rabbitstew

It is. Although the stats are all rigged as they include speed as a reason for an accident when the driver might have been driving well within the speed limit, but too fast for the conditions. Its all part of trying to justify why the police always harp on about "speed kills" when it doesnt. Inappropriate speed does or effectively just dangerous driving does.

Awesome stuff!

Yeah, thats probably why she made the guy a billionaire. Wouldnt have the same attraction if he was a bin man.

My wife read them and thought they were brilliant, so i had to read the 1st one to see what it was all about. I found it really hard going and probably one of the most disturbing books ive read. Basically the guy grooms the young inexperienced girl and abuses her. He tries to control every element of her life, from what she wears, what workouts she has to do to stay in the shape he wants her to be, which of her friends she can & cant see and even dictates what contraception she must take. She spends most of the book crying unable to talk to anyone as shes signed an NDA. When she tries on several occasions to leave, he stalks her and turns up wherever she is. He even buys the company she works for to keep an eye on her. The BDSM stuff is irrelevant really and very mild, the psychological brainwashing and stuff he makes & tries to make her do is the main thing. At least she didnt agree to the anal fisting he tried several times to get her to agree to. Im at a loss why any woman would like the idea of a bloke like that.

"Defence lawyer Graham Walker said: "The speed of 166mph leaves most of us speechless" - clearly he`s not a biker then!

Reminds me, I need to get down B&Q this weekend and stock up on chain, ropes and cable ties, ready for when the wife gets back from watching it. Im still not convinced she will appreciate me stalking her for a few days, getting her to sign some sex contract, tieing her up, beating the living daylights out of her & forcing myself on her. But hey ho thats what he does in the book and apparently women love it.

The 320d is a good car, they were mega popular as company cars for a long time and still are - so quite a lot on the 2nd hand market. The same engine is in the 120d and my mate did 120k in 3 years in his company one without any major problems. They are pretty economical and servicing is cheap. I considered them when I was looking last, but decided to go with the 123d instead as I preferred it over the 3 series. The M-Sport does have quite hard suspension which isnt to everyones taste. Personally I find my 123d M Sport actually handles better than my zed did and the only time the suspension seems hard is when I have any passengers. Then its noticeably a very firm ride. However, since 99.9% of my journeys are just me in the car on my own, the handling seems perfect for me.

I noticed something similar when I had my zed. I saw probably a handful of zeds in my 18 months of ownership and only one guy ever waved back at me, the rest looked at me like I was some weirdo. However I did find my zed did attract huge amounts of interest though from non zed owners. I could barely park it up without people commenting on how rare or how nice it was. I remember stopping off at the local co-op one day to buy a pint of milk and came out to some complete stranger saying how nice the car was. Kids would should out "nice car mate" as you drove past. I popped into the local car parts place to get a bulb for the wifes car once and came out to find the manager drooling all over my zed - ended up chatting to him for about 30mins about them. I even remember when I took it for some new tyres once. The whole tyre place just stopped working on other peoples cars and ran around my zed like they were changing the tyres on an F1 car. At one point there were 4 fitters all working on my car. Mad!

^^^^^^ love it!

I am also insured with Admiral and they didnt send me this list. Looks like they figured it was something which specifically you would be interested in! Funny stats though. I wonder how they worked out what the actual "legal" amounts were? Did someone have to sit there and take a load of coke & mdma then see if he could drive okay? Then take some more until he was a jybbering wreak and unable to even see the car, let alone drive it?

I had that happen on my 5 turbo, which I think has the same rear calipers. Theres a very small clip which holds a bit of small angle-iron in which is all what holds the brake pads in. If the clip falls out (or isnt put in properly) then the pads soon fall out. Luckily when it happened to me I was only doing about 20mph. I stopped the car, picked the brake pads back up and refitted them using a bit of tree to wedge the pads in. At least it held until I could buy a new fitting kit.

As above Waze (which is a free app) & a Valentine One.

Ive tried a few but find the best which I now use is the valentine one. Its not cheap, but it is the best. Warns of radar from half a mile away in both directions, plus gives you the direction its coming from. Does the same with laser. TBH in this day & age they are only of limited use. Most mobile traps are laser, and once that hits you its instant, so the time the detector warns you your already nicked. Most new speed cameras use infared like the truvelo ones & specs ones, so again, it doesnt warn you of them. Your better off really using an app like Waze which uses gps to warn you of any cameras etc. Users also report road accidents, hazards & speed traps so you get a lot more info. I only use my valentine one to "remind" me about the camera near where I work which is in a 30. Its just after some traffic lights and when you come off the lights you are always trying to avoid running cyclists down, so you are paying more attention to the road rather than your speedo - so its easy to accidentally end up doing 35mph.

Its things exactly like this which stopped me ever using a garage again, buying my own tools & doing the job myself. Me & my family have only ever had bad experiences with garages and so just wont touch them. A few stories below. I had a car actually catch fire as I drove away from a garage once after they did some work on it. They had broken a heat shield under the bonnet & left it lying on the hot turbo/manifolds. The same car they had also "forgot" to connect a pipe which set the boost level for the turbo so it was dangerously overboosting and nearly blew the head gasket, and to top it up I found a gearbox bolt lying in the rain gutter on the car. I went back and complained, the manager basically said it was my word against his so tough. As this was a national chain of garages, I complained to their head office who just spoke to the manager involved, then told me exactly the same thing. Wasnt worth me persuing via the courts so I just forked out £200 for a new heatshield and left it at that. My brother had new brake pads fitted once to his hot hatch at a local garage, he turned up 10mins early to collect it. As he stood on the forecourt he heard this car having the living daylights rung out of it down the local bypass, literally bouncing off the rev limiter in each gear. The car came screetching around the roundabout and onto the garage forecourt and hey presto it was my brothers car. The YTS mechanic told him he was just "checking the new brake pads". My brother told him what he thought to that. My Aunt had new brake pads fitted at a main dealer once as part of its MOT, then as she only ever has the same main dealer look at her car she took it back for an MOT 12 months later. They phoned her up asking why there was a rusty pair of mole grips clamped onto one of the rear brake hoses. Obviously she had no idea as shes not a mechanic. Turned out when the main dealer had fitted the pads 12 months earlier the mechanic had left the mole grips there by accident. In this case, the garage took full responsibility and replaced the brake hose & did a full MOT for free on the car. One of the very few times ive had to venture to a garage recently was to a Nissan main dealer when I was given the mis-guided impression that they would do some work under warranty. The mechanic drove the car into the workshop and not realising I was watching him through the glass screen proceeded to rev the living tits out of my 350z. The K1 exhaust was pretty loud as you can imagine inside the workshop. It was only when the parts manager caught me looking and shat himself that he managed to communicate to the mechanic that the owner was a 15 stone skin head and didnt look overly happy.. Fair play to the mechanic he did come out looking very sheepish and grovelled for forgiveness to me as if his job/life depended on it.

Excellent, mine arrived today, so will be putting them to good use. My only worry is on bolts, whether they will grip too much and end up snapping the bolt off. I will have to use plenty of penetrating oil/heat and take my time I think!

I live less than 5 miles from the pod - can hear the cars going up the strip from my back garden. Weather here today is pretty grim, ice & snow everywhere, was a nightmare this morning trying to get out of my cul-de-sac. Forecast is much of the same all weekend, so not surprised its cancelled.

Ive got to be honest, Ive never really had that problem - Ill warn the dealer that Im intending to actually test the car and that Ill be driving "rapidly" and none (other than the BMW lady) have ever had a problem with it - the GTR salesman clearly challenged me to drive as quick as I could (and in fairness to him sat there chatting away like nothing was happening at 160+ ), Porsche, Bentley, Lexus, Elms BMW and Audi were all the same, even the private sellers I bought the 350 and the 135 let me drive pretty much how I wanted to - the 135 guy wanted me to drift a roundabout no less! Your not the Stig are you?

Just managed to get a 14 piece griptite set for 48quid delivered, so will be putting these to good use on my project car! Ive got an air powered impact wrench but it rinses the air so I really need a bit bigger compressor.

WOAH! Why didnt I know about these. These would be so handy. The amount of times ive spent hours trying to undo rounded bolts off. Let us know how they workout as I need some of these!

I hate moving house. Last time I moved, I had so much stuff the only way to do it was to buy the new house before selling my old one, then slowly move all my project cars/motorbikes/gym equipment & house contents over bit by bit over a period of a few weeks. Endless amounts of trips back & forth. I guess I could have hired a 2 or 3 articulated lorries & done it in one weekend, but i dread to think of what that would have cost. Then my old house struggled to sell as the property market was dropping. Ended up having 2 mortgages for 6 months until the old house sold. Im planning that my next move will be my last, but it will take me a good few years yet to save up before I can afford to buy somewhere like I want.

The black/yellow plastic ones do seem to be higher than most speed ramps ive found. I remember years back I used to park my 5 gt turbo in a council car park every day. One day I came back to the car only to find that they had installed those black/yellow plastic speed ramps on the exit. Was a nightmare trying to get over it, it virtually ripped my exhaust off. I wrote to the council and they basically said tough. In the end I had to remove the middle silencer from my car to give me a bit more ground clearance. When I had a 370z for a week I did notice it seemed to be lower as standard than my 350z was, as it did scrape on the block paved speed ramps outside my work place.

I think that was bmw`s concern as they were very interested in what I did for a living, if id want it on finance etc. etc. They even had a look around my zed and priced that up for a part ex to make sure I was fully aware on how much extra id need to buy the beemer.

I think it was something like £60 an hour plus cost of belt plus VAT. Its just the aux drive belt, so it does alternator/air con etc like you say. I guess the positive thing is that the HR only has the one belt whereas the older zeds have 2. If I remember rightly, the metal frame for the hood pushes against that part quite hard, and after time, it just wears through, or the pressure causes it to rip.

As above, the plugs are done on years or mileage. 6 years if I remember rightly on the HR, so should have been done already, although they arent cheap so may have been missed. The belt is an easy 5 minute job. The first time the belt on my HR shredded at 22k I took it to Nissan as I assumed it would be covered underwarranty. They took an hour and charged me £90. The 2nd time it shredded at 40k I bought the belt off a trader on here (£15 i think it was) and it took me 5 minutes to fit in my driveway. Ive no idea why the belts shredded though as nothing was catching the belt and the pulleys etc all had no play in them. Really odd.

Its all a bit of a catch 22 really I find. You can fork out more money and get what you think might be a better car, but you have no telling what will end up going wrong with it. Its all pot luck really. Very often I tend to go for a cheaper vehicle, knowing it needs work. After doing the work at least I know its all been done properly and the overall price is probably about the same as if id bought a "decent" one. The last vehicle I bought was my Ducati 996. I could have gone and bought one with everything done for about £6k or one needing work for £4k. I went for the one needing work. I then immediately dropped £1500 on it giving it a full major service plus upgrading all of the brake callipers, pads, lines, fitting new chain/sprockets etc. etc. Then 200 mile later the clutch went. That was a bit annoying as the seller had told me the clutch had been done. But even so, after I fitted the new clutch the total overall price still came to less than £6000 and now I know everything has been done on it.