I don't think you can beat decent gas fires. They look warm, they heat the room, you can stand in front of them and warm yourself, you can keep the tea-pot/food warm on some of them. You expect heat from the fire-place, it's a focal point and you arrange furniture to suit, cosy. 8 of our 10 ch rads are now turned off, far too expensive to run and they simply don't radiate or convect like a decent gas fire. So for us, it's gas fires (in rooms we occupy), leccy fan heaters in loos (when occupied) and leccy blankets in bedrooms (fresher & less stuffy). We're actually using antique 'crystalglow' fires, beats the crap out of the 'living flame' crud.
A conventional flywheel would outlive a car without ever needing any consideraration - however DMF along with many other improvements have made a significant contribution to reliable and economical motoring (I recall taking my greasegun with me on holidays as the steering on my first car used to get a bit heavy after a few hundred miles). similar - modern ignition systems don't suffer the niggling problems in damp weather. Many other examples could be offered and occasionally sods law strikes and an improvement leads to you having to repair something that at one time didn't exist - but consider it holistically.
Thanks very much for the time you took to reply. I really appreciate it. The Honest John site came up trumps - it identifies a DMF/clutch problem suggesting that my car if used for multiple short journeys can suffer either DMF or clutch failure at intervals as low as 40,000 miles. The car does 25-27,000 miles a year with many short journeys interspersed between longer journeys, so there is clearly a risk that these problems will continue and could cost a lot of money when the car is outside warranty.
I can extend the warranty for a further year from April 2010 for a reasonable sum, so I will do that. If the problems continue into 2010 I will sell the car and buy a replacement. To be honest, I really wanted an automatic but bought this manual car because the franchised dealer was closing down and I got an excellent deal for cash. The car is very suitable for my needs and is otherwise excellent in every respect, so an automatic version would appear to be the answer.
You make a good point about modern cars being generally more reliable. Generally, I agree, but the DMF has made no contribution to this increase in reliability.
There are several unrelated brands of car that use dual mass flywheels and they all seem to exhibit weaknesses that make a complete nonsense of any claims to greater reliability.
For an extremely clear and concise explanation of the particular problems with DMFs please read js.b1's reply to my previous post.
All of this mystifies me. AFAIK no ordinary road cars have straight cut gearboxes, or if there are any it's very few ultra high performance oriented ones. Straight cut gears make noise under heavy load, basically a god awful howling, as anyone who's been involved with race cars know, and nothing you could do to eliminate noise at idle, even if they do make an unusual amount of noise at idle which I don't even think is the case, would affect this in any way.
Again, camshafts, especially dual OHC camshafts in modern engines, are either driven by belt in nearly every case or occasionally by chain. Straight cut gear teeth do not even factor into this part of the engine.
DMFs are used to reduce transmission rattle by cushioning torsional input loads from the engine. They also have somewhat of a mitigating effect on driveline clonk caused by shock loadings from rapid power applications or gear changes. IMO a sledgehammer, and a very unreliable and expensive one at that, to crack a pretty non-existant nut.
I wouldn't buy a car with a DMF if you paid me, especially one that already had a decent mileage on it. I'd rather have a car with a miniscule bit of rattling you'd never hear with the radio on anyway than one which requires £1500 to be spent on it every couple of years. In fact my petrol Focus actually has a slight gearbox noise at very low speed but it was several years before I even noticed it until that one day I was crawling down a country lane with the window open and the radio off. Up till then Capital radio or the CD player had entirely masked it. Why anyone would even worry about such a slight inconvenience is beyond me. Failed DMFs just make a shit load of money for car manufacturers is all I can assume and only buyers refusing to countenance them will see the demise of the damn things.
This has gone way OT, but still...... My first car, a Ford Prefect took me all over the country. Only the abysmal maintenance by the main Ford agent in Cardiff defeated me and it. Then a succession of Mk1 Cortinas were cheerful, cheap to run and I carried 8x4 sheets of ply in the estate. That one, the 1.5 estate is what I wish I could buy today but possibly with a simple diesel engine. A Princess (impossible to maintain) and Montego (rustbucket) were OK'ish, then 3 Omega estates, no rust and take the 8x4 ply. Ist 2 were great, 3rd utterly ludicrous overcomplication and horrendous repair costs only did 95k miles rather than the 200k I expected and got previously.
I have a grease gun for the lathe and for when I had Defenders, but never needed to carry one on the road.
Last month's experience with a Focus estate advertised by main dealer was..... Called in, car up on hoist having DM flywheel replaced under remaining Ford warranty. No other Focus estate there, so couldn't test to see if rear seat space acceptable. Inspected underneath only. Week passed. Car down and ready. Sat in front and back, think it's smaller in back than hatch, so prob unsuitable. Commented on smell of diesel. Dealer said just been worked on, so expected. Test drive fine, felt nice, commented on trip meter saying 7mpg. Dealer said just been worked on needs reset. Parked, in old trousers, so knelt down looked under car diesel dripping. Dealer, nice suit, went to find mechanic. Mechanic said Yes those pipes fell off in workshop we pushed them back on, probably have to order new push on plastic pipes I made holistic decision and walked. I've now bought something else. It judders at certain rpm in all gears under load. Must have missed that rpm on test drive. Is it the flywheel? Back in next week for them to say.
I've posted this sort of thing here there and everywhere. I want a car with a proper spare wheel, of sensible size to carry junk and a limited mobility back seat passenger, that runs on diesel and is not a target for political parasites to plunder for car tax. I want reliability and simplicity.
I wanted my central heating central.
Why does "efficient" have to work against this and common sense?
Skoda. Dirt cheap second hand, because they still carry a totally unwarranted (sic!) stigma.
read the hilarious novel 'Incompetnce' by Rob Grant, ISBN 978-0-575-07499-1
In the context of building regs, the requirements for insulation and airtightness are totally destroyed by the requirements for adequate ventilation.
Unless you use heat recovery ventilation this sets an upper limit on the amount of insulation its worth putting in a house.
If you want to use a heatpump, or low output temp 'efficient' boiler, you need to double up on your radiator sizings as well.
Or face using your efficient boiler in a more inefficient part of its curve.
None of this is headline news, because after all, the whole point of an 'eco' technology, is not to present a low carbon efficient way to do what's needed, but to make you feel less guilty after shelling out four times what its worth to acquire it.
Hmm, the thing I have bought is an Octavia estate and it judders at
1500rpm.
18k miles, 2 years warranty and I hope to confirm next week that the dealer's locally good reputation is justified. I also haven't yet confirmed what I have seen on the 'net which is that a single mass flywheel is an official replacement option.
Of course, it might not be the flywheel, but I can't think of many other parts that would give the symptoms.
straight cut boxes and side valve (car) engines petered out in the 60's. My guess is the gear cutting machines were simply better, and helical gears sounded better and were not unduly expensive to make. You did need good thrust bearings in the box tho. or double helical gears..and that's really when synchromesh was the rule, not the exception, on ALL gears., even first!!
and it was all mainly 2:1 chain off the crank to the camshaft, and a distributor spiral geared off that, or in the case of OHC, run directly off the shaft end.
Belts came a lot later. Once materials that could handle the strain were available..fiber glass and kevlar I suspect.
I did have a car with a gear-driven camshaft...but a lot earlier. 1952 Land Rover...side valve, pushrods, low slung camshaft. And no synchromesh on first or second. That's when I learned to double declutch (not that I owned the car until 1972).
The Subaru 1800 GLF5 I had in the late 80s had a direct drive cam - but that was a flat 4 so the cam and crank were right next to each other. Push rods connected the cam to the lifters. Later ones moved to belt drive OHCs.
Don't you mean "Incompetnece"? or was that irony on your part :-) I've read the book - laughed a lot. I also predict, sadly, that it'll be the "1984" for the 21st century.
The car I am having serious DMF problems with (see above) is a Skoda Octavia. It is my second Octavia.
I put 154,000 miles on the first one and the only serious problem I had with it was when a drive belt broke at 144,000. The flailing belt did a lot of damage but until then the car had required only routine servicing. After repair I sold the car to a local taxi firm and last time I saw it the odometer was reading 218,000.
But the new Octavia with dual mass flywheel is an altogether different proposition.
It isn't only the dual mass flywheel. A work colleague runs an Octavia with the same engine as mine (2.0 litre PD TDi 140 bhp) but with the DSG gearbox (paddle shift hear change) which is a quite different design. Mine is a conventional six speed.
After 106,000 miles he is on his third gearbox and now, just out of warranty, it is exhibiting the same fault once again. The estimate for a new gearbox, fitted, is just under £4000 but he has been offered a goodwill payment of £1300 towards the cost.
We are both now considering conventional automatics. Neither car has had any problems apart from those with the gearbox, and the conventional auto has a good reputation for reliability.
I haven't lost faith in the brand as a whole but I would advise people to steer clear of dual mass flywheels and DSG gearboxes, both of which have had problems in VW, Audi, SEAT and Skoda models.
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