Hella, Tyco etc etc. Avoid unbranded sheet. Apologies for my tone, but Granddad wire is sick of reading about posts where these naff looms have failed ;) Surely people only need to learn once, but people keep buying them!!

Something to consider with the 16V is it's simplicity. Scan the forum and see how many "My VR6 stalls at junctions", "VR6 MAF", "VR6 running rough", "VR6 plug fouling", "VR6 Chains", "VR6 Bore wear", "VR6 oil consumption" type threads there are. Then compare that to how many engine queries you get for the valver ;) Don't get me wrong, I love VW's narrow angle 6 but ask yourself this: how brave are you? Are you feeling lucky, punk? :D As Tom said, if you can afford to buy the car and nothing else, don't even consider it. It's like paying £5K for an old Merc E55 AMG, being happy with it for a day, and then waking up with the stark reality you can't afford to run and maintain it.

Just seen the prices for the 920 on EE. Sod that!

KwikFit were doing a good deal last year. 4 tyres for the price of 2, and on good brands like Continental. Ideal if the fronts are almost bald and the rears are heading that way too, but aren't essential. At the time that was cheaper than independants. The biggest problem for me with Kwik-Fit is their mechanic's couldn't care less attitude to people's cars. And their balancing often needs redoing 2 or 3 times at my local branch!

RE the corners, I just make sure I don't butt the tiles up hard up against the wall as they're not always as straight as they may look to the eye. Always leave a 3-5mm gap so that way you can move the tiles around a bit whilst the adhesive is still tacky, then the whole wall should look uniformly gapped. If you don't get the corners right, the rest of the wall can look an arse, but it's usually less obvious with the smaller tiles. The trendy big tiles will show up alignment discrepencies very easily! And you think walls are bad. Try tiling the floor! I had a right ball ache with our underfloor heated bathroom.... and don't use black tiles on the floor either. A pig to keep clean :D ---------- Post added at 5:08 PM ---------- Previous post was at 5:04 PM ---------- Oh and if you use an electric cutter, wear some overalls, eye protection and expect to get wet :D

And why is there such a thing as a TT kit in the first place? Hardly aspirational given there are millions of the bloody things on the roads for peanuts as it is!

Mixing those two will be fine

I suppose it's probably best to sit back and wait for all the glitches to be ironed out first anyway, because I bet there will be some :D

It would certainly limit their customer uptake. I don't get this one upmanship with the big 4, especially now they're bloody merging anyway! I mean, did Apple really want to limit it's iPhone uptake in the UK by only letting O2 sell it for the first year? And likewise the 920 with EE? I hate all this corporate game playing. They put their own agendas before meeting customers' demands and satisfaction.

Yeah I know what you're thinking, you filthy fark!

That's why the 920 appeals to me. Nokia have a long history of making reliable handsets and non-enterprise Microsoft products tend to be reliable too. It could be a spot on partnership and finally knock Apple of it's bloody Laurels :D

This may be a silly question, but can you have two seperate phone contracts at once? I'm thinking of keeping my iPhone and just let the contract run it's course (only a tenner a month for 6 months) and get the Nokia too.

Best thing is the filter is only 20 odd quid and 40K service interval :D Yep, I just pulled out the blue return line and left the black one in place. Obviously there will be some fudging of pipes and what not to get it to fit where the original filter sits, but it's easy and fairly logical once you're under there!