rabbitstew

From my experience they can pull you over for any "reason" they think of. I remember getting pulled over at 2am once after being out on the town on a Saturday night and the reason they gave was "you were driving very cautiously sir". Of course I was f**king driving cautiously, id spotted the police car following me for the last half a mile, I was hardly likely to start driving like an idiot! They couldnt wait to breathalyze me but i hadnt been drinking at all so I was fine. They looked very dissapointed. It varies drastically depending upon the person I think. I remember one night (long time ago now!) I was up until about 3 or 4am drinking tons of vodka with an ex girlfriend. I got about 3 hours sleep, woke up with the hangover from hell. I felt so sick I couldnt stomach eating any breakfast and was struggling not to chuck up. I cant remember why now, and its not something id ever do now, but I then decided to drive over a mates. On the way over to my mates, sods law, someone crashed into me (100% their fault as they were doing 60 in a 30), but the first thing the police do is breathalyze everyone. It was only then that the situation really hit me, until then I hadnt even considered I might be over the limit. However I suddenly realised that having been drinking from about 6pm until 4am, having hardly any sleep, no breakfast to "soak it up" etc, I must be well over the limit. All sorts of things flash through your head at that moment such as how are you going to cope with a driving ban, how will you get to work, will have to sell the car etc. Anyhow. I blew into the breathalyzer, struggling not to throw up over the officer, and it came up totally clean. It certainly taught me a lesson.

I know, I was staggered. Basically how they worded it was something along the lines of that the insurance should have cost £220, but they gave me £160 worth of loyalty discount to bring it down to £60 for 12 months cover, but any cancellation before the end of the year and you loose that discount, plus get hit with a cancellation charge, plus admin charge etc. etc. All buried deep in the small print. Unfortunately you can only use your NCB on one policy at a time, so I couldnt even let it run till it expired and start my new policy up elsewhere as I needed my 15 years NCB to stick on the new policy.

£200 for 6 months is nothing. Mine cost me well over £1000 a year to insure and thats was with 20 years ncb and a clean license, living in an cul-de-sac full of pensioners, as ive mentioned before on here, the same companies were quoting me just £400 to insure a brand new Lambo Gallardo! Thats quite lucky. When I cancelled my Yamaha R1 insurance policy 3 months into it (£60 a year it was costing me), I expected a small refund, but was told id actually have to pay them £120 in order to cancel it. They had an early cancellation fee of £50, plus admin costs, plus they would cancel any initial discount on the policy etc etc.. I was amazed. Id been with them for 4 years and the only reason I was cancelling is that they wouldnt let me add my Ducati 996 to the policy. Even though both bikes were worth the same amount, i only wanted 3rd party only so no extra risk or liability for the insurance company, and tbh, the 996 is a lot slower than the R1, so surely im at less risk of crashing if im out on it. But, unfortunately they didnt see it that way. After much haggling we settled on id pay them a £40 fee to cancel, meaning my £60 for 12 months insurance actually ended up costing me £100 for 3 months. sigh.

Excellent stuff. Word of warning though, tweaking your bike soon gets expensive. Since I bought my Ducati 996 2 years back, I have easily spent as much on the bike modding it as it cost me to buy initially. However it is very rewarding though when you can feel the difference the mods make and you turn what is already an excellent bike into something even better.

The GT86 isnt great on performance. I absolutely rinsed one out & left him to dry in my daily 1 series diesel the other week. The look on the other drivers face was a picture.

Interesting. When ive got mortgages in the past ive never been asked to make sure I have life insurance in place. Sure enough the IFA usually asks about it as they get extra commission if they sell it to you, but its never been a condition of having a mortgage issued. Usually banks dont tend to care as they know if you keel over then your house will more than likely be sold as part of your estate and they get their money back. On the GP front, as Ekona says, id go down there and wait until they sign it. I guess what you should have done is to book an appointment to see the doc and get him to sign it in front of you. As a side note, GP`s might charge for this, at least my local one certainly does if you ask him to sign anything such as passport photo verification etc.

I agree, but unfortunately the insurance companies see it like this... I remember when I was 19. I had a 1972 classic 850cc old mini which cost me £20 to buy. I spent every spare moment I had and every spare penny turning into a rally replica. Full 6 point roll cage, alloy wheels, uprated brakes, bucket seats, stripped out interior etc. But I couldnt afford a better engine. So, it had the original 850cc engine which (if I remember correct) had 20bhp, but with all the extra weight of the roll cage etc the performance was even slower than standard. It struggled to hit 80mph flat out and if I came to a hill id have to drop it down to 1st gear in order to drive up it. As soon as I mentioned roll cages to any insurance company they wouldnt touch me. In the end I managed to get it insured with Adrian Flux for £500, third party only. Which was a staggering amount at the time as the car was probably barely worth that amount back then. It seemed every company assumed that i was planning to deliberately roll it as I had fitted a roll cage, even though it was a performance reducing mod.

Value of car seems to make no difference, its purely down to stats. When I got my zed, I was paying £1000 to insure it and at the time it was worth about £16k. And yet I was quoted only £400 by the same company to insure a brand spanking new Lambo Gallardo which was worth significantly more. Same postcode, same details, even telling them id park it on the street outside my house etc. I guess statistically more zeds have been claimed for than Gallardo`s and so they are a higher risk.

Its surprising how good engines can handle lack of oil. I serviced my mates daily diesel the other year and he only had bought 3 litres of oil with him when the car normally takes 6 litres to fill it up. It wasnt even showing on the tip stick when I poured it in. Being a tight wad, rather than buy some more from the local motor factors he decided he`d just drive home as he had a can of oil at home. However, before he could even do that, due to his fuel pump being on the way out and there being a small air lock in the system from changing the fuel filter we had to get the car started. No amount of cranking would fire it up. So, he then suggests using brake cleaner in the inlet. Squirted a ton of that in and my god, that certainly did the trick. The engine (cold engine with virtually no oil in it) went from zero to bouncing of the rev limiter quicker than ive ever heard a diesel rev. It was amazing, I thought it was going to explode. And the knocking. My god, it was both incredible and painful to hear at the same time. Ive never heard anything like it. If I ever heard a death rattle that was it. Anyhow, he drove it home, stuck the correct amount of oil in, and car was fine. Been fine ever since.

Ive got an optimate on my R1 and then use £20 cheapie trickle chargers from LIDL/ALDI on my other toys. Not really noticed any difference for what I use.

Excellent thread, really enjoyed reading it and it just goes to show that doing track days doesnt have to be expensive! Am sorely tempted to buy an old beemer myself, but I know I just wouldnt get the spare time (be allowed a free day pass) to actually be able to do the track days.

Looks like my old zed is still going strong. I did about 20k in 1 year in it, but the new owner/s have only done 2k one year and 1k another year. Some funny MOT advisories on mine too. Failed one year for having headlamp beams too low, so the garage adjusted them and it passed. Then next year, it failed cos headlamp beams were too high!!! So garage adjusted them again and passed it. Also got an advisory for the K1 exhaust being "noisy"

Depends which model you get. When I had my zed it was costing me about £1300 a month all in. Super Unleaded, at about 20->25mpg on a typical "gentle" daily 90 mile commute for me which consisted of about 6 miles of 30mph then the rest cruising at between 50 and 80. At the time I was spending about £450 a month on petrol. Tax - £550 a year for me as mine was an HR Insurance - £900 for me as a 40 year old with 22 years NCB living in a quiet area, but your mileage may vary. Tyres lasted about 20k for me, cost £650 for a set of Falkens. Quite reasonable as the tyres on my BMW 1 series cost me £900 a set. MOT is same as any car, servicing was cheaper than my wifes Peugeot 307. You can do it yourself, its really easy. Oil + Filter + Air Filter/s (2 if its an HR). All easy and simple to do. Nissan use the same £4 oil filter on the zed as they do on a Nissan Micra. Other items you may want to check if it needs are new spark plugs - they are every 5 or 6 years or X many miles. Brake fluid should be changed every so often and Aux belts. I needed new brake pads at about 35k miles, I went for DS2500. £250 a set. Again, easy to fit if you have the brembos. Other than that, for me, depreciation was the biggest factor. My zed lost about £4000 a year in the time I had it. However, the prices seem to have stabilized a lot now so if you get the right car, you will only loose a minimal amount. I liked having the zed as a daily runner, but the biggest problem I found was that as I was driving it every day, the fun special exciting feeling you get when you only drive a car at the weekend soon went. Weekend would come and id really not fancy using it as id been using it to poodle to work & back in. Whereas, if I kept it to only drive at weekends, every time I got in the car I knew it would be for a fun thrash out and id seem to really enjoy the car a lot more. I found the same when I used to use my Ducati as a daily. Weekend came and id just not fancy a ride out on it.

Nice! My very first bike was an RD350. Used to love that power band when it kicked in. The noise!

I drove mine all year around. Was great fun having roof down, heaters on on those crisp icy mornings into work. Nearly got caught out in the snow once but just about managed to get it up the hill and onto my drive.

Im with Admiral and they certainly do. This year, as always, they doubled my premium. Quick call up after a 30 second check on confused to give me a base line price, and they happily dropped. Some years I dont even bother checking on confused, i just ring up tell them I can get it for 50% less than they are quoting and they always drop the price straight down. So, if the OP cant get a price to compare against, just make one up! Last years premium is usually a good starting price.

Mad, my dad wouldnt even put me on his 1.6 Vauxhall Cavalier when I was that age!

I hate parking at airports. Its always a nervous moment coming back to your car after being away.

what moisturiser do you use?!!!!!!!

If they remove the offending code so the vehicle fails the emission test then I wonder if it will then subsequently fail the MOT emission test? In which case, suddenly you have a huge amount of cars not fit for road use! Or does the MOT emissions test check for different type of emissions?

Not sure how it could be a genuine Milwaukee Yamaha MotoGp bike as there is no such thing. You might mean the Milwaukee Yamaha from British Superbike though it has headlamps. It has pillion seat... so its a road bike with a sticker kit on it to make it look like a race bike. I have to say, when I was young I didnt tend to think so much about safety on bikes. I remember back in about 1997 I was dating this 20 year old blonde, blue eyed Finnish bird who was pretty hot. She`d go pillion on the back of my ZX7R wearing a short skirt, skin tight leggings/tights/stockings and high heals. Id make sure she had a leather jacket & helmet on but even so, thinking about it now, skin tight leggings are hardly going to offer much protection. Still, it did give the cars following us something nice to look at. Its only when you crash you realise how vulnerable you are. Fortunately whenever ive crashed ive been fully Dianese`d up. Still, I think the turning point for me was when I nearly flipped my R1 trying to impress a bunch of young girls at a bus stop. Id just washed it and thought id just take it for a quick spin to warm it up wearing t-shirt & shorts (as you do cos its summer). The front wheel came up a lot quicker than I was expecting in 1st, and im pretty sure the bike was vertical with me hanging on before I stomped on the back brake. Of course, the front end then came down quicker than a hookers drawers on a Friday night, resulting in throwing me forward against the tank with such force that it felt like someone had just hit me in the crown jewels with a sledge hammer. It certainly bought tears to my eyes. From then on, I religiously make sure im wearing the right gear whenever I go out - even when nipping to the shops.

When I had my HR, the oil filter was exactly the same one as fitted all the rest of the Nissan range. So a Nissan Micra used the same oil filter as my 350z HR. It was like a fiver or something, very cheap. The Aux belt is clearly visable at the front of the engine when you open the bonnet. On my HR for some reason, this belt would shred itself every 20k miles and Nissan had no idea why. All the pulleys were fine and nothing was catching the belt. You can clearly see if its fraying etc. The last time I swapped the belt I went for a Gates higher performance belt which hopefully would last longer than the OEM Nissan ones. The HR only has the one belt, and it really is a 5 minute job to swap using just a 1/2 drive breaker bar (to move tensioner off) and an allen key (to lock the tensioner whilst you swap belt over). Cant remember what oil I used but someone else will advice on that. Plug wise, the HR uses different plugs to the older models and they are more expensive. Again, I cant remember which ones, but one of the traders will advise and give you latest prices. I cant think of anything else which would need doing, but maybe keep an eye on the brake pads. I had to change mine at 40k miles and they were the original set. So yours may be coming up to needing some if you havent changed them already.

My HR used to always be a bit knotchy from 1st to 2nd when cold, but once warmed up was fine. The car had only done 20k miles and the general concensus was that its a "feature" of zeds.

I found my 350z seemed to get one extreme or the other reaction from people. There was no middle ground. Driving through local towns, I very often had kids shouting out the "awesome car" or "nice car mate" comments. I guess its cos they know of the 350z from fast & furious or gran turismo type games they play. I remember going to buy a pint of milk once and as I came out of the shop to get in my car, some complete random stranger said what a nice car the 350z was. Also, people who knew cars used to always say about it. My old neighbour loved it and was gutted when I sold it. Taking the car for an MOT was a major event. The whole garage came out to look at the car and said how they hadnt many of them. Even buying some stuff from the local car accessory shop, I came out and found the manager already outside drooling over my car saying how he`d never seen a roadster one. On the negative side, I had some old biddy shout abuse at me after she crossed the road in front of me and caused me to slow down. God knows why as I didnt beep her or rev my engine. I also had some old man wave his walking stick at me in anger after I drove past him at 15mph in a 30mph zone. I assumed that was due to the loud exhaust. Stranger still, was as I turned down some road on the way to work one morning, 2 chavs shouted out "w@nker" at me. Strange! TBH whilst it was fun having a lot of attention in the zed I was quite relieved when I switched to my beemer, as its much more subtle. Those who know what a 123d coupe is appreciate it, others just assume its another one of many bmw`s on the road.

As above, i used the autoglym stuff on my roadster, made the hood look brand new. If it needs proper colour restauration tho then you may need something else. Mine just looked a bit grey/faded, but came up looking new after I treated it.