OT: Look North Leeds bias

[Johnny B Good]

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Ah! "Springfuckits", the bane of all neophyte forensic scientists. :-(

[tony sayer]

Well some years ago I worked for Audiolab and that was run by Philip Swift who now owns Spendor making speakers, and Dr Derek Scotland and he used to rattle on about the above and blamed the problems in engineering on society and universities mind you this was some 30 years ago now...

His basic gripe was that if you had a bright kid you'd encourage him/her to do one of the above "professions". Getting your hands dirty doing "engineering" was considered a big no no.

That was why the parts for the amplifiers were made anywhere other then the UK. I remember a problem they had with the control knobs on the equipment and a few mouldings, he wanted a fine spark erosion finish. There was a firm across the way doing plastic moulding and upon asking him why we didn't use them he said that all they were capable of was moulding kids piss pots and not much else. Whereas he was talking to either BASF or Bayer over in Germany where a plastics engineer was considered a good profession to be in but here?. No way.

And don't get me going on the attitude of the banks, even the finance money was coming in from Germany too. The local banks just wanted them to by in equipment from the far east and re band it!, can't be doing with trying the make it here in the UK they just did not see that concept!.

In the end they had I believe some five distributors in Japan alone, such was the quality of their gear!.......

[tony sayer]

It might have been rare then Mark but its a damm sight rarer nowadays!.

Not one of my daughters boyfriends had any idea how a car engine even worked let alone any idea how to fix it;!.....

[Woody]

Mock ye not. We gave our old Octavia to daughter about 18 months ago before she got married. They live in the south west and had been up to see us last Autumn and were driving back when the little oil-can light came on. She rang in a panic as to what it meant.

My daughter has a PhD and is a senior lecturer at one of the countries most popular universites. He husband does the Intranet for one of the mobile SPs. Neither of them even had the idea to RTFM!!

[Yellow]

Two things:

First, cars really are harder to home fix now by someone who is just starting out, harder to just start fiddling with. My first car, a fiesta, had an engine that would have fitted twice over in the compartment and every bit was identifiable and understandable - and no electronics.

My current car, you would need a confidence boost before you were prepared to even start looking for the engine under all the matt black covers and plating, let alone start working on it.

Second, young people don't seem to buy old crocks any more - you used to have to keep working on them just to keep them going but they all seem to drive around in flash numbers that are only a few years old. :-)

[tony sayer]

No they don't do that there're deprived, they have no idea of the joys of decoking an olde moggy minor or trying to change the fan belt on a Mini beside the road in the pouring rain, poor sods.!.

Understood theres waay to much expensive electric's in the modern motah I was just told that a replacement dashboard for a new style Audi A 6 was around 1800 squids!.

And I do see hapless taxi drivers in a workshop being told their ECU needs changing and thats the price of a second-hand motah.

However a bit of knowledge of how the thingy works, and that hasn't changed since Mercedes was a girl, doesn't go amiss:)...

[Davey]

Don't forget the Moggy when its left front wheel falls off after a sharp left turn. The result of not lubricating the screw thread that comprises the vertical part of the wheel's support.

[Martin]

In my old Nissan Primera, everything was controlled by micro processors. Everything was preset in the factory for the life of engine. There was nothing to tinker with. I got rid of the car after 16 years. The engine ran perfectly all those years.

[damduck-egg]

Depending on how long ago somebody was a teenager it was often the case that the only cars that were available cheaply were vehicles that were about to dissolve into a pile of rust. Sometimes you could stave of the inevitable collapse with bits of metal ,pop rivets, fibreglass , chicken wire and cement or whatever was to hand. Youngsters today have a choice of a much more numerous pool of vehicles which at the same age as the ones I had 40+ years ago look hardly used. Not being able to tinker with a car though because everything is reliable or not serviceable does remove the element of personalizing a vehicle , possibly that is why we end up with youngsters spending hundreds of pounds on bling accessories and sound systems. It doesn't involve much tinkering with the underlying vehicle and is achievable where as my generation were bolting on rev counters, ammeters variable pitch fans etc and then getting brave and doing bits to the engine .

G.Harman

[NY]

And everything's status codes and flashing icons these days. We bought a brand new car and later that day, after driving it for about 30 miles, it suddenly lost power and an engine-management icon started to flash, with no other information. Given that the car has two LCD displays, you'd think they could have displayed a message describing what the fault was that had been detected.

Fortunately the loss of power was only temporary and the car was fine to drive to the garage in the morning where they spent ages checking it out thoroughly. Apparently it was a fault in a sensor that measures turbo boost pressure, which temporarily put the car into limp home mode until the fault cleared - but the flashing warning continued until it was manually reset by the garage.

Similarly my Peugeot has just started giving a warning about the diesel particulate filter and it actually displays a message, though it says "Risk of filter blocking" without saying whether it's fuel, air or particulate filter :-( Given that the car hasn't done much stop-start urban driving and has had long runs which will heat up the DPF to burn off the soot, I suspect this too is a case of a transient fault which is no longer being detected but has latched on until the garage reset it.

[NY]

And even if you *do* decide to be brave on a modern car, and remap the engine management unit to give a bit more power, it's a fairly simple process - take the car to a garage, they plug in a cable to a programming unit, press a few buttons and it's done - without working on the engine with spanners and screwdrivers.

[tony sayer]

In article , NY scribeth thus

See!, no fun at all as gas flow porting the heads and suchlike to race tune 'em like we did years ago!....

[Davey]

I had a Pontiac in the US, that was a blast to drive, but after

120,000 miles it started to lose communication with the ECU, so it ran in limp mode, and wouldn't tell anybody what was wrong. Only the tachometer worked. Every garage wanted to charge $80 just to plug the analyser in, and then to change the ECU, which wasn't the problem and would have cost at least a couple of hundred bucks. On its last journey, I had to sit at traffic lights with the revs. above 3500 to keep it from stalling. (This on Detroit's 8 Mile Road).

[Charles Hope]

Q friend of mine had a local body repairer - George- who was the only person he knew who "could weld two bits of rust together". A very useful person to know in those days.

or even rebuilding it as I did with my Anglia.

[Woody]

I got a better one than that on our (then) Octiva 1.9TDi 130.

I bought a plug-in box, the price of which varied between ?15 and ?160 depending on who was advertising it. I plugged it in just before we left towing the caravan to Norfolk. Fantastic! 45mpg towing (against

28 before) and 67mpg solo (against about 50 before) PLUS - for the first time ever enough torque that I could manage to tow easily in sixth gear!

A week in Norfolk and big smiles all round.

One the way home, SWMBO driving, we had to stop at one of the roundabouts at Sleaford and it was chucking it down. As she started off there was an instant of Traction Control and the general fault light (flashing pre-heater symbol - like a small coil) came on. Mpg back down to below 30 and all the torque gone. Stopped under a bridge and removed the device but no difference.

When we got home, called our tame garage, took it to them, and the diagnostics showed 'fuel temp sensor out of range.' I dug the unit out and did some checks on it and quickly came to the answer that all it did was to replace the fuel temp sensor with a 180R resistor. I assume this must have thrown the ECU into a different part of the mapping. A bit of Googling found the sensor range was

0C 20K 20C 5K 100C 320R The fault was latched but the car continued to run as normal, and 20 secs with the OBD (ODB?) cleared it.

I tried replacing the sensor with 330R and 270R resistors but it didn't make the step change that the 180R did!

[Indy Jess John]

I heard of somebody scrapping a Nissan Sunny because of excessive rust, and they tried to haggle with the breakers about the scrap value because the engine ran beautifully. He was told that the engine was worthless because nobody ever needed another one.

Jim

[Martin]

There was no rust on my Primera. Plastic parts were getting a bit brittle though. As far as I know, the car was deregistered and shipped to Africa. There's a car transporter that takes old cars from the Europoort(Rotterdam) to West Africa once a month.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yup. ISTR BIL had an omega that maxed out at 220k miles on original engine. Just was falling apart bodywork wise and a lot of MOT stuff came all at once.

Commercial diesels reckon on a million miles don't they?

[NY]

My Peugeot 306 had done 160k miles when I sold it after 10 years, and it was still in good condition (mechanically and body) but it had got to the stage when it started to cost more - two new fan belts (second was because first had failed due to bent pulley rather than just due to age of belt, and first garage hadn't noticed that but wouldn't pay for second repair), new cat or turbo (I forget which) etc. But it survived a further couple of years - its final MOT expired on its 13th birthday so I presume it was scrapped some time just before then.

And my present Peugeot 308 has done 156k miles so far in 7 years and that's still running perfectly - still bags of power and fuel economy is still good. And still on original clutch which is incredible - every other car I've has has needed a new clutch at about 70k. I've had a few niggly problems with the emissions and anti-pollution system - it's in the garage at the moment having a warning with the diesel particulate filter investigated (*) and the fuel-additive system (sounds a bit like AdBlue that commercial vehicles use) had to be replaced a while ago. That's excluding the normal wear-and-tear things like brakes and routine things like new cambelt at about 140k miles.

It may well get up to the 220k miles that your BIL's car managed but I doubt I'll keep it long enough for it to reach the million ;-)

(*) It's probably sulking because my wife's just got a new car and we'll be using that for most of our holidays and days out from now on :-)

[Charles Hope]

The drivers seat on my 309 wore out at about 100k miles - so I managed to swap it with the front passenger's one. But all sorts of silly things kept needing replacing - all adding up to far more than the car was worth.