Recent content by Avocet

They can do that. It's not uncommon for cars to be registered anything up to a year after they were built. The rules around it are complex though. There should be an EU (or GB) "Certificate of Conformity" with the car. It will be a very boring looking single sheet of A4, with masses of...

All new cars now sold in the EU, need to have "Intelligent Speed Assist". This limits the car to the speed limit in whatever area it is travelling. Initially, it beeps at you, but if you continue to exceed the limit, it will start pushing the throttle pedal back against your foot. It can be...

Lots of reasons. For the punter, he gets a big cubby box (sometimes refrigerated) between the front seats, where the handbrake used to be. It also means the handbrake comes under the control of the Electronic Stability Control system. In the type approval test, you have to be able to bring...

Not really. They don't pass much volume. My old (1980s) Alfa has them. They're pretty small bore pipes. They were first introduced on aero engines in the war.

I'm assuming it's the airbox you want to take off? If so, I think the rubber bushes just pus over the barbs, so you have to carefully prise it off, as Burnerman suggests. Just be careful, as the rubber bushes have got harder with age, and the plastic spike they push over, might have become...

Believe me, I don't like it any more than you do, but if it were true that the numpties just found riskier ways to live, we wouldn't be seeing the reduction in deaths and injuries that we are doing. I absolutely agree that people get numb to Risk Assessments, but that's only part of the point...

There's a big bit of me wants to agree with you both. Even in the mid '80s when I took my first tentative steps into industry, the health & safety landscape was very different to how it is today - and I imagine that in the '60s and '70s, even more so. We had great fun - "How hard can it be to...

Indeed it was! But was it "better"? Probably more fun, I daresay, (I had a number of Reliants when I was younger, including a Bond Bug!) but those of us who look back fondly on those golden days, were the ones who didn't die. As a toddler, I did many miles, sat on my (unbelted) dad's lap...

How well did it work? We're more or fewer people per 100,000 workers killed or seriously injured in industrial accidents back then?

He might well be telling the truth. Some diesels will "black their oil" very quickly after a change - within a few hundred miles. As Burnerman says, it doesn't really affect the lubricating properties.

Coating is important. They're coated from the factory, but once the coating has failed and they go dull, they'll do so again, very quickly, without another UV resistant coating.

I think you need to be really careful there. Everyone will tell you they do it "properly", if you ask!

Indeed, but it kills the "spike in the middle of the steering wheel" argument. Improving perceived safety doesn't necessarily make things less safe.

You'd think so, wouldn't you? But more people died in car crashes before we had any seat belts, airbags, energy absorbing steering columns, etc!

I've used those kits before. You might be using a bit too much compound if it's going "everywhere", but some splattering of the surroundings is inevitable, I'm afraid. The buffing mop that came with my kit is more of a sort of "toweling" affair though, like the polishing bonnets you get for...