November 2006
asks James May in yesterday's Telegraph, and then proceeds to describe shearing off the top of a 10mm bolt whilst doing it up... using a two foot long bar.
Fool!
To think that there are people driving around with incorrectly torqued bolts - he could as easily have under-tightened it, and watched as it came undone whilst he was riding it.
He clearly still doesn't understand torque from the rest of his article.
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Just tried to check the oil level on my one-month old Volvo D5 for the first time...
Dipstick is a pig to remove: it seems to be a curved dipstick made to fit a curved hole and takes a lot of persuasion to come out! How stupid is that?
The last inch of the dipstick - just below the "flattened" bit with the min/max markings, is also twisted a full 90 degrees for some reason?! anyway, hard to read the oil level but i think I'm on the minimum line. Now, it's 4pm on a Sunday in rural France, and I need to drive 175 motorway miles to Barcelona at 3am in the morning... I'm not going to find somewhere selling the manufacturer spec 0W-30 oil this time of the day. Any huge risk if I put in some Shell Helix synthetic 10W-40 to top it up instead? Surely not going to knacker the engine is it? (No more so than letting it run dry ;-) ). Read more
Well, it looks like my original post was one big false alarm!
I checked the oil last Sunday, 90 mins after a 20 mile run, when I presumed that the car had had time to stand and that all the oil would have returned to the sump. Anyway, I didn't add any oil this week. I checked the level again first thing this morning after the car had been parked-up for 36 hours and it's reading almost full..?!!!
Thank for the useful and informative advice all round!
This has been a cracking car since we bought it used in 2003.. One niggle noticed this Autumn is that while hot air comes through the LHS heating vent with heating on full, from the RHS driver's side there's only very slightly warmed air (at the same pressure so air flow is not the issue).
Any other Micra owners had this? Is the fix likely to be expensive?
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Consulted the Haynes manual and there is 1 heater matrix and no further info about how the ducting is arranged. A bit of experimenting and it seems the air on the RHS vent gets a lot warmer when the non-footwell ventalation setting is selected - air flow increases and both LHS and RHS vents seem equal in temp. So this might well be related to the ducting and flaps rather than a partially blocked heater matrix.
I have a 1998 Astra 1.7TD which seems to have an intermittent lack of power/revs.
When I accelerate through the gears, sometimes it feels as if a rev limiter comes in at about half way through the rev range and the engine will not continue to increase the revs. It does not happen every time, but it is a little disconcerting when it happens on a slip lane entry to a major road. On other occasions the engine will rev smoothly through the range quite normally.
Has anyone come across this problem before and can anyone point to any likely causes and offer any suggestions please?
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Mother in Law drives a Space Wagon with the 145 bhp 2.4 litre four-cylinder GDI engine. It's an 02, with 45K on the clock. Just been serviced by main agent. She was complaining that the oil pressure light was coming on. I've just taken it for a ten mile run, and, sure enough, when at the last traffic lights befoire home, revs dropped to 800 (correct tickover?) and oil pressure light came on. Have checked oil level, and it is fine. M.I.L. is twitchy: her last (earlier model) space wagon had the cam belt let go, even after full service history, so she doesn't want major engine surgery again...
Tim{P} Read more
Yup: defective pressure sensor switch. Now replaced @ £60.
Tim{P}
Well my father finally realised what he did about two years ago and demanded his Forester XT back. I've only done 14,000 miles in it and I'm very sorry to see it go. For me, its real selling points were (in no particular order) a huge amount of internal storage room, great ride for a sporty car, and easy access and egress. It has also been supremely reliable. So what to replace it with?
Well I've taken Dad's old Forester (a 99V with 40,000miles) , and traded it in for a 14 month old, 20,000 mile, Subaru Outback 3.0Rn. Its a top of the range with sat nav, electric heated seats and CD as well as cassette players - very useful with young children. Costing £15,500 plus the old car. I get it next week. I can't wait to get behind a creamy flat 6-cyl engine with five speed tiptronic. No change in insurance costs and probably no worse economy......
I'll keep you informed. Read more
Excellent seats and the dash is far better than the 1980s/1990s designs that were almost generic of Japanese cars. My Outback dash is almost Audi like in its classiness!
A couple of days ago I updated my Norton Internet Security from 2006 to 2007. Now I am suffering from pop-up adverts, which I now know are tied to this site as this evening I am getting a bingo liner site loading a new page every time I click on another thread I want to read.
Do you know if the pop-up blocker in Norton Internet Security 2006 has been removed in the 2007 version? I can find no reference in the manual.
Alternatively can anyone recommend a pop-up blocker (preferably free download) that works well.
For the moderators: I feel sure you will get lots of complaints about the frequency of the bingo liner site. I have contacted HJ with a complaint.
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Roger
I read frequently, but only post when I have something useful to say.
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I have learnt a lot from this site and hj in the telegraph and i dont beleive for 1 second that this is a dodgy site, but I have to admit, and I do understand that the site has to be funded by adverts, this latest bingo pop up is driving me mad. Every time you move between sections another one loads itself. I also think internet gambling is dangerous. I would rather pay, say £5 a month for this site.
Can anyone recommend a good diesel auto family car 2 to 3 years old for about 10k ? We fancied the scenic & love the diesel 1.9 engine, but they only do an auto in the petrol, which was horrible. The Touran was smart & nice in the 2.0 TDi DSG but they cost a fortune. The Zafira looks a bit dull. Help! I'm stuck.
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Mondeo or Vectra. Mazda 6. Passat. Primera.
Depends whether you want it to be cheap, reliable, to last well, or all three.
My C15 (02 reg) diesel, which people helped me out with previously, has decided not to start. It turns over OK, it looks like fuel is getting through to the injector pump, I can't get to the injectors themselves to see if it is getting that far. Given that this is a sudden change, I am suspecting an electrical related problem. Does one of the relays control some part of the injector system? All fuses look OK.
(The van will soon be called Friday at this rate, it was the fan motor which caused the previous problem and I have also found that the radiator leaks very slightly.)
All help gratefully accepted, especially as I am supposed to be working tomorrow ! Read more
crack off the pipe nut that connects to the injector see if there is any difference when undone ie: faulty injector? when i start a job that looks a pig a nice cup of hot tea & biscuits and a little patience usually helps!!!
Got a text from SWMBO whilst at work telling me how much she hated the Scenic. I hate that car, hate, hate , hate!
Turns out she had got out to find it frosty so started the car in the driveway, went back into the house, got her stuff together and then out into the car and drove to work 5 miles away.
Of course, the Scenic has keyless entry and after starting the car, she had went back inside and put the keycard on the kitchen table.!!
So drove to work, pressed the button to switch engine off but got a message telling her that card could not be detected and engine wouldn't switch off! So had to drive back up the road to get the card!
Donkey ears for Xmas me thinks.......
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it seems that this is in fact a safety
benefit if xileno's manual is correct.
That still doesn't help you if you stall it!
It's much like stalling a car on a log-jammed dual carriageway with a flat battery you're charging on the way to a concert with a couple of mates. Which I, err, have never done :-$
[walks off sheepishly]
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Mike Farrow
Browse
Thanks Gordon, that is a good piece of work NC, good fun to play around with however with regard to answering the question posed by this thread it is the corrolation between rpm, torque and bhp that need consideration.
As I said above max torque is the rpm where each individual cycle of the engine is at it's most effective, max power will usually be at higher rpm than max torque because although each cycle will be less effective at higher rpm there are more cycles so more power is produced. Therefore as long as torque is not dropping off faster than the rise in rpm (if plotted as two curves) then power will continue to increase with revs. As soon as rpm reaches the point where the torque curves falls away more quickly that the rpm curve is rising then power will reduce despite revs continuing to rise.
A turbo diesel produces loads of torque at low revs compared to a petrol engine however the torque drops off sharply over around 4000rpm so at such engine speeds, despite the rpm rising, the power actually reduces. What allows a petrol engine to (generally) produce more bhp is its ability to achieve higher rpm and to sustian it's torque curve longer so even if at high rpm the torque curve is dropping off it is doing so at a lesser rate than the rate at which the rpm is increasing so power continues to rise as the rpm increases.