DannyBoy

Where were you when I went and spent all that cash on exhausts and remaps and whatnot???!!! Could have saved myself thousands and got way more power using this cheap fix rather than doing things properly DB

Well FI is still actually the best value if you look at it £/bhp. My £3k worth of bolt on mods and remapping has got me 30bhp, so approx £100/bhp. A vortech kit would cost around £7K fitted and gain you 100bhp, or £70/bhp. But as others have said, (and has been said many, many times on countless other threads) the zed does not give cheap power, and by far the cheapest way would be to get an Evo instead. DB

How much you pay for the engine will play a big part in the overall cost. An LS swap is touted as a good cheap alternative to FI by guys in the states, but only because LS engines practically grow on trees over there so you can find lots of low mileage used ones around. Over here it's not so easy, and a brand-spankers LS2 crate engine with all the peripherals was going at about £12k last time I looked. Epic results, but not as much of a cheap option over here as it is in the states. A vortech kit would be considerably cheaper. DB

Sorry, but £3700!!!!!! does that come with complementary reach-around? Had a quote from Trim-star for a full seats and dash trim in nappa leather for £1900. And i've seen the quality of their work and it's top-notch. DB

Not necessarily; there are quite a few things in the new MOT rules that aren't compulsory to have on the car, but have to work if they are present. Headlight washers for example, a lot of new cars still don't have them, but if your car had them from the factory then they have to be present and working. Stupid I know, but them's the rules. DB

I can confirm from recent experience that niether the rear wiper nor screen washer are part of the MOT. I don't think they're even checked as my rear washer doesn't work and i didn't even get an advisory. DB

I'd get a wired one mate, I have the dremel 8200 cordless and it really only lasts an hour or so of decent work and then takes at least an hour to recharge. It's also really back-heavy because of the battery. Really not sure why i didn't just get the wired one but it seemed a good idea at the time DB

DB

Also try and include a bit of decent narrative about the car beyond the usual paragraph of acronyms and 'well-cared-for mint example' etc. People like to buy from nice people, especially when buying private, so come across as a nice person in your ad and you're only helping yourself. I know it's not exactly the same, but I've sold three cars on autotrader (admittedly more mainstream cars) and all three went inside two days for the asking price. It could well just have been luck, but I'm putting it down to the fact I spent some time getting decent photos and writing a good ad and getting some people to read through it. Best of luck DB

Exactly. How would you like them to test it? 9 miles is nothing, gives the car a decent shakedown too. I wasn't aware the Zed couldn't be roller-tested, but a 9 mile round trip is hugely excessive given the location of the garage. You could do a trip to the next village through a bit of 60 limit and back again inside 4 miles (I used to do the trip on my bike pretty regularly). I reckon I know exactly where he went; there's a new bypass road a few villages away (it's the fens, there are villages everywhere) which is wide and straight for about a mile, so basically a drag strip. That would be about a 9 mile trip. I didn't actually say anything to the garage. When I picked up the car I made a point to ask if the cats needed a spin to warm them up or if they passed ok (giving them the chance to own up) and the guy said they just let it run for a bit and they were fine. Given that they were happy to lie about it and i had no proof, I didn't see the point in kicking up a fuss over something that had already happened when I have several mutual friends with some guys who work there (neither of whom were there yesterday) and it could potentially cause awkwardness in a small village. I just won't be going there ever again. If it was something like Jez doing a shakedown run after doing some actual work on it I wouldn't be bothered in the slightest, but you just know this wasn't the case. It always seems to come back to a lack of respect for other people's things these days. DB

...that the new-style MOT now includes a thorough test drive by a 17 year-old spanner-monkey? This wasn't something I was aware of until yesterday, when I saw my own car drive past the house (at some speed) with the work-experience kid behind the wheel. I took it to the local indy garage just for an MOT as it's walking distance from my house, and I even said during a conversation about the HFCs that if they needed properly warming up to pass emissions (the only possible reason for driving a car during an MOT) then they should ring me up and I'd take the car out for a spin and do it myself. I always reset the trip odometer when dropping it off at garages just out of habit, and so after seeing the car go past my house I was expecting to see a few miles when I got the car back; nine miles, NINE frickin' miles of joyriding WTF would make someone think that that was OK? If you can't trust the village indy anymore who can you trust? On another note the car passed with flying colours except for low tread advisories on all 4 tyres which are only about 15,000 miles old, do RE050s wear this fast? DB

First impression is that it isn't that cheap considering it's a CAT D, that's probably only £1500 cheaper than a regular 2006. Also it looks like it had front end damage to me, as it's a 2006 facelift car, but it appears to have a pre '06 non-facelift front bumper. DB

Depends how cheap it is really, and yes a link would help. CAT Ds can range from properly silly cosmetic damage to actually pretty serious stuff. One way to get a better idea of how much damage was done is to find out when the car was written off and use that to estimate the market value of the car at that time. The insurance company will have estimated the reparis to cost more than that value, which could be an indicator of how bad it was. Post a link up and people will be able to give you a better opinion; I dont think anyone is going to nick it off you, most of us already have one (Or two in the case of Keyser) DB Edit: You already posted the link

AAM do a very nice true dual that as far as I know you can't easily get hold of over here: http://aamcompetition.com/i-4642415-aam ... haust.html Sound clip: I almost got one instead of my Milltek, but couldn't be arsed to ship it over. DB

I actually hadn't considered a 350z initially when looking for a new car; I didn't really know anything about them and I'd put them in the 'boy racer, looks fast but isn't' bracket along with Celicas and stuff. I was totally failing to get excited about all the boxsters and z4s that I was going to see, and then one of my mates got a Zed and told me it had a 3.5 V6 and i got interested. With a bit of research I realised they were rediculous value and the perfect balance of sport and comfort (which i hadn't been convinced about with the other cars) it was a total no-brainer. DB

If you actully read the article it sems pretty clear that it was a car malfunction rather than driver error; it had almost come to a stop next to the engineers and then inexplicably accelerated into the truck. DB

That's such a tough call but I'd have to go for the McLaren! Well we'll have to see if the McLaren can make Vicky Butler-Henderson cry with joy when 5th gear get hold of it . I've never seen a car reduce somone to ecstatic tears before like the 458 did so I think that has to be the yardstick. DB

It's certainly added some of the character that was missing from the tin-top, but i'm afraid my money (like I'd ever have enough of it) would still go on a 458 and I don't even like ferrari as a brand. DB

Such as what? I thought I was pretty clear, but here goes: There are two types of seats; cloth seats with nothing electric in them, and leather seats with electric adjustment and heaters in them. It's not unheard of for people to buy the leather seats second hand and put them into a car that didn't originally have them. In this case I believe that the heaters can't be wired up to work without a lot of effort, so you may see a car that appears to have non-heated leather seats, but it actually has the same heated leather seats as everyone else without the heaters plugged in. DB

Manual cloth seats or electric heated leather seats. If someone has put leather seats in a non-leather car then some of the electric gubbins might not be wired up, but it will still be in the seats. DB

Only the most asked question on any car forum ever. 30 second search threw up this lot: search.php?keywords=induction+kit&terms=all&author=&sc=1&sf=titleonly&sk=t&sd=d&sr=topics&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search DB

Milltek could be an option. Not that loud on its own compared to other systems, but a fantastic slighly raspy howl and no boomy chavvy stuff. I have HFCs paired with mine and it'll fill a tunnel quite nicely if you get me. As you've got decats already I can only imagine it'll be considerably louder. DB

He usually either has, or can source, interior bits DB

+1 For the sake of the £25 my insurer wanted for uprated discs, pads and brake lines, it just doesn't make sense not to tell them when you think what you're risking by leaving yourself potentially uninsured. DB

Very sure I wasn't done over. Got a very cheap low mileage gearbox and had a trusted garage (Horsham Developments) do all the labour for exactly what they quoted, but the clutch and flywheel are the killers price-wise as you really need to change them both at the same time. I'll be honest and say £2k is a slight exaggeration, but if i'd paid the going rate for my gearbox instead of getting it cheap (guys I bought it from didn't really know what they had) then it would have been about that. Hopefully your problem isn't going need a total replacement. Bear in mind that the transmission on these cars is pretty noisey, and not the smoothest to operate, so a lot of what you're experiencing could just be normal. DB