Matt owns a Renault Clio and it recently failed an MOT test on a number of points. On getting a quote for the work required he figured it would be cheaper and easier to do a lot of the repairs himself. Knowing I had had some experience working on cars, well Land Rovers, he gave me a call to see if I would give him a hand doing some of the more complicated work such as brakes etc. I agreed.
It has been a few years since I had last worked on a Land Rover, I had sold mine in February 2005, Steve’s has been off the road up in Bulmer for a couple of years now and Jon’s hasn’t had that much work done to it since either. I had helped Jon do a bit of breaking on his spare LWB job, but that’s not exactly mechanic’s work. I was realy looking forward to getting back into the swing of things, the excitement of taking something that doesn’t work and making it run again. I couldn’t wait.
Monday saw me take my first look at what we had to do. The list of work seemed fairly small on fist appraisal, but on closer inspection we realised it would be quite a task.
Work required:
Remove failed starter motor.
Fit new starter motor and test.
Remove defective brake discs and pads.
Fit replacement discs and pads.
Remove defective brake drums and shoes.
Fit replacemetn drums and shoes.
Untwist brake hoses.
Locate and fix electrical problem in front indicater.
Visual inspection of vehicle for MOT.
Armed with a fairly decent tool kit, the trusty Hayne’s manual and a glorious afternoon we set about the task. Now, as any amateur mechanic will know nothing ever goes to plan so by 10.30pm we had removed the atrter motor and semi-replaced it with the new one. We had removed one of the front wheels and removed the brake pads and that was about it. We had had to run out in the middle of the job to get a new socket for the front brake caliper retaining bolts and a tub of high temperature copper grease for the rear drums. Matt and I had also ended up covered in oil from head to toe and both wearing filthy clothes.
I have never had so much fun!
I recently purchased a Seagate external hard drive as I was looking to extend my storage capacity but allowing me to maintain a degree of mobility and hopefully allow shared storage when I get round to buying a laptop. I went for the 320GB version as it was on offer at eBuyer and also they have a good reputation and a decent warranty. The customer reviews were also pretty useful.
Having now used it for a week I can agree. It is virtually silent for all but the most strenuous search tasks and even then it’s not exactly a rock concert! The search time is pretty quick too, not found any difference between it and my internal hard drives. It looks pretty smart too, is small enough to hide away on my desk without cluttering it up.
I have yet to test the mobility and ease of use on other machines, but that will come soon enough I think. My only real bone is the location of the cables. From the design there really wasn’t much choice, but it basically means that the cables are on show. Fine if you are not like me and have a certain amount of OCD about stuff like that, I guess.
I would recommend one, especially at the offer price of around fifty quid including postage and VAT. I got an extra bargain as Google Checkout were offering a further £10 off if I used thier checkout service! So £40 cannot be sniffed at!
Seeing as I am getting four brand new housemates from the 1st July and I am moving rooms I now have the perfect excuse for thinking up some new toys, gadgets, space savers etc for next academic year.
We have big plans for a home network, 3.5 of us will be computing students next year, so I am acquiring a new computer so that I can a) have a linux machine that I can practice on and b) there is going to be some spare space for extra hard drives and other network paraphenalia. To this end I need to put together a list of stuff for my new computer – I have a case, PSU, fan, motherboard and a hodge podge of hard drives, optical drives and other bits and bats. The computer I have acquired was originally an AMD 688Mhz, with 20Gb hard drive, 128MB RAM, I seem to remember my brother putting a 64MB nVidia graphics card in there and on board sound. There is a prob a network card in it. I was planning on putting one or two new, larger hard drives in there, but apart from that I don’t know where to start to get it up to some sort of spec. I basically need it for running linux and as a storage system. Any ideas or suggestions welcome.
There is also a new stereo system, a new television, possibly Sky TV and i am definitely looking at some kind of back-up storage system. I don’t know whether a couple of large external hard drives are the way forward, or just use DVD’s – again advice would be useful.
I am also seriously looking into a new laptop, as portable as possible but with adequate specs so that I can use it for a variety of things like media, uni work and the odd bit of WoW/mobile blogging.