rabbitstew

Look like E46 rims to me. The optional 19" ones though (that most E46 M3s wear) Didn't expect to like it but it looks great! When I was looking to buy an E46 M3 last year the general consensus is that the 19" rims look better than the 18" but the car just doesnt handle anywhere near as good with them. Not sure if this is the same on the Z4M however.

You don't think RM CYA's is reasonable? Anyway, take it form someone who was thinking like you, car is a bit cheaper and tax is a bit cheaper so it leaves you more money to insure it and run it. After having mine for 5 months, I really wish i'd spent the extra on an 06 facelift. I really love the newer lights and they'll cost you nearly a grand, then you have the LED rear lights which will cost you another couple of hundred. Not to mention the extra 20 horses which will cost you an up-rev, an exhaust and hight flow drop in filter = another grand+. So for another 2.5k you could have a decent enough 04 car with the power and main upgrades to match the looks of the 06+. Total cost 9k, which is about the same as you'll pay for a great looking 06+, but it'll have 2 more years of mileage, seat wear and corrosion. Plus, you'll never be able to get the upgraded interior of the 06+ in an 04 without selling your liver. Just buy the 06+, I wish I had. I did the same sort of thinking when I bought my 313. Whilst the road tax was double the cost, i figured the extra 33bhp, the higher rev limit, better handling, nicer interior and all the other improvements Nissan did when they overhauled the old zed to produce the 313 model was well worth it. I cant remember all the improvements now, but theres a thread on here where they are listed and its quite a long list! I figured if I bought an older zed, sure it would be cheaper, but id end up spending on mods just to try and get it up to 300bhp and end up spending the same amount anyway.

Looks like a nice car, but for that sort of money you are nearly on 313 money, and id definitely be looking for one of them if you are going to spend that sort of money.

+1 The Alzean and black looks lovely in my opinion.........piccies rarely show Alzean off in its best light. Its really not that bad - personally I prefer it to black leather Yeah, I'll definitely look into viewing one in the flesh. Were black and tan the only original options or were there others? Depends on which year but Black Leather or Frost Grey Leather were the only options on the GT pack seat wise. The tan or Alezan Orange as its actually known was an optional option which cost £650 on top of the GT pack. They are very hard to photograph, in photos of mine they look mega orange, but in real life its more like a light tan orange. I dont normally like tan interiors, but the Alezan Orange does look good and really sets the car off. My car had 41k miles on it and the seats still looked brand new, although i did treat them with the proper leather stuff every 4 months religiously. The only problem on the Alezan Orange interior is that the gear knob seems to wear MEGA quickly and the original ones arent cheap to replace unless you go for an after market one.

That is mental! I really hate parking my car anywhere, as these days the parking spaces seem to be getting smaller and smaller.

They look like the 19" M3 rims.

Actually looks pretty nice in that colour and is less than I paid for my 313 roadster last year.

Also look at the samsung tab 2 7inch... thats got a cracking nice screen on it and is the same sort of money. You may however find the 7"`s are too small, depending on what you plan to use it for.

I was wondering that too, normally you`d get a new manifold and the turbo connects to it, else if this one is connecting to the exhaust system further down then there would be a hell of a lag. Also, surely you`d need to lower the compression ratio on the engine if you were going to turbo it? Or isnt that needed on the zed?

Personally I think on the face of it that looks like a bargain. When you think my 2007 roadster was dropping in value to the tune of 4 grand a year and costing me an arm and a leg on running costs with high insurance / 460quid tax etc... Then this car here, which you may well be able to get for less than the asking price seems to be a good buy. It looks reasonably clean in the pix to me.

From my experience I would definately go for the 313 model if you can afford it. The extra improvements they made for those models is well worth it.

British Military combat boots for me normally. Saying that, I actually drove mine in flipflops a few weeks back as I just needed to move it around on the drive. My god. Scariest thing ever. No control what so ever. God knows how my missus drives her car in flipflops and sandles!

Worked well on mine, but then again mine were virtually mint with only a couple of small chips. But I touched them up and they looked really good. Take your time over it too to get a good job. That reminds me, I still have a tin of that paint in my garage i need to sell.

All depends on which model you have. The early ones had quite a bit less power than the last 350z`s they made. Welcome!!

If you cant weld before you get a mini, then you`ll be an expert in no time. I learnt to weld on my mini`s and soon became a tab hand at it. The only problem I found these days is that the cost of bits is a lot more than when I was a lad. I remember being able to walk into any scrap yard and they would be full of mini`s. Now, they are like hens teeth. There are tons of tuning stuff out for them. I did my last one up like a 1960` style one with bullet wing mirrors, loads of chrome, single upswept exhaust etc. Yours is a carb one so all the old school engine tuning bits will bolt on if you want to just free up a few extra bhp from the stock 1000cc engine. If you can get hold of a 1100cc head you can port it out slightly and bolt that on - they had bigger inlet valves. Or, when I last was looking, you could get hold of a 1275 metro engine fairly cheaply which would bolt straight in. The later MG metro engines were the same as in the later Mini Coopers and were quite "nippy". Also, since yours is an 86 you`ll have disc brakes and 12" wheels, which is a big advantage - they came as standard on mini`s after 1984. They are basically the same brakes as the coopers had, so just some decent pads and you`ll be fine.

You can go for a sports tourer. They are much more relaxed. My VFR750 is like sitting in a chair - nice relaxed riding position. Big tank range, but sporty enough that you can have fun and throw it around.

It all depends what you intend to use it for. We have both the new ipad3 and the nexus 7 in our house. The ipad is designed more as a device you would use at home or in the office and you wouldnt want to lug it about all over the place. The 7" tabs, like the nexus 7 (and the samsung tab 2 7inch etc) are designed to be a lot more portable. They will easily fit in a girls handbag, or in many coat pockets etc.. so you can take them anywhere. They are roughly the same size & weight as a small paperback book. If your going to lug an ipad about you may as well take your laptop. If you try holding your ipad for any length of time it soon becomes a bit uncomfortable - which is why everyone buys these cases which fold out into a little stand for them. Whereas the 7" tablet is much lighter and easier to hold. The 7" tablet market seems to have gone through the roof. A lot of people see it as the optimum size for a hand held tablet. Even apple who stated that they would never make a 7" tablet are considering getting a slice of the action. For me the thing I had to try and decide on was would I really use a 7" tablet, when ive got an Galaxy s2 phone which does it all anyway. If your wanting something which you`ll probably mainly use in the house, maybe just for web browing or looking at photos then the ipad would make more sense. But even then id probably opt for a netbook or laptop as i find it much easier to type on a proper keyboard. One thing I dont like on the ipad is the screen is 4:3 ratio - the same as old CRT tellys were before widescreen came out, so if your trying to watch tv or films on it, you either have to zoom in and miss half the picture, or loose 1/2 the screen with big black bars top & bottom. My missus does love her ipad though, but from watching her use of it over the last month or so, she uses it as an e-reader most of the time - rather than use her kindle, she uses the ipad to show friends her photos, and she also uses it to go onto facebook. Thats it really.

+1

Good luck with the mini. Ive had about 6 of them and used to work for a local Mini garage. I know them inside out!. I actually scrapped my last mini - a 1990 1275 Cooper 2 years back. Wish I hadnt now as the prices of mini bits has gone through the roof. Even that mayfair you have just bought is worth nearly £1400 in bits! They are lovely but very frustrating cars. My first car was a 1971 850cc Mini which cost me £20 to buy, £100 to respray, MOT, weld and get back on the road and then cost £500 to insure 3rd party only!

Esp when its costing you nearly £500 a year!

Well iplayer is flash, so thats why the stock chrome browser doesnt like it. I downloaded firefox beta and installed the flash 11 apk seperately (you can d/l that directly to the nexus if you google for the file, then install it straight away). In firefox you can select to view the iplayer website in "desktop mode". Then its just as if your watching in on a pc. That's pretty much what I did... but I found that the controls are so tiny and it's hard to move forwards and backwards on iplayer... or maybe i have fat fingers? lol Another solution was to try it from the dolphin browser, but the browser would throw a wobbly if i put full screen on.... shame... seemed like a more stable browser. Your right, the controls are a bit small like that as the desktop site isnt really designed to work on a tablet. Hopefully the bbc will bring out an updated version of iplayer to work on the latest android soon - i guess they must have done something similar to allow it to work on the iphone / ipad as apple havent supported flash for a very long time. Firefox browser seems to have improved loads since I last used firefox. It started getting all slow & bloaty so i moved onto chrome some time ago. Looks like I may have to give it ago again now. Not tried dolphin browser yet...

Ah, admiral *were* the cheapest, but now i notice when i get quotes they are no longer near the best prices. What you find is that insurance companies seem to take it in turns to offer the cheapest prices to suck customers in. Then they jack them up for subsequent years hoping people will not bother changing provider. If you keep an eye on the comparison sites you can see this happening. Its happened for as long as I can remember. Strangely enough the cheapest one which keeps coming up for me now is Privilege or ASDA money.

I bought a £20 BMW USB-OBD cable off ebay this week, been playing around with the coding software BMW uses (freely avaliable on the web), was amazed at what you can do to the car in a very short period of time. You can access and code virtually any of the onboard computers in seconds!! Its very cool been able to retrofit parts without going anywhere near a dealer(in my case adding better speakers/amp), but at the same time quite scary...I get the impression you can easily "brick" the whole car if you send the wrong code to the ECU!! I can also see how easy it is to "clone" a key if you had access to the right kit (reading the data is easy, but writing it to blank key needs additional equipment)...I cannot see how BMW can really stop this, short of a complet redesign of the OBD system. Its easy to stop. OBD connectors and the software has been out for donkey years. I have all the cabling to do most cars, and use it quite a bit when im working on cars and fixing problems. Where BMW is different is that on most cars the OBD socket is usually dead until you turn the ignition on. But, on BMWs, like my new 123d coupe, the socket is perminantly live. Apparently this is due to some EU regulation or something. So, burglers dont need to actually turn the ignition on before they can use it!!!! In addition, with the location of the OBD socket and the black spot in the stock alarm motion sensors its easy pickings. Solution would be for BMW to make the socket only work with the ignition on, relocate the socket somewhere else in the car, or improve their internal motion sensors. Thats not so easy these days. I built a massive triple garage sized workshop at my old house as i had the land for it, but when I moved the other year there were very few houses these days which had a double garage or even the land to build one on - unless you went for some farm type place. In the end I managed to get a house with a double garage - but any "double garage" seems to only be about 16ft square, so you can just about squeeze 2 cars in and thats it. Lol, sorry was thinking like a Kiwi. Standard here is 2 car garaging at least, sometimes more, like 4 or 5 + if it's a big house. Man id love a 5 car garage!

Well iplayer is flash, so thats why the stock chrome browser doesnt like it. I downloaded firefox beta and installed the flash 11 apk seperately (you can d/l that directly to the nexus if you google for the file, then install it straight away). In firefox you can select to view the iplayer website in "desktop mode". Then its just as if your watching in on a pc.

I think this would depend on the type of trader we are talking about. In my experience, big main dealer type car dealers simply look in the glasses guide, say yep this is the book price for your car and wont pay anything more. Thats exactly what i found with my zed I just part ex`d. Book price for my 2007 313 GT Roadster was 8.5k. Retail price was 12k. That did not take into account the fact it was a 313 model, as glasses guide only lists the older models. Any factory options on the car made no difference to this price at all, so they ignored the rays wheels, the sat nav, the alezan orange interior, the metallic paintwork etc. etc. etc. All of which the original buyer would have had to pay extra for and on some cars add to its resale value. Any extras I added myself such as the stainless steel exhaust system, or brake upgrade or anything else all added no value to the trade in price at all. The only thing they took into account was the very low mileage, which increased the trade in price to 9k. So, as far as the dealer was concerned they didnt care if I left those bits on the car or not, as the book price is all they paid. Same as with the road tax. In actual fact they didnt even care that the car had 10months MOT on it, as they immediately retested it themselves so they could sell it with 12 months MOT. Main dealers like that will either sell the car on their forecourt (if its a Nissan dealer), or if they only specialise in BMW`s or Audi`s or something then they will ship it off to another trader who will sell it. Now... if you are a smaller trader with a lock up and a bit of forecourt, then in my experience they will be looking to sell the car on quickly and will more take into account things like decent tyres, road tax, full MOT etc.. as it all means less expense for the trader and makes the car more appealing to buyers for that quick sale.