Mike_B

Yeah, it's at the bottom of this link in Index E: New Flat Rate VAT tables Your calculations are slightly off: Currently invoice £100, VAT takes it up to £117.50, you pay 13% of that, so VAT man gets £15.27 Now you'll invoice £100, VAT takes it up to £115, you pay 11.5% of that, so VAT man gets £13.25 With the former you get to keep £2.23, now you get to keep £1.75 - so you've lost out. Remember with flat rate VAT you pay the percentage on the gross, not the net.

Ditto, but I was hoping the flat rate would be re-adjusted in line with the change, or am I being overly optimistic about the competency of this :tsktsk: government? It has been adjusted, just not by quite enough. So tens of thousands of really small businesses will be paying MORE to the government as a result of this 'boosting the economy' measure. By a lucky fluke, my company year ends right this month, so at least I've not got to mess around with part-year changes to the accounts.

The 118bn figure you mention is just the borrowing for ONE year - they are also borrowing 78bn THIS year. The additional tax from the new 45% band will barely, if at all, cover the interest on this amount, let alone pay it down. Of course they are bankrupting the country - they are the Labour party. Labour supports poor people (well, in theory they do). When those poor people are dragged up into a middle-class style income bracket, they don't vote Labour any more. The eternal paradox of socialism... if it works too well it's not needed any more, which is why there is always 'more work to be done' which means more taxes in support of more spending. Of course these days 'taxes' are replaced by 'borrowing' and 'spending' is replaced by 'investment' but the effects are exactly the same - big bills for everyone and the country running out of money anyway. The VAT cut will actually affect me adversely. My VAT registered company subscribes to the flat-rate scheme (won't bore you with the details) and as a result of the drop to 15%, I will be roughly £50 a month worse off than before. Cheers, Gordon. You incompetent pillock.

Yes, those figures are correct. The new bands will be introduced, but the 2001-2006 cars will be capped at band K no matter what their emissions, in much the same way as they are capped at band F now. The real point of putting it back for as long as they have is that it allows them to move it onto an 'election manifesto' platform rather than a 'you will pay this now' platform. That will give it much more of an air of legitimacy because the government (ie the Labour party) will be able to say 'this is what we said would happen if we were voted back into power'. I'm quite happy with that, to be honest. If they are voted back in, people can't complain. If they are not voted back in, it won't happen as the Tories have categorically stated that in their eyes it is an unfair and retrospective measure.

BBC is quoting the chancellor as saying "the new vehicle excise duty bands will be phased in. The maximum increase next year will be £5". So it's quite likely it won't happen at all then, given that Labour will likely get booted out by 2010.

I don't know fella, unfortunately. There can't be many possible donor cars from within the Toyota stable, because almost all of their cars overall are FWD and so obviously have a different setup at the front end. The only obvious possibilities would be earlier model GS cars, or the Mk2 430 - which may not even be the same rack as the 300. Have you thought about a second-hand one from a breaker, or is that where you are looking?

The load on a transmission in "normal" use is surely somewhat different from the corresponding load using a launch control system though ? Of course - but they did fit a launch control, to a road car sold to the public. My view is that if the operation of the system is detailed in the manual, and obvious from the cabin, then you can expect it to be used. If they supply a transmission that isn't up to the job, that's a pretty serious error, surely? I wonder what would happen if trading standards (or whatever suitable, legally empowered body) were to get involved?

If no-one here wants it, I'm sure eBay will find you a willing buyer. That stuff isn't cheap, especially in that quantity. 250m is 70 quid on Amazon.

They're 'supposed' to be secure - but the thing is there is only so much room on the key to have the bits that make up the 'unique' shape. I remember getting stuck somewhere with a colleague who had a flat tyre. The 'unique' locking key on my Mondeo went straight into the 'unique' locking nut on his Mondeo. The reg numbers were consecutive, and the two cars were bought from the same dealer at the same time, which might have had something to do with it. Mind you, his key was identical to his Dad's Escort. It wouldn't start the car because the chip embedded in the key was obviously wrong, but the actual cut of the key was exactly the same. I think there was only 256 permutations of that type of key. Good ol' Ford...

Why on earth isn't the gearbox strong enough to take the load? It's hardly a top-fuel dragster, which have so much power that you really are right on the limits of what can be achieved using steel and aluminium. Built to a price, I guess...

Compared to the vast amount of power required to turn over and start the engine, I really can't see you being able to flatten the battery just by running the stereo and a small screen. You could probably run it for days before you noticed the battery going flat.

The word on the street is that the increases in road tax will be postponed this afternoon in the pre-budget report. Obviously everyone here would like that to be the case - but what do the panel think will actually happen?

Congrats fella... good news indeed! Weddings seem to be the in thing at the moment - the gf and I have 4 to go to next year alone!!

Good choice with the Goodyears - I've got the Eagle F1 GSD3 which were the last of the older tread design before the Asymetrics came out. Lovely tyres - bags of grip wet and dry, and better ride than the old Bridgestone RE040 that were on before. I'm sure the new models will be at least as good.

But the logical extension of your argument that more noise is better is that cars should be purpose designed to make as much noise as possible - clearly not such a good idea. The sort of roads where traffic speed is high enough to make life unpleasant for those who live nearby are not the sort of roads where people are likely to just wander out into the street anyway, so the argument that people will dance gaily out straight into the road just because the cars make a bit less noise seems to me somewhat flawed. I really can't see why people are so anti this piece of legislation - it's almost as though the mere fact that it came out of Europe is enough to turn people against it. Even if the UK left the EU tomorrow, no tyre manufacturer is going to spend millions developing new quiet tyres for Europe and then not sell them in the UK. How many posts do we see in the Wheels and Tyres forum asking 'which tyres are the quietest'? A darn site more than we see from people asking about 'which tyres are the loudest because those pedestrians just keep on walking out in front of me', that's for sure. Still, 1-2 away from home, in Berlin! :D

Love that bonnet - mine has a bad dent/stone chip in it, so thinking of replacing it. That's really nice... any idea where I might be able to get one?

I don't know about the compound hardness, but certainly the tread pattern makes a big difference. 4WD vehicles with off-road rubber fitted seem to make a sort of howling noise, must be something to do with having big chunky individual blocks smacking down on the surface rather than having a smoother rolling surface. Chris is right though, the road surface makes the biggest difference. When you drive along the M25 and reach the point between the M3 and the M4, where it was widened two or three years ago, the surface suddenly goes so quiet it's like you're flying. ROAR-hussssh - just like that! The quiet stuff is called SMA isn't it? Stone-Mastic-Asphalt; only trouble is it's not that grippy when it's first laid, unlike the regular blacktop.

Motorbike scoring seems to work quite well too, and you get points for being further back in the field. 25 pts for a win, 20 for second, 15 for third and then a point less per place all the way down to 1 point. But then bikes, as a rule, have larger entry fields than F1. There's pros and cons to all methods of doing it, same as for football tables etc. It's quite interesting to retrospectively apply different scoring methods after the end of the season, sometimes you get some quite big jumps up and down the table for a given team/driver.

Not sure they do actually fella - at speed, tyres are far noisier than engines on modern cars. Apart from the ultra-loud diesels that seem to get fitted to Transit-style vans - WTF is that all about? Having lived close to a fairly busy road, you do kind of get used to it but it is stressful having that deafening noise going constantly, especially in summer where it's too hot to close the windows. I agree that there are probably more important issues to worry about, but I don't disagree that on principle, tyres should be made quieter. Science will come up with new compounds that provide more grip but less noise - there is nothing like compulsion to focus the minds of researchers!

Good work but one suggestion - when you build the roof, fit an RSJ across the centre of the garage. You can then mount a block and tackle on it to get some serious lifting power without having to mess around with engine hoists etc. Won't add much to the cost but could be very useful!

Seriously - are those pics now in the public domain (ie been in a newspaper or something?) I don't think we would be very popular with the general public if posting them here caused them to get let out on a technicality (unfair trial or whatever). OTOH, the mafia did/do post bail on behalf of people they want out of custody, so they can exact their own punishment instead of seeing them sent safely to jail. So maybe not a bad idea to leave 'em up!! ;) RIP

Didnt know that I thought that was something else when a load of traders lost millions ? Got any articles on it wouldnt mind a read up :) A 5 second nutshell - hedge funds borrowed huge numbers of VW shares, believing the price of the shares would fall, and then sold them. The huge influx of shares into the market caused the price to drop. The idea of this, known as shorting, is that they can then buy the shares back, return the shares to their original owner, and pocket the difference between the price they sold them for and the price they bought them back for. What they didn't know is that at the same time, Porsche were quietly buying up large numbers of VW shares, to increase their stake in the company. That then caused a shortage, and the price rocketed. Unfortunately for the hedge funds, they had to buy the shares back at a sharply increased price, meaning that instead of pocketing the difference they had to pay out vast sums of money to buy enough shares to cover their original positions. All quite amusing, really.

There's one born every minute... Surely anyone with any common sense would do a Google search for how to resolve such a problem before looking on eBay to BUY instructions?

Have you tried Seatwave? www.seatwave.com Might be worth a look... :)

I think I speak for us all when I say PHEW! Glad it was something simple... :)