What's made you not grumpy but not smile either today?

Currently reading:
What's made you not grumpy but not smile either today?

Got in to work (06:00) to find that there is a mistake in today's job list and either nobody spotted it yesterday afternoon or they decided to leave it until tomorrow to fix.

I'm perfectly capable of rewriting the CNC programs in order to fix the error, bu I have to await confirmation from the office that it is indeed a mistake and not something special requested by the client.


So now I have to find something else to do until 09:30...


Edit: And my digital vernier caliper is flashing "Low Battery", secretary, who has the keys to the store cupboard, doesn't arrive until, you guessed it...
 
Last edited:
Personally I think there are many people driving cars that are out of their financial comfort zone. If ignoring major component failure you cannot reasonably expect to repair faults without impact on daily routine then surely that cars not for that person. Most wealthy people don't see the impact of repairs as the first owner, warranty and newness. However a few years down the line and a second hand luxury car on finance with a heavy repair bill is just too much for many families, we don't have much money and if my GP went to the garage for everything it needed we probably wouldn't afford that but as it's an in house job and we own it that's how it's viable for us. We also know someone with two Aston martins and he never bats an eyelid when they go to the garage. He is not surprisingly slightly better off than us.

Agreed.

Also being missed in this debate is the ugly subject of finance, if you took out a loan to buy a car, and are still paying it back, then it HAS to be worth something, right?

Can think of several examples with people I know, having to spend large amounts on repairs in order to keep an absoloute dog of a vehicle going, as they can't afford to write it off financially with several thousand still owing on a loan and the vehicle has no resale value if it doesn't go...
 
... Ford, volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, Audi, even Peugeot (205 gti) Renault (alpine) and Citroen (SM, DS) have their iconic cars that won't die.

Yes there are Fiat enthusiasts, otherwise we'd not be here, but aside from the old 500, which wasn't that popular till they relaunched the 500 in 2007. Fiat don't really have iconic cars like the others.

Ummm...

Fiat Uno Turbo?

Fiat Coupe?

Fiat Ritmo Abarth?


Don't forget that Fiat use their other brands (Alfa Romeo, Lancia) for the 'special' cars.

Lancia Delta Integrale?

Alfa Romeo 155 Q4?

Alfa 145 QV?

Lancia Thema 8-32?

etc.

Some of those would have been on bedroom walls in the early 90s.



As for the Fiat Dino, comparisons would be the E-Type Jag, Aston DB5. Nobody makes cars like those anymore.
 
Last edited:
Ummm...

Fiat Uno Turbo?

Fiat Coupe?

Fiat Ritmo Abarth?


Don't forget that Fiat use their other brands (Alfa Romeo, Lancia) for the 'special' cars.


Show me the £10k uno turbos and £100,000 fiat coupés

Fiat don't have the same following as fords, merc, BMW or VW even.

I'm not counting Lancia, or Alfa Romeo in this as they are not 'budget' brands. They are also not fiat, otherwise why not just include Ferrari and Maserati and be done with it.
 
Show me the £10k uno turbos and £100,000 fiat coupés

Fiat don't have the same following as fords, merc, BMW or VW even.

I'm not counting Lancia, or Alfa Romeo in this as they are not 'budget' brands. They are also not fiat, otherwise why not just include Ferrari and Maserati and be done with it.



None of those brands have a forum as good as this one though. I think that says a lot about the Type of person that is a Fiat follower vs the rest. Namely more common sense and intelligence ;)
 
I love my GP but at heart I’m a vw fan, mk2 golfs specifically but currently whilst my golf is 260 per year to tax, and my GP is 30 quid then it’s a no brainer, the connection with someone else with a like minded VW is similar to that of motorcyclists, there is an instant bond and always an admiration for the other vehicles, it’s hard to explain but it’s not the same with my current marque, I love it the same, I also lavish the same devotion, etc to my current vehicle but no one ever comments, stops you in the street, or has the time of day. Where as you could have a 4 hour conversation about your Montreal washer bottle in your golf and still have more to say, I guess it helps as the golf appealed to several generations, and people are still buying a mint one now for 6k as dad had one 25 years ago. Plus you really could maintain those cars, I do my GP now but I need, laptop, MES, and more understanding of electronics than anything on older cars.
 
None of those brands have a forum as good as this one though. I think that says a lot about the Type of person that is a Fiat follower vs the rest. Namely more common sense and intelligence ;)



I'm not sure, when someone is spending $340,000 on a BMW CSL, They worry to much about the forum or type of people on it, the same likely applies to those buying a ford RS500 for £100,000 or a 1952 be beetle for $50,000.

Also having not tried every single forum for every single car brand in every possible language, it's not really something that I can comment on, certainly though, if you don't speak English, this isn't a good forum
 
For various reasons I have searched for help on various forums.
Toyota: Slightly helpful
Ford Focus: Extremely hard work to find anything useful except big exhausts and lowering. Did eventually find help about speedo sender removal and symptoms of failure, which were spot on, but it took a lot of hard work extracting such info.
Land Rover Discovery: Difficult to find useful info.
Suzuki: Mostly gibberish.
Vauxhall: hard work, unless you wish to 'tune' it.
VW: Struggled to find what I needed.

This forum is absolutely the best I've seen and used. Well done everyone.
 
I love my GP but at heart I’m a vw fan, mk2 golfs specifically but currently whilst my golf is 260 per year to tax, and my GP is 30 quid then it’s a no brainer, the connection with someone else with a like minded VW is similar to that of motorcyclists, there is an instant bond and always an admiration for the other vehicles, it’s hard to explain but it’s not the same with my current marque, I love it the same, I also lavish the same devotion, etc to my current vehicle but no one ever comments, stops you in the street, or has the time of day. Where as you could have a 4 hour conversation about your Montreal washer bottle in your golf and still have more to say, I guess it helps as the golf appealed to several generations, and people are still buying a mint one now for 6k as dad had one 25 years ago. Plus you really could maintain those cars, I do my GP now but I need, laptop, MES, and more understanding of electronics than anything on older cars.
I experienced this kind of 'brotherhood' when I borrowed an Alfa Romeo 164 - just for one day. Never driven an Abarth but I suspect that it has a similar kind of following.
 
I'm on a random Mazda 3 Facebook group...mainly Americans.

They had a little poll when do you change your oil? Some are following on board schedule others are doing it at half intervals. But either way the full intervals on an American 3 are less than half of the UK one on the same car (6k versus 12500).

But apparently oil changes every 3k is a big thing over there..even if it's 0w20 fully synthetic..

There must be oceans of barely used oil..
 
I'm on a random Mazda 3 Facebook group...mainly Americans.



They had a little poll when do you change your oil? Some are following on board schedule others are doing it at half intervals. But either way the full intervals on an American 3 are less than half of the UK one on the same car (6k versus 12500).



But apparently oil changes every 3k is a big thing over there..even if it's 0w20 fully synthetic..



There must be oceans of barely used oil..



I change mine every 7,000 and use fully synthetic

Basically I’m trying to never let the oil get so bad it clogs up the system
 
I change mine every 7,000 and use fully synthetic

Basically I’m trying to never let the oil get so bad it clogs up the system

I'm pro regular oil changes....but every 3k? Mine gets done every 8 (with the correct fully synth oil due to timing chain) simply because that's how many miles it does a year..but 3? If it was a 400bhp 2.0 turbo from the 90s perhaps.
 
Last edited:
I'm pro regular oil changes....but every 3k? Mine gets done every 8 (with the correct fully synth oil due to timing chain) simply because that's how many miles it does a year..but 3? If it was a 400bhp 2.0 turbo from the 90s perhaps.

Yes the Americans do like frequent oil changes. It's based on commercially Driven FUD (fear uncertanty and doubt). In cities there are lots of "jiffy-lube" and similar fast oil change drive throughs. The EPA have had a long running campaign to stop the practice because it's wasteful and causes pollution (oil recycled falls way short of oil sold). There have also been scandals of them up-selling premium oils brake fluid changes etc that are not needed and in some cases not even done.
I'm a 8-12k man depending on engine and usage.

Robert G8RPI.
 
Last edited:
At 3k miles you could be recycling it into other cars or not changing it at all and no one would notice (unless it was a diesel). I've done 1500 since my last change and it still barely has any colour to it, even at 8 it's very light yellow.

Ah well, this from country that says a set of plugs and a new air filter is a tune up..
 
I'm pro regular oil changes....but every 3k? Mine gets done every 8 (with the correct fully synth oil due to timing chain) simply because that's how many miles it does a year..but 3? If it was a 400bhp 2.0 turbo from the 90s perhaps.



I get mine done every 10k, there is the option for a longer life 18k service interval, but apparently I have been told by the dealer themselves that they still use the same oil in the 10k as the 18k so they essentially just tell you to not bring the car back for an extra 8k the thing is I do a very high number of miles so want it running well and to be reliable, as well as the costs of the two different services end up evening out. (Expensive life longer service verses cheaper shorter intervals)

It means my car gets two services a year one major and one minor.

When I had a Range Rover years ago and I had a friend who had a V8 Range Rover (both 80s models)the recommended interval for that v8engine was about 3k miles because the tolerances were terrible, use thick oil to try and keep the compression up and change it regularly as it would get heavily contaminated with products of combustion past the piston rings.

I think historically American cars especially muscle cars have been much the same and needed to have very regular oil changes, and it’s almost just the thing you do now if you have a car in the US.

Why wouldn’t you have your oil changed so regularly if that’s what everyone else does?
 
I can totally see why your average old V8 with tolerances you can fit hand in, running on mineral oil would need regular changes. Getting it done 3 times a year if you do 30k a year is sensible enough...but 10 times a year on that mileage?

Tbf their cars, can do what they want. But it's really strange that if my car was registered in the U.S. the actual scheduled interval would be 6k, a mechanically identical world car registered in the UK is 12500. The waste involved must be massive.
 
Today I stopped to help a chap in a Porsche Cayenne. He was "parked" about ten feet from a junction, hazard lights on, two wheels on a grass verge, sat at around a fifteen to twenty degree angle and there was blue/white smoke bellowing out of the exhaust.

I asked of he was okay and of he had broken down. The voice on the loud speaker laughed and he informed me he was on the phone.

"I'm in a fifty thousand Pound Porsche. As if I'm going to need help from someone in a....

...Fiat?"

"Okay. You are burning oil though. Probably because you are parked at such an angle".

I went by about half an hour later and the Porsche was still there with the bonnet up and engine turned off. I didn't feel like stopping to help that time to be honest. I did; but the chap wasn't there.
 
Today I stopped to help a chap in a Porsche Cayenne. He was "parked" about ten feet from a junction, hazard lights on, two wheels on a grass verge, sat at around a fifteen to twenty degree angle and there was blue/white smoke bellowing out of the exhaust.

I asked of he was okay and of he had broken down. The voice on the loud speaker laughed and he informed me he was on the phone.

"I'm in a fifty thousand Pound Porsche. As if I'm going to need help from someone in a....

...Fiat?"

"Okay. You are burning oil though. Probably because you are parked at such an angle".

I went by about half an hour later and the Porsche was still there with the bonnet up and engine turned off. I didn't feel like stopping to help that time to be honest. I did; but the chap wasn't there.
Weird. Also - would the angle affect the engine so alarmingly like that? Surely these cars are designed to run over all sorts of gradients? Sounds like there was something wrong with him more than his car.
Anyway it's a Porsche. They never break down... [emoji52]
 
Weird. Also - would the angle affect the engine so alarmingly like that? Surely these cars are designed to run over all sorts of gradients? Sounds like there was something wrong with him more than his car.
Anyway it's a Porsche. They never break down... [emoji52]

Take all of the above with a very big pinch of salt.

To be honest if my car broke down I have full AA cover and wouldn’t want to accept any help from a random passer by, especially if I was driving a £50k 4x4, because let’s be honest, even if he is burning oil, what’s a passer by going to do about it anyway?
My brother had a Cayenne if it went wrong the first call you made was to your credit card company to extend your limit, there was literally nothing you can do on the driveway and. £50k cayenne would still be well under warranty

I’ve known people to wreck a 4x4 engine though oil starvation but this requires some extreme levels of off roading putting the cars at very, very steep angles for prolonged periods. They don’t tend to burn their own oil because they are designed for driving on steep angles. Being parked on a kerb isn’t going to do anything.
 
Last edited:
I can totally see why your average old V8 with tolerances you can fit hand in, running on mineral oil would need regular changes. Getting it done 3 times a year if you do 30k a year is sensible enough...but 10 times a year on that mileage?

Tbf their cars, can do what they want. But it's really strange that if my car was registered in the U.S. the actual scheduled interval would be 6k, a mechanically identical world car registered in the UK is 12500. The waste involved must be massive.

Maybe they know the culture of very frequent oil changes out there, means if they specified a 12k interval no one would do it anyway and it’s a way of slowly trying to change the culture by setting a higher interval which they can increase over years to try and push people to not be so keen to Change the oil every 5 minutes
 
Back
Top