rabbitstew

Lol... i didnt get it either until someone just explained it! Someone mention pies tho?!!

Welcome!

Nissan seem to use the same small oil filter across their whole range. I know my HR oil filter was the same one as they fit to a nissan micra!!!!

My dad has always been into engineering and stuff so I was lucky he had a garage full of tools I could use. I started when I was a kid, I had an old 1971 Austin Mini 850cc which cost me £20 to buy. Anything went wrong on it, i simply couldnt afford to pay a garage to fix, so I did it all myself. I ended up doing loads to it. Engine out,New clutch, change head gasket, cv joints, bearings, wheels, brakes, exhaust, suspension. Basically rebuilt the whole car. This was before the internet days, so it was just a Haynes manual and common sense. I havent stopped since really, every car ive had since ive always serviced myself and anything which needed doing ive done. Over the years ive built up a collection of tools which would rival any local garage. You name it, ive got it. Air compressor, all the air tools, specialist sockets & pullers, mig & arc welders, a massive tool cabinet full of everything. All my mates & family now always bring their cars to me for any mechanical work, as you simply can not trust a lot of garages to do a decent job. If you service a car yourself you know exactly what oil & bits you have put in it. My mate took his Vectra to Vauxhall for a service last year and they didnt even bother changing the air filter or pollen filter, both of which only cost about £4 to buy and take minutes to change. He now brings his car to me instead! These days its much easier. If ive not done a job before, I just look online and theres always a guide on there where someone has done the same thing - makes it much easier! Some people are put off thinking you need a ramp & all sorts of tools, but really you dont. Even though ive a double garage I nearly always do the work on my drive. You just need a trolley jack & a set of axle stands... they cost pennies from any car parts place and a decent set of sockets. I made the mistake really of buying all my stuff separately whereas these days you can just buy a complete set of sockets & tools from halfords, including the toolbox for quite a reasonable price! One thing I will say is to buy decent tools. Not cheap crap. I tend to buy Halfords Professional when I can as they have a lifetime guarantee. You may have a bit of an outlay initially but it will soon pay for itself. An example is my mate with his vectra. He paid Vauxhall £140 for a minor service. The bits came to about £40, so you`d save £100 straight away. They wanted about £250 to change the brake pads. The pads came to £30 or £50 if you replaced the discs too. So instantly saving £200. The tools needed for that lot were just some torx spanners, 2 normal spanners and a piston rewind tool which cost £14. So hardly anything really!

Welcome! I used to always be around Fordham / Soham / Ely way! Some interesting roads out there!

In my zed, my galaxy s2 fitted nicely in the sliding compartment between the glove box & the gear stick. Not sure if the older zeds had that compartment though.

Was your car parked literally inches away from the hole they were digging or something? Thats mental the mess they seem to have made. Ive had a water meter fitted before and they just fitted in an inspection hole in my drive which was already there. No mess or anything. And how an earth did they damage the headlamp washer? Lets hope they respond and get it sorted out. The fact they tried to clean it down with water suggests that the worker know they caused the damage and therefore hopefully their company will admit fault.

I just read that myself. Shame as a lot of people had their hopes up. Still, the main guy is convinced they are there somewhere and is continuing to look....

I still find Maplins useful for hard to find electronic stuff. Recently bought an external USB dock for browsing my old IDE hard drives. I bought the same but from ebuyer online for a couple of quid....

Fair play to the guy, id have promoted him for showing initiative.

They are seriously expensive. You have to take out a mortgage to buy cards from them. I actually found an old school card shop in my local town before Christmas which does cards for 10p & 20p. Which compared to Clintons £4 a card is amazing. I think with places like supermarkets having massive ranges of cards now, most people tend to just buy them at the same time as their weekly shop. How about places like Maplins? Are they still doing well? Originally when electrical stuff was expensive, they were like radioshack and did a massive trade in electronics etc... but now with everything coming in from China for pennies I cant see many people bother repairing electrical goods etc... And anyone who is into that stuff can just buy it all online anyway.

I had a rear shock on my 350z go at just 22k miles! Still, a replacement from alex was really cheap and litterally a 10minute job to swap over. Mileage is a funny thing. Nearly all my cars ive taken well over 100k miles on them, some ive sold at 175k and still going strong. But, there still is that psychological thing with buyers that anything over 100k is bad. Zeds drop in price like mad these days due to not everyone being able to afford to run a big thirsty sports car, so if the car is a minter with high mileage then i dont really think the resale will be affected any more than a normal mileage one.

I used to use services like lovefilm etc.. when they first started up, but then Royal Mail cut their deliveries down so it would seem id only get 3 deliveries a week, rather than 2 a day. So that made me move to using blockbuster in store instead for my films. I used to always hire a couple of films & watch them Saturday night with the missus. I think the back in the day, video / dvd shops had the advantage as it seemed films would come out to rent years before they would be on sky and decades before they were available to buy. Now it seems films come out on sky quicker, and are available to buy from shops much quicker, so less people go & rent them. DVD`s are cheap as chips now so a lot of people buy them instead, and also Cinema seems to have made a come-back over the last few years, so whereas when people would rent films, now they go out to the cinema instead. Personally I seem to buy more movies than I used to, and seem to have moved more to watching tv shows on sky rather than movies.

White wheels always reminds me of rally cars, so id have gone for grey or silver I think. Very nice paintjob though there and the level of detail is excellent.

Nissan in Birmingham re-aligned my roof without any problems, so i guess it depends on which dealers have a "roof" specialist. Brum is probably a bit too far for you to go tho!

Its all down to each persons circumstances. When I got my zed I couldnt believe HOW EXPENSIVE it was to insure. Insurance companies were quoting me miles more than they quoted me for M3`s, Porsche Boxsters, Scoobys & Evo`s. It was coming in at about a grand and that was with me being nearly 40 and having something like 20 years NCB. The M3 quote was about £580. I had stupidly assumed that the zed would be cheaper or at least the same sort of insurance cost as an M3 being as the M3 was a quicker car and I thought BMW parts were more expensive than Nissan parts.

I havent played online poker since I lost a hand when I had KKQQQ and the other guy had KKAAA.

Id be tempted with the m3, its one of the cars on my "to own" list which ive come very close to buying several times but never did. The prices of them are very affordable now.

hahaha... love things like this. I remember trying to change the bulb on my golf, which ended up being a front bumper off and had to strip half the front of the car off just to change a lightbulb. Or on the zed... swapping the exhaust over... that wont take more than an hour..... ends up taking 6 hours and lots of swearing...

Better nip down there quick and hire a load of dvds out then in case they dont bother asking for them back!

I discovered "Bonnie Rotten" the other week, whilst doing some err... research. Ideal for those of you who liked tattooed women!

Ever since I got my first PC with a CD drive back in the early 90`s I moved onto .mp3`s for my music collection. Every CD i used to buy id rip straight onto my hard drive and play that through my hifi. I remember paying £600 for a twin speed CD writer when they first came out so I could burn my own compilations to play in my car. That didnt stop me from buying CD`s and I still bought no end. I remember even back then the UK prices for CD`s werent as cheap as abroad, so it was very often cheaper for me to buy CD`s or DVD`s from America & Australia and have them shipped over to the UK! However, I personally havent got any new music in years. I cant remember the last album I bought. Nothing out there these days seems to excite me. I still buy the odd CD, but its usually a remaster of an old artist or something like that. I dont know how music sales compare to old days, but im guessing that whilst us older collectors dont like the new music, the kids of today must be buying it via itunes or whereever. Certainly stuff like x factor & pop idol etc.. seem to generate a lot of interest & money even if the artists are usually a bit generic.

They look good. I may have to treat myself to one of them. As i just use a cheapie trolley jack ive had for about 15 years. Does the job but its not ideal for lowered cars. I have to lift the side of the car up by hand and get a mate to stick the trolley jack under it.

Costs a fortune in rent and business rates in huge shops like HMV. Not really a shock though, albums sales including downloads have plummeted from the heydays of the 70's and early 80's, there used to be at least 4 independent record shops in Chester plus an HMV and Virgin in the early 80's, now they've all gone. The downfall began when they stopped making vinyl, half the fun was admiring the art on the album sleeve, CD's are just so impersonal. Pete As someone who has the costs of rent and rates coming off my bottom line, I do realise this, but my point was the fact they encourage customers to shop online with this policy. We match our online prices which gets customers into the stores as hopefully they prefer the experience of one to one service. Also, they will hopefully see something else they like, whether to purchase straight away or in the future. Their free delivery policy, albeit a correct policy, costs them a fortune. They should have matched their online price to dicourage their customers from buying from their online store. You're right about the failing/changing market, they should have reduced the number of stores they have and really pushed the download market more. I think whenever places like this go bust they drag out the "piracy has killed it" or "new media format has killed it" - They have done this for as long as I can remember - certainly when cassette tapes came out and was going to "kill the industry" back in the 80`s with people copying tapes... then people downloading media were next to blame. But, you look at other companies and they are managing just fine. I think its a mega competitive world out there now and margins are slim, so companies just have to cut back as much as they can and try and promote the advantages they have over online retailers - such as the in store experience - being able to take returns back to your local store - get advice face to face etc... Makes you wonder what the high street will look like in a few years time. Will it just be bookmakers and coffee shops?

And dont dismiss your local garages. I found the cheapest price for a set of Falkens for my zed was on mytyres.co.uk. I then popped into one of my local tyre places and they actually quoted me virtually the same amount, incl fitting, so I went with them instead.