Mike_B

The garage on the house I moved into at the end of May only has a 6'6" door - I can't get the GS in it! When I moved in, it didn't have a door at all so I suppose it's an improvement... I need it to keep the motorbike in really, won't be keeping the car in it even if it would fit through! I will rebuild it completely, though it's hardly a priority at the moment. Rewire of the whole house next week, then we can start doing some decorating etc.

The fuel is just a commodity being sold by a shop. It's no different to the fact you can't go to marmite.com and find out the price of a jar at your local corner shop!

Have a look at this post, it might give you some clues? Don't know if it will work for your car, but it won't do any harm to try it...

From the way you've said that 'the aircon works' I assume you're testing with the aircon button set to off. Are you sure it's not just drawing external air in which is already fairly warm at this time of year? Mornings are usually a lot cooler than afternoons obviously, which could be why you've noticed it the way you have... The temperature you see in the console is what it is trying to set the inside of the car to, which is not the same thing as the temperature of the air coming out the vents. If the car believes it is 20C inside the car, and you've set the temp to be 23C, then it will blow hot until the inside temp matches what you've set. If you set it to 16 and then turn the aircon off, there's not much it can do except blow in air from outside as quick as it can in an attempt to cool it down. But the air it blows out will be exactly the same temperature whether you've asked for 19C or 16C, if the outside air is already warmer than that. I doubt it's the matrix at fault, because if you're asking for cool air then it will simply shut off hot water running through the matrix.

This sounds like the sort of buzzing you get from any phone, rather than an iPhone specific issue. What happens if you put another type of phone in the same location as your iPhone and make a call using that? My first guess would be 'the same thing'... Try putting the phone in another location in the car (for testing, just leave it on the passenger seat maybe?)

My parents used to have a coffee table which was a wooden surface, but they had a sheet of glass cut to fit exactly over the top of it. Underneath they had dozens of different foreign banknotes, some new from the more obscure countries of Eastern Europe, and some really old ones. There was even a Weimar Republic one from 1920s Germany. Made a good talking point... My favourite of the local pubs also has a handful of weird notes stuck on the wall behind the bar.

Many countries with weak currencies don't like you taking it out the country - Egypt and Morocco are two more. I've snuck out a few quid in those currencies but since they have poor exchange rates they are useless outside those countries anyway. There are only 3 really valuable currencies in the world, USD, Euro and (to a lesser extent these days) the GBP. If you have assets in those currencies, you're sorted wherever you go...

i think the day to day transactions of a lot of people is now being done in US dollars, for the reason of sheer weight of the local money is ridiculous. I heard they were paying all government employees in USD now too - its the only way they can get them to turn up to work any more. It reminds me of stories in the late twenties in Germany, when they had similar hyperinflation problems. People would literally take a wheelbarrow of cash to the shops, and have to leave them outside while they got groceries. People would then nick not the money, which was worthless, but tip out the cash and run off with the barrow!!

I loved bits of it, and hated bits of it. I went for a week's diving in the Red Sea, which is pretty much the finest scuba diving area in the world. That bit was just amazing... On the other hand, you will literally not be able to walk more than about 20 yards without someone grabbing at you to try and sell you something, and then acting all offended when you eventually get so fed up with it you tell them bluntly to f*** right off. It really, really, gets on my wick when people just will not leave you alone. It's not just at stalls in the street either, you find the same in shopping centres...

I use the Vanish carpet foam on mine. Spray on, brush in gently with a scrubbing brush, leave it for an hour and then vacuum away with a normal vacuum cleaner. Works quite well and is very low effort compared to some methods!

Definitely head for a 430 if you can. There is little in it in terms of fuel bills, but it has a shedload more grunt than a 300 in addition to the better suspension. The new 350 is more powerful again but I suspect they will be out of your (and my!!) price range at the moment.

Pyrex is pretty heatproof too. Strange fact - what we now call Pyrex was originally developed for the railways. Signals used to run gas/oil lamps, which of course burn extremely hot. They are also on one colour for long periods of time, so the coloured glass lenses would get very warm indeed. If it then started to rain, the contraction caused by the cooling would shatter the glass. A new class of glasses called borosilicates was developed to solve this - and quickly found use in the kitchen under the trademark Pyrex. Every day is a schoolday... :)

Hahaha... big can of worms there. With really good quality equipment, the sound via FM is better than via DAB. This is especially true in the UK where our wonderful government, via Ofcom, have seen fit to use an outdated encoding mechanism and don't enforce any minimum bitrates. Many UK stations are only broadcast in 64k Mono. Even the BBC only use 128kB stereo, except for Radio3 which is (or used to be, anyway) broadcast at 192kB. This is all using MP2 encoding which is less efficient than MP3 or MP4, meaning the effective audio quality is even worse than you'd expect for those bitrates. However, there are undoubtedly more stations available via DAB, you don't have to retune as you go around the country, and there is less obvious interference, though you get a sort of bubbling noise when the signal drops. Plus, as you say, some stations are DAB only. If you want to listen to 1Xtra on the move, DAB is your only option. Personally, I'd go for it as long as the adapter and any additional aerial requirements aren't really expensive.

A union, in this instance, is simply where a pipe joins something else - either another piece of pipework, or a tank, or whatever. From the sounds of it, the union between the fuel hose and the tank is badly corroded and if the individual parts are not available, the preferred fix from the main dealer's perspective is a new fuel tank and pipe. I think the problem you might have is that if you were to get hold of spare parts from scrap cars, they are likely to be in a poor condition as well since it's a known weak-spot for corrosion. You could ask for the prices of new parts though, I guess it depends what the car is worth to you. If the rest of it is in good nick and you don't want to sell it in the near future, replacing with new parts could give it a new lease of life for a few years yet?

Indeed, I had about £250 knocked off my bike insurance just because i rang them up and said i'm not paying that much. Bit of a cheek really - I refused to reinsure with Elephant this year (changed to Bell, which is the same company really) simply because they didn't offer me as good a price. They rely on you just letting them get on with it, and I refused their offer of 'let's see if we can do better' because if they can't be bothered to offer me their best price in the first place, they dont' get the business. Simples...

The 2002 GS have a different master cylinder from the pre-facelift 98-2000 cars. Therefore the known problems with the earlier models do not apply to yours. That's not to say the brake system in the car you're looking at is working properly, but the master cylinder problem you're talking about affects a specific component which isn't even fitted to that vehicle. How were you performing this brake pumping - were you stationary? Was the engine running?

Is likely to be my next car also, unless work suddenly requires me to drive loads when a diesel would be the obvious choice. My MkII 430 is an excellent car, so the MkIII must be a fabulous motor. Are there many 460s around? I use the boot space too much for the hybrid to be viable, but I don't think I've ever seen a GS460 anywhere - dealer or on the road. That must be an absolute cracker, and because of the fuel costs, probably a real second-hand bargain. The initial depreciation must be terrifying on them!

The Royal Mint are offering £50 for each coin, but only for the first 10,000 applicants, and then only for a limited time. So technically the coin is worth £50 if you get in there quick. Strikes me that they are putting about the rumour that they will be worth a lot more than that later on, to avoid having to pay out £50 for many coins. That way they are 'seen to be taking it seriously' by offering a reasonable sum for their return, but also guaranteeing that lots of them will remain in circulation by hinting that 'collectors' will pay large sums for them later on. But of course, if too many of the coins remain out in the wild, then they will not be very rare at all and so the market price will remain low. As they come into banks, after being spent, they can be removed from circulation for free.

On the other side of that 'The Sun' style comment, I know someone who was falsely accused of such a thing. After he was acquitted for total lack of evidence, it was revealed that the girl in question had previously made similar allegations against 4 other men, all of whom were also completely exonerated. Of course, that didn't stop people just like you spitting at him in the street, breaking his windows with stones, etc etc. For absolutely no reason whatsoever - he had done absolutely *nothing* wrong except having had the misfortune to live a few houses away from her. RIP MJ.

Doesn't help as much as an autobox though. :P

Just had mine done a week ago by Kwik-Fit for £45. It extracted 255g of refrigerant, when it should have had 600g in there. No wonder it wasn't very cold any more... It added (I think!) 9ml of soluble oil along with the correct 600g refrigerant after a 20 minute high vacuum to suck out the old stuff. Worked a charm, and had it gone bang, I'd have had some form of comeback against the garage.

As does the GS. You can also close the windows and sunroof by holding down the 'lock' button on the remote, even after you've got out the vehicle. This works on IS and GS models, I would assume it also does on the LS.

I have a suspicion that it actually is more than one driver. That way they can use whichever driver is available, but people still accept it as one person which makes the consistency of the lap times more believable. If you knew it was Lewis Hamilton one week and Narain Karthikeyan the next, people would say 'oh well of course the Aston lapped quicker than the Audi, it had Lewis driving it!' Bu by always using the 'same' driver, people are more likely to look at the cars being the deciding factor in that crucial 1/10 second laptime difference.

Right, just got back from having it re-gassed at Kwik-Fit. And what a difference... is now cold from all vents, am well pleased. Looks like they did a good job of it, and certainly can't moan at the price!

And those are exactly the customers (and lenders) that have dropped us into this economic black hole we're in at the moment.