rabbitstew

Well, before I got married, if I wasnt playing with my car id be: Weight training - have a similar setup to the OP but I have a powercage and about 600lb in olympic weights would workout about 5 times a week. Shooting - used to spend 2 or 3 hours every weekend clay shooting as well as lamping at night Running - used to go running 3 times a week Motorbikes - used to enjoy having a Sunday ride out with my mates Socialising with my mates - used to go up the pub with them once a week for a catchup and a few drinks Gardening - used to enjoy keeping my garden immaculate Project car - used to enjoy working on my project car, tuning it, fixing bits etc Computer games - used to enjoy playing games on my purpose build media/gaming PC. Movies - used to love watching lads movies and spent a lot of money on a home cinema system Mountain biking - used to cycle around 40 miles a week at one point, But since I got married, when im not playing with my car (usually only used to go to work & back now rather than weekend rides out) Cleaning the house Hoovering Ironing Doing all the clothes washing, then drying it all, then putting it away. Feeding 3 cats Shovelling 6 lots of cat sh!t up each day. Getting baby up, dressed, fed Bathing baby & putting him to bed Cooking all the evening meals Doing all the washing up after cooking the meals. Making lunch Changing all the beds Putting random stuff away which seems to get left out everywhere Getting dragged around tescos / asda / morrisons Work etc. etc.

I had exactly this when I had my zed with a K1 on. Going through a village, I was doing about 20mph in a 30mph and some old bloke actually waved his walking stick at me in disgust as if id been doing 100mph. I guess its more of a noise thing than driving the zed as in actual fact I had this also happen to me last weekend on my Ducati 996 with its open race pipes. Coming thru a village, I was doing 30mph in a 30mph zone. The Audi A3 in front of me was accelerating away from me, so I estimated he was probably speeding at more like 45mph. Whole load of pensioners completely ignored the speeding Audi and stared at me on my bike with daggers. Had I stopped I wouldnt be surprised if they had dragged me off and burnt me at the stake. I found the comments I got on my zed were mainly very positive. Parking outside a shop to buy a pint of milk, complete stranger comes over and says "nice car mate!". Nipping down local motor factors to buy some oil, come out to find the owner of the place drooling over my car and end up chatting to him for ages about how he`s never seen a roadster one etc.. Driving through my village once, behind a Porsche 911, bunch of kids on side of road completely ignore the Porsche and shout out "Nice car mate!". Even the garage where I had it MOT`d commented on "wow, dont see many of these". When I went to have new tyres fitted it was like being at an F1 pit-stop, they completely ignored all the other cars and swarmed mine so I had 4 fitters, one on each wheel. I did have a couple of strange ones though. Besides the old pensioner waving his stick at me in a threatening way for daring to do 20mph in a 30mph zone, I did have some old biddy walk across the road directly in front of me, then shook her head at me as if it was my fault. And turning into the road I work in, I had a couple of chavs shout out "w@nker" at me loudly for no reason at all. I put the last one down to jealousy as they looked like they had walked straight off "Benefits Street".

Mad, prices must have gone up. When I part ex`d my fully loaded mint 2007 HR Roadster at a dealer 3 years back I only got £9k for it and that was after some serious haggling. At the time the forecourt price would have been about £12k on it. When I bought it the roadsters were more expensive than the coupe`s also due to being rarer. I think I remember I worked out I lost £7k in 18 months in depreciation.

Ive been considering one of these for a long time. Ever since what I thought was an ordinary family merc saloon blew me off the road when I was in my HR roadster. I especially like the fact I could probably get away with parking it on my drive without it being overly obvious to passers by what it is. The only thing putting me off getting something like this is just the running costs. I see blokes using them as their daily commuting car, but when im doing 100 miles a day, the fuel cost alone would kill me.

TBH your experience doesnt sound too bad and very typical of most garages ive dealt with in the past. I bought my 07 Roadster from a Nissan main dealer for 16grand. There was zero negotiation on the price. They did throw in a "full service" and a new MOT. When the MOT certificate was shown to me I noticed that it said "has advisories" but craftily they had removed the adisory sheet. Luckily I went online and found out that the only advisory was that the brake pads were getting low. I tried to use this as a bargaining point, but the main dealers policy was that as long as they had enough tread on to pass an MOT then thats it. In actual fact there was only about 1mm on the pads when I checked them a few weeks later and so I swapped them out for Ferrodo 2500 at a cost of £250 to me. In addition within a month I realised that one of the rear shocks was leaking - again I replaced that myself at my expense. But it should have definitely been picked up on the MOT. I too had a warranty albiet the Nissan approved used cars one. I went back twice to try and get something done under warranty. Firstly the drive belt on the front of the engine. Mine stredded itself after 20k which was strange. Nissan said it should last 90k easily. They replaced it, charged me nearly £100 and said that because it was a "consumable", even though it has worn unusually quick that its not covered under warranty. That belt actually only lasted 20k again, but the next time I bought an uprated Gates belt for £15 and fitted it myself in about 5 minutes. The other warranty item was the roof, it started sticking and I could see one of the metal cross beam things in the hood was pealing away from the frame. They said that the roof wasnt covered by the warranty either. But at least with that they fixed it as a "good will gesture" - the fix being them to simply drill holes in it and rivit the bit back on.

Yey! Made me a bit jealous as I had a twilight HR Roadster which I had to sell a few years back.

Spotted in Ely today, Silver Roadster, M** CJO

I'm sure you're aware, but for the benefit of the original poster make sure any plates you buy are legal and not show plates, which I'd guess the majority of those ebay plates are. To be legal number plates should have the BS number (BS AU 145d) and the name of the company who produced them stamped on and to produce them they need the V5 document. You'd be unlucky to ever get pulled up on it, but all it would take would be for a busy body during MOT time. It'd be a pain to fall foul for the sake of an extra £10 for legal plates. The ones I got were the normal MOT approved ones which indeed have the above details on it but good point, anyone buying does need to make sure they have those.

Its a game they all play. They figure that a certain percentage of customers will just renew without questioning, so they hike the premium up ridiculously for the renewal. In reality what it means is that they either loose customers to other companies, or they have to pay for customer service team to take the call from the customer - then "speak to their manager" before dropping the renewal quote down to a more sensible level. Still, its a pain in the backside having to call them up every year and play the same game.

This was mine!

Thats handy to know, i didnt realise you could do it online, i usually send the forms off & have to wait a couple of weeks. Remember that a pair of plates will also cost you circa £20-£30 as well. I get mine from ebay for £10 a pair delivered. Much easier than messing about with passports/v5`s etc down halfrauds. Still, all a bit of a pain that the seller didnt sort it all out well in advance. As soon as I know im going to be selling any of my vehicles, the first thing I do is to get the private plate switched off & onto retention as you never know when the vehicles going to sell and any buyers may be put off by just this sort of hassle. Only time I didnt was when I sold my zed and bought my beemer, but that was a bit of an impulse buy and didnt have the time to transfer the plate off in advance, and my god, what a nightmare that turned out to be. The BMW dealer wanted to handle the whole process, which meant me missing out on a months road tax refund and it took weeks for them to sort everything out. Never again!

Thats a shame to hear AF are going down the pan customer service wise. Ive used them at various times in the past without any problems. When I got my zed, they were one of the few companies who actually would touch me. Sky & other "specialist" companies were quoting about £1200 upwards and AF came in as the cheapest at less than a grand. My brother had a claim through them a few years back and that went smoothly - albeit the 1st "offer" for his written off car was about 1/3rd of the actual value and we had to prove to them what the real market value of the car was - but then again, thats par for the course with any insurance companies from my experience.

If I remember rightly last time, a lot of people who normally would vote for the Tories voted elsewhere as a "protest vote". Hence a lot of the Lib Dem votes last time were actually people who would normally vote Tory, wanted to protest but didnt want to vote Labour. I guess this time around those voters are more happy with the Tory party and went back to voting how they would normally do. What I thought was interesting was that from what I read earlier, UKIP actually had over 3 million people vote for them, more than who voted for SNP and Lib Dem. But, due to how the election system works, they didnt get many seats. Certainly excellent results baring in mind they seemed to have come from nowhere over the last few years. What makes me laugh the most today is that a lot of people I know on facebook are slagging off the Conservatives and saying how disappointed they are with the result, and that the worlds come to an end etc. etc. etc. At the end of the day the public voted and regardless of which party you support, if the conservatives win then its because the majority of people want that. Thats the whole point of votes really.

Awesome!!!!! Its strange seeing your own motor in a mag isnt it! Way way way back when I was using my Renault 5 GT Turbo as a daily runner I had a couple of blokes in some hot hatch try to get me to pull over by waving at me and pointing at a magazine they were holding up.. I floored it and left them for dead. As soon as I slowed down they eventually caught me up and tried again. After about the 3rd time of me leaving them for dust, seeing they were still mega keen I pulled over into a garage to see what they wanted. Transpired they were from Max Power magazine and wanted to take some pix of my car & interview me. The first question they asked was "do you read max power magazine" and I remember I was about to say "no, because its a bag of shite", but I bit my tongue and figured if I ever was to sell the car it would be a nice bonus for the new owner. As it was, the bird I was dating at the time was a pretty hot blonde, so the photographer was more interested in taking photos of her than of my (standard looking, non chav`d up, I hasten to add) car. Sure enough, the next month my car was featured in the magazine and for about 8 months afterwards id get completely random people coming up to me saying "you were in max power....." sigh!.

Hahaha. Im doing something similar with my Ducati 996 atm, stripping off bits not needed and lightening it. Last weekend the wife was trying to do some baking and spent ages hunting high & low for her kitchen scales, until she found me with them in the garage. She wasnt happy with the greasy finger prints id left all over them.

No seatbelt!!!!!!

You may even have problems with the HFC`s as whilst they are a cat, ive read on here of people still failing the emissions test with them.

Only problem with that approach is that if people see that the same car has been up for sale for a while and not selling then they think something is up with it. If you then get bodywork all done, you`ll probably find buyers will still be knocking you down from the original price as its been on the market for ages. I had something similar happen with an ex`s car which we were trying to sell. Id get the paintwork sorted before you sell. That way the car will look mint, all those scuffs and stone chips will be gone and anyone looking will be amazed at how well you looked after the car.

I have a friend who has made £45,000 in just under 18 months on a GT3RS, WOAH!!!!! Why didnt I know this earlier? Theres me chucking about £6500 down the drain for 18 months of 350z ownership when had I bought a GT3RS it could have not only paid for all the fuel it would cost to drive it to work and back and be "free" motoring for 18 months, but could also pay for my house extension at the same time! [rabbitstew scuttles off to look at porsches on autotrader.....]

I just watched the same episode and words fail me. It was like going back to the very first Wheeler Dealer series and the dodgy stuff he used to do back then.

Spotted in Cambridge, 2pm today (22/4/2015), Chesterton Road. Blue Azure Roadster private plate NRN * Women driver.

It's actually quite refreshing to see a trader knowing what he's selling rather than just assuming a 2007 is a HR. When I sold my 313HR (on a 07 plate), the problem I had was that the glasses guide the dealers use didnt know what a 313HR was. So the prices they gave were the same as a normal non 313 model. As the dealer didnt know anything about 350z`s he had no idea what I was on about. My car was July 07 if I remember rightly. It was an ex Nissan Press car, so would probably have been one of the first ones.

I got flashed last week. Sods law. Theres loads of roadworks on my way into work atm and I am religious about keeping to the speed limit in my car. I sit there doing 40 in the 40 and 50 in the 50 every day, with endless amounts of cars and articulated lorries flying past me and no sign of speed camera vans. Then last week I decided to go a different route home and coming into a 30 from a 60 on the outskirts of a quiet village I was distracted by a broken down truck on side of the road and I didnt slow down quick enough. So got flashed by a blue camera van hidden under a bridge doing 39 in a 30, so hardly foot to the boards, but still more than 30. I couldnt believe it. Made me wish id speeded everywhere rather than be careful. Still, you live & learn. 100quid & 3 points or speed awareness. Since 3 points jacked my premium up by 30% last time, I am going to opt for the speed awareness course. Going to be annoying though being preached at about how you should keep to speed limits etc when 99.99% of the time in my car I am. [Motorbike however is a completely different story! ]

I test drove one of them back in 2000 at a local BMW garage and they wanted £28k for it! Unfortunately the insurance quotes I was getting were ridiculous. £3000+ if i remember rightly. The same companies were quoting me about £300 for a 328i.

80`s hot hatches are nicely rocketing up atm, along with any "classic" fords. Essentially all those cars which people wanted or couldnt afford back then, but now people have money to spare and are looking to relive their youth.