yeah the fixed rear windows that look into the boot space. I found two screws on the leading edge, but removing them didnt seem to do much and i didnt want to break anything.didnt really want to have to mask up half the car to paint them in situ but looks like i'm gonna have to 🤣

My car has a sad cup holder like this:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/arUAAOSwzixc77dp/s-l1600.jpg

Its rubbish as its too shallow and cups fall out.

I came across this however (ignoring the ludicrous price):

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/294301903188?hash=item4485c2a954:g:P6kAAOSwwchhAlIq

Much deeper cup holes... Was this a later revision? Or is it some sort of aftermarket addition?

Doing a bit of exterior TLC, i painted up the trims along the top of the door as they were badly faded, and now the rear window trim looks awful.

Anyone know how it comes off?

yea i've also gone with N+1. Still managed to bite me a few times though.

A couple years ago the A4 steering rack failed in early December, removed it (in the awful weather) and sent for a rebuild, but took quite a few weeks due to the time of year. Around the same time, noticed a small leak from the radiator on the P38 but was managable with just top ups for local running. Until one morning it was no longer a small leak... I had the EV at work, and the wife managed to arrive at work (5 miles up the road) with the temperature needle jammed in the red. Took two kettle fulls of water to fill it back up again and she made it home again after. Literal stream of water pouring out of it when it was running! Except now we were down to N-1 cars! I was straight online to get a new rad, which arrived a few days later, went out in the evening and fitted it to discover water pissing out the end tank. It had got cracked in shipping. Refund applied for and another new rad sent out.

That lot had the wife somewhat pissed 😂

Even this year, the A4 failed its MOT in January and the weather was awful so i had been putting off fixing it. In the 2.5 months we were stuck with only the P38, it managed to kill its MAF and kill an ABS sensor. MAF was especially bad as while i could get it started with it unplugged, wifey couldnt resulting in her ending up stuck in the nursery car park. 💖

That was also my approach for a long time tbh, you'll note from my signature i've got a 22 year old Audi and a 28 year old Range Rover :P

However old vehicles are unreliable, and i got fed up with being stuck outside on the driveway in the rain, trying to fix some critical issue ready for work in the morning. With the young family arriving, time to work on things reduced, but things still broke and needing sorting, and wifey becomes less tolerant of breakdowns when theres kids in the car!

I ended up buying the 330d with a 6 grand loan, hoping to get something newer and less breaky. Unfortunately 9 year old cars also need fixing, albeit less often and generally less critical failures. The 6 grand loan also meant i was paying out a couple hundred pounds every month. It also needed various bits of the front suspension replacing, a new set of wheels (that era of BMW are prone to cracked alloys), brakes, and various other fixes including a new throttle body.

Leasing the B250 was a bit of an impulse. For the money i'm spending on fuel, i instead get a new car. Total monthly spend actually went down significantly as i sold the beemer and paid off the loan, so instead of paying loan + fuel + tax + repairs, i was paying the lease fee and a small amount of electricity. It didnt need fixing and just got driven for 25k.

The Skoda is rather expensive, i agree. That ones not a lease however, it was bought with an interest free government loan scheme, so it'll be mine once its paid off. and yea, 380quid a month is a lot of dough. However if i still had the beemer i'd be over 320quid a month in diesel alone, plus tax, MOT's, repairs etc, and i know from the person i sold it to that it cost him a bunch more money with various other bits needing sorted in the time hes had it.

End of the day you need to look at the total cost you put into the car over a period of time. Financing buying it, depreciation, repairs, fuel, insurance, tax etc etc. Add it all up, and produce a cost per mile. Bangernomics is mostly about luck, but it also relies on you having time to fix the car and do the repairs yourself. You might get lucky and you buy something nice for 2 grand and it just works for years with minimal issues. You also might buy something nice for 2 grand and literally everything explodes inside a year costing you thousands in repairs (or you skip the whole car and buy again) Your trading money for time at that point.

In this instance, your comparing buying an expensive car with next to no running costs, with a cheap car with high running costs and a large input of time required. It all comes down to how many miles you do. If you dont do many miles, the fixed costs of buying the expensive car become a burden. But if you do lots of miles, the fuel is the primary cost, and being able to reduce that cost by 10x makes a huge difference to how the whole thing stacks up.

Even taking your example of your Jag, 180miles is costing you 40quid. As you say your mileage is reduced, but even 6 times a month its £240 a month in diesel. If you were doing double the trips your forking over £480 a month in diesel. Car costs are low, but fuel is huge. If you could instead reduce that fuel bill from £480 to £54, you've now got a bunch of cash you could use towards a car payment instead. Infact you could pay the £380 i'm paying for the Skoda and still have cash left over ;)

Its also largely why i went electric with the daily. My commute is 80miles a day.

I had a 9 year old 330d, which was costing about 17p a mile. Round trip commute was about £13 a day. For a months commuting say 20 trips a month it was around £260 in diesel a month. It was also at the age where every month it was needing something fixing, often minor ofcourse, but still requiring time and effort.

Same commute in the EV costs about £2 a day in electricity, or 40quid a month. The first EV i leased was £260 a month, basically paid for itself by the time you'd taken fuel and tax into account, not to mention it was new, reliable and had a warranty.

The Skoda is a bit more expensive at £380 a month, but fuels also gone up (if i still had the 330d i'd be paying £15-16 a day now), and its a bigger, nicer car with more range, so i'm happy with the extra cost.

Clearly its not for everyone, but when the fuel savings mean its almost free it can really work in your favour. Theres no way i'd have paid those monthly payments for a new ICE car.

Marshall8hp wrote:

I’d have thought that was a lot of money for a boat anchor.

Yeah, just depends whats wrong with it i guess. If it didnt run because the fuel pump failed or some electrical issue for instance its quite different to it having siezed up due to running out of oil or having thrown a rod.

My initial thinking was get a pair of heads, give them a good going over, skim, relap all the valves etc etc and then swap them over when i do the head gaskets.

A pair of heads on ebay is £150-200. Buying a whole engine for £300 instead somehow feels like much better value, and i've then got loads of spare parts for other things, and potentially bits i can sell on the recoup the cost. But then it could be totally ruined internally.

From what i can see online, the cam sensor is common from '97 onwards (ERR6169) so GEMS and Thor must use the same part. Pre-97 they used a different part, but i think the change was the electrical connector, as thats mid-way thru GEMS production and the cover didnt change then.

Wreckers want £300 for the engine, but said its a "non-runner" but dont have any further info. Undecided on wether i should just get it anyway.

i tried my two locals at the weekend, 20mile round trip in the end, and all i managed was burning two gallons of petrol :(

I did try to tie in a trip to the tile store, but that was also a bust as they didnt have what i wanted.

Scrap man did give me £90 for 28kgs of copper and brass though so that was a plus, though if i'd know the rest was going to be a total fail I could have done that in the Skoda for about 30ps worth of electricity rather than 14quids worth of petrol

i wouldnt worry about the bores, its the bearings that need the oil.

yeah, theres a few pics on ebay, thor covers seem to have two oil bosses on the side, GEMS only has one.

Cam sensor appears common from '97 onwards, so that didnt change when they switched to thor. Some reports that thor has higher oil pressure, but that cant be a bad thing?

My local wrecker has a late model 4.6 and i was thinking of asking them for a price for the whole engine for spares. I've ordered the bits to do the head gaskets, and while i'm there i want to fix the front cover seal. Its tempting to pick up another engine, and pull the heads and front cover off and get them all cleaned up and refreshed to make the downtime faster.

The oil pump is in the front cover, leaving me a little wary about swapping in an unknown one ofcourse, but it seems Turner has a repair kit for them with a new steel rotor, so i guess i can strip and inspect it. Also wondering how far i go when i'm in that far already... its probably worth feeding it a timing chain?

Can anyone confirm my guess that the GEMS and Thor timing covers are interchangable, with the only difference that i can see being the Thor cover has an extra oil sensor outlet?

I've searched and cant really find anything confirming it, but looking at pics they seem very similar...

You need to swap the ECU and do a few wiring mods, but swapping to Wabco D is possible, theres a writeup for the swap floating around but i dont remember where.

Yeah mine are similar to yours Richard.

Tried to check the receipt but it was an ebay link for Maltings offroad who sold the cooler and both pipes as a kit. Suggests Allmakes4x4 on the listing now, but who knows if thats what it was back then, they were bought june 2020. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/272730150024

Now i'm worried I fitted shitpart ones to mine when i did the cooler a year or two back 🤔

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QzCUIocppM

Bit slow and shows him installing a fitting rather than pipe but it works the same way and shows how it goes together.

tanis8472 wrote:

About 2 years old. About 9000 miles.
So they are butted up?
The one still attached looks like something has blown out too

The steel collar does the same kinda job as a jubilee clip. Except its permanent.

So the rubber hose is slid over the steel pipe, and then the steel collar slipped over the joint and crimped in a machine with a precise die which crushes the hose and clamps the assembly together.

However like i said, usually when i've seen these things, the steel pipe would have barbs or ridges on it to increase the "grip" on the rubber hose.

Also, i really hope that when you say "pulled off at J4" you meant "shut the engine off and stopped immediately"

If you've driven it even a mile with no oil pressure its likely the engine is scrap.

The rubber hose is crimped onto the end of the steel pipe with a hydraulic machine. I'm a little surprised there is no barb on the steel line.

I guess the rubber has deteriorated over time and eventually lost sufficient "grip" on the pipe that its come apart.

It often doesn't get locked anyway so we might not notice even if it refuser, but I've said to the wife about the beep/message and showed her what to do.

I'll have a go with the brake cleaner when I get a chance and see if that helps the sticking too.