nerdstrike

No doubt the banging choonz will repel any incoming debris...

Once a year my in-laws pile into the car with an absurd amount of luggage. Even so, not scratched to this degree! Watch out for that classic failure mode of glove boxes, the snapping of the plastic rod that limits how far the door opens, and optionally damps its descent.

Woah, technobodge! Seriously? Two data channels to the same device despite having multiple megabits of bandwidth? I'm guessing it's an ugly hangover from early hands free car kits.

plus replacement underwear for that 3k RPM torque surge!

It's a bit skinny on the details, but nice and easy for me to get to. Not that my car is worth showing... Keep me in mind if anything starts to shape up.

A poor bite when cold is very much par for the course for "fast road" pads. I felt similar on a set of Hawk HPS in my last car. As Church says, pad composition is pretty scientific and little to do with the brandonium they're made of. The coefficient of friction of fast road pads falls away as temperatures go from warm day to cold winter, giving you a dead pedal on a cold wet rotor until enough heat builds up to get the compound working properly. Indicative friction versus temperature graph You can see that the Hawk HPS pad has half the friction of their random OEM pad at room temperature, and you don't get maximum stopping power until around 250 celsius. Sadly I cannot find a graph for stoptech pads, but you get the idea.

Enjoy your motor! Plenty of roundabouts for you to experiment on... Don't expect the highest standards out of Steven Eagell btw, their primary skill is sending out spam, with car maintenance and customer service second.

Yeesh. Just seen a 10 cm fracture on the far side of the windscreen. I had a chip fixed last autumn, and the whole screen replaced the year before that. Now another one! Is it just me? Was the first replaced windscreen a weak one? In each and every case it's happened because the car in front couldn't stick to the middle of the lane

He attached a rubber liner along three sides. The thing that caught my eye was that I could see quite a rough edge where the three layers are visible. Aroused my scepticism.

Windscreen replaced. This replacement looks pretty cheap, and the gap between glass and metal seems pretty large... I'm having misgivings about signing off on the thing. Can somebody with a legit windscreen tell me how flush the glass should be to the surround?

The dirt cheap OBD scanners can't sample very fast, so you can't log anything that happens inside of about half a second. Ok for finding out your peak boost, not ok for spotting erratic spikes in pressure. When I've logged the MAF over time, it's very difficult to capture accurate peak values with my cheapo ELM327 clone, say no better than +/- 10 g/s Torque Pro is a great app for live readouts, but the logging is a bit crappy. I've had troubles with it not saving to the drive sometimes. It'll do live graphing too, but they are pretty transient. I ended up doing my own plotting in R.

Our weather is mild and moist most of the time, indeed I was out cycling in a pleasant 10 degrees this week. Today it's a bit warm for winters, tomorrow it will be freezing. Occasionally the winds change and we get weather from the baltic care of Norway or the arctic. The snow falls, it lays a day or three, melts, refreezes and creates black ice everywhere. All the roads block up with people crashing, the airports and railways grind to a halt, and then everybody panic-buys food. We're really bad at handling snow! The real advantage of the winter tyres is in handling all the cold and rain from about November to March, and you get a chance of getting home if it snows.

Meanwhile in the weather forecast...

The pedal is a hydraulic link directly to the gearbox casing, so it's going to transfer any vibrations from engine back to your foot. It's also common to have intermittent vibration from the gear linkage at high RPMs - it's probably the same resonance manifesting in different ways.

It is inordinately more difficult for a manufacturer to "just turbo" a car. Unlike the modifiers, they have to worry about reliability, cost and regulatory compliance. One of the factors of keeping the price down will be only having to make one core model of the car. Hence all the special editions have been bolt-on bits and paint jobs rather than changes to the drivetrain.

You are describing precisely the set of circumstances which motivated me to have some winter wheels. Fortunately I was stuck in a parking spot, rather than on the road. It doesn't take much camber or incline to complete befuddle a RWD car on ice with hard tyres. Those country lanes are the last roads to thaw :/

That would be my guess. Several of the impacts I've seen have been low on the screen. If the bonnet were higher, the stones would have bounced off the bumper or bonnet first which would have slowed them down a bit. It's still bad luck, but exacerbated by the excellent shaping of the nose.

@lewisw - oof that's an ugly one. It takes weeks to get a repair lined up anyway, so you might not have got it done in time anyway. Anyway, happy birthday to me, new windscreen coming next week...

FWIW I've got a squeaky seat belt receiver. It took me a while to localise. If the belt tightens and the angle changes, it starts to squeak over bumps, as the sensor cable moves over the mounting. I also have a slightly too loose passenger seat slider release bar, which bounces up and down on rougher road surfaces. The rear window trim can come into contact with the chassis, but I'm not convinced it's a squeak source. There's just not much there to make the noise. I'd be more inclined to think it was the seatbelt mount in the door frame, or perhaps the parcel shelf which is full of loose things...

At least I don't need to degrease the inside of the windscreen now...

You might get better stone damage prevention on the radiator, but that is replaced with stone damage on the grille.

I sometimes feel a little kick when changing to third from second. Like it skips half a rotation before locking in.

Is there any chance of being garrotted by the dashcam wires if the airbags trigger?

Depreciation is great... until you own the car.

Just over 35 mpg at the pumps, the ECU has a rosier view of about 38 mpg. I managed 42 mpg at the pump on a long haul to and from Scotland. I think one could achieve 44, but probably not more than that unless hypermiling. My car is unmodified.