Toon Chris

My old girl had an odd fail: Supplementary Restraint System warning lamp indicates a fault (5.4.2) Any guesses? Airbag light maybe?

'toothed' mate, just sayin'. <\pedant> But I digress. There are no shades of grey unless the contract is deemed unreasonable by a court. Ignorance is never a defence. It is YOUR responsibility to determine if what you have bought is standard or modified and act accordingly. As Dan says above, if you are going to give them a way to get out of it then why bother buying in the first place. And many insurers are quite happy to accept mods if they add no extra power and particularly if you are ok with the insurance only covering mods as standard parts. Keep trying; insurance is always a pain to arrange but the insurers who give discounts for forum members are all very familiar with modded cars.

This. Stick your head and arm under the back end and give the heat shield a wiggle.

Welcome Mr Pirate

To partially answer, drive your car at a reasonable speed over a sharp bump in the road, like a small bridge on a country road (be careful etc). The rear is likely to rise up too far as the springs compress and then uncompress too quickly. If you go too fast the tyres will lose contact and it's surprisingly easy to provoke this (so be careful etc). You will most likely bang your head on the roof as it comes down to meet you as you go up to meet it A better shock will damp that and you will soak up the bump without lift-off yet still retain a nice smooth ride. Yes you can crank them up but even on a moderate setting you will get a much better road ride than OEM if nothing else because of that poor rear damping effect the Z suffers from. I don't have the skill or will to fiddle with settings so type 1 KWs (non-adjustable) were my choice and I found them excellent at a 10mm drop from standard. They looked great even lower but I kept ripping off my exhaust flexis on speed bumps. They also lasted for 150K without unduly suffering. In fact they were still better than my shaky memory of the oems. So buy the best deal as above and they *will* be better than oem.

Also, they tend to worry too much as it can look very rusty and still be solid. Attack it with a wire brush and if it is still in a coherent shape smother it with underseal and that's a pass

About 5ftlb more ....... I could fart more torque than that ....... Your sofa must be full of holes, that's some fart

I think about pulling over when i see stranded cars, especially on the A1 as its not nice being on the hard shoulder. But then I think the women will think I'm a weirdo/rapist which is a sad sign of the times and by then I'm past and it's too late. I know a bit about cars, have tyre inflater and a breaker bar to easily change a wheel and my car can tow a truck but i suppose the police get to them eventually.

I have told the OP days ago that I can probably fix his old circuit boards if they are just mechanically broken, or make a new one up from the old and new circuits. No need for any bandying about of £270 dramas. Mate, ok it's not free but its cheap and all you need to do is ask

If it doesn't work I fix keys for Alfa and Renault and I'm happy to take a look at yours for you. If the board is physically broken it can still be fixed PM me if you need to.

I've had bearings on the Z where there was no play at all but when the mechanic took the front apart it practically disintegrated. To me a thrum means a bearing and a thrum at particular speeds is the first sign. Louder sounds on turn are also a good indicator as the bearing loads up. The speed range will widen and the noise will increase. Clarkesport will have a bearing at a decent (i.e. not dealer) price.

Oh dear, I see you have fitted the type that gets easily clogged.

Probably. You don't have an exhaust flexi-pipe leak do you.

Its a deliberate move to kill off the USA's cheap fracking, shale oil and coal industries.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Shithouse-crap-caravan-suitable-for-dogging-sordid-affairs-murdering-/191675366847?#description The description is great fun, but the Q&A is just as good

You know what they say, if you can't see the problem here, you are the problem

Except people who don't indicate on roundabouts though, right? Well yes if you mean people who wander across lanes on roundabouts, obvs. driver vs driver is fair game and I'm not going to pontificate about that as we both have metal shells. Ranting is fun and a necessary release, it just got a bit daft with the how much room debate.

All this blether about how much space is right or wrong when overtaking - really - who cares what the regulations say, if you can't use common sense and need a booklet to tell you what to do then you shouldn't be driving. Bottom line is that driving a car in a straight line is easy, you are unlikely to make a sudden 45 degree move 2 feet to the right because of a pothole, rock, coke can, drain or you sneezed when someone is overtaking you. Neither will the back-draft from someone passing close by unsettle you so much that you might do that 45 degree veer to the right for the next likely over-taker. Its not cyclists and car drivers, its human beings with lives and loved ones. People might behave like d*cks but that doesn't make them evil or deserving of injury. Always remember its a real person and if you as the responsible driver can't give them a safe distance when overtaking then wait until you can and suck it up, you won't get physically hurt if you make a misjudgement but they might and a court and the rest of their family won't care about your petulant 'they didn't give me much room to overtake so actually it was their fault', excuse. I drive in the Lake district all the time and it can send you mental with cyclists on small and windy roads. But no matter how annoying it is and how righteous and pig-headed some of them are I don't want to cripple or kill one so you just have to accept that you wait until its safe to overtake and that's that.

Can barely hear a thing on either of those. Can you get someone to record it outside the car? From the very small noise I heard it sounds like a normal exhaust noise.

It's not pinking is it?

I understand that purist VE argument. The urge to get as near as possibel to a theoretical (but impossible) 100%. Buit is that really what you are chasing? As Vizard once said, there is no substitute for CCs. Dig deep, take a breath and bore and stroke it. Unless you are trying to impress Nissan with your ability to tune their engine there is no reason to stay purist on the block. If your unchangeable criteria is only the base engine and not to use FI then to me I can't see why you wouldn't spend the money on getting the base engine uprated first, even if it strains the budget for other toys you might like. Every 1% gain you get on more CCs is going to give you proportionally more, and you may be able to avoid many more expensive mods simply by having more grunt to start with. No point strapping an expensive saddle to a donkey. Turn your donkey into a stallion first and the great saddle doesn't matter any more (as an allegory thats the best I could come up with on the spot!). So is your purpose to get more power with no FI, or is it a bit of playing with bolt-ons because you like research and fiddling, or because you want to be unique? Sorry if it sounds critical, I don't mean to be offensive, only direct. None of those reasons are necessarily bad, but I do think examining what some of the underlying drive you have for doing this is going to be worthwhile. There could be a lot of pain, expense and hard work ahead, and a lot of dissapointment too. You could blow your budget on things that simply don't work out. If it has to be this engine and it has to be NA then isn't it more sensible to go down a route that absolutely *guarantees* more power? Bore and stroke.

Its the twin plate clutch that would put me off.

Oops. Might take a while for that to dry out.

Just corrected that for you

Do it! Redress the balance