TigerFish

There are no "visible" ultrasonic sensors anywhere on the Mk1 on the factory alarm systems. Apparently there are motion sensor(s) (as you can disable them from the key fob when you arm the alarm), but I have yet to find out where it/they are located!! An aftermarket alarm could have a sensor on the pillars though.

I use a similar tuner nut to those on my GS. Work a treat. Be careful though, some are not the "star" key type, but like an allen key. I had a cheap set like that and the allen key was a sh*te fit, so rounded off and the nuts had to be forcefully removed by other means. I now have a good quality set on. Just be careful with the cheap ones.

Picked the car up last Saturday morning. With the head gasket job and the worn front suspension arms they found, all in all, the bill came out to just shy of £1300 including costs of parts I sourced myself Good to have her back though and had the added bonus of meeting Gord while I was there. Good to meet you mate.

If you have a mic showing, then the chances are you have the phone control unit also, part of which is located in the centre console somewhere, and another part (for the antenna) is in the side panels in the boot I think. From what I can gather, they were specifically designed to hook up to a motorola phone, so could be a bit hit and miss for any other makes or more modern phones. This would still require using the mobile phone to dial a number etc, so not sure on the legalities of it as far as hands free goes these days. With the very good blue tooth kits available, I have a parrot CK3100 in my Mk1, they work great. I guess you could just try and use the existing unit for its speaker muting function, but then again the parrot kit comes with all that gubbins anyway.

Thanks for your reply, someone today said the ball joints were a problem on this model especially the sport with the 18" alloys, but if they had play in them surely this would have been picked up on the mot test? Let me know please as soon as you find out what the soloution is. Thanks Mike. It has turned out to be the bottom suspension control arm(s) no2. They are the ones that go at a 45% angle towards the back of the car and are bolted to the main suspension arm. Not as simple to change as they first look. The front subframe has to be removed which involves undoing all of the front suspension and supporting the engine. Charlesworth are replacing mine while they are doing the head gasket.

Still sounds like AOHell are having problems with their servers to me.

Don't forget that if the DNS server(s) are down at your isp you can get this exact same thing. Your cache knows the lookups for the sites you have already visited, but not for those you haven't so they don't work. Before getting too concerned about virus's or trojans (AGV is very good and should've picked any dangers up), try rebooting your laptop and your broadband router to see if it all comes back up. Or contact AOL to see if they have problems in your area.

Just sent you a PM Gord Cheers Gord. Car is being picked up on Monday (or earlier if the recovery fella can do it). B)

Just sent you a PM Gord

No idea mate. I can take a look at mine over the weekend when I am back where the "dead" car currently resides.

I thought it was best to stick to the Toyota stuff due to the way it's formulated to stop corrosion of the engine ? I've not seen any that do not have corrosion inhibitors in for a long time. The owners manual just says to use ethelyne glycol based antifreeze, not alcohol based, and doesn't even mention a brand from what I remember (been a while since I read the manual though).

I don't think you will find it is a nut as such. It will be as aido showed in his pic, a bolt thread with a nut shape for screwing it in/out of the mounting hole, and with the ball on the end. Having not looked at mine, and before seeing your pics, I had envisaged a nut on the back of the mounting hole holding it in. Having seen your pics, I think aido's pic is how they would look. That would be a lexus item I suspect, or SGS can probably supply, but they should not cost much. Anuj, when you ground it off, did you still then have to remove the threaded part of the bolt from the mounting hole? I would expect that the strut "should" pop off the ball joint, based on the fact they must've pushed them on in the first place, so if the worst comes to the worst, you should be able to get them off using a wee bit of force. This would aid getting a socket on the left behind ball/bolt/nut to help undo to renew..

Or just buy any ethylene glycol antifreeze that you like. Other places do long life stuff and are cheaper than Toyota.

Some answers to a PM that finest1 sent to me earlier. No Problem A double din will work mate, just that I already had a single DIN that I wanted to use. None of the wiring will line so to speak for any head unit as the connectors are more than likely going to be different. i.e. My Sony unit has ISO connectors, the Lexus has three toyota connectors so I cut those off and connected the required wires into an ISO harness. There is more room, but that isn't the reason I did it (see answer above). I didn't change the amp, I discarded it. The replacement head unit has the amp already in it so it was redundant. If the replacement head unit has RCA connections (Mine does but I din't want to use them for this purpose) it may be possible to feed the factory Amp. That would have to be at your own risk... lol. With my setup, I essentially bypassed the amp by joining the in and out wiring of the amp together so that the factory wiring could be used straight from the head unit to the speakers. This meant the amp could be completely removed. The RCA connectors on my head unit were used to feed that Vibe sub-woofer in the boot. Yes, single or double DIN doesn't make any difference. I doubt there will be any after market head units that "talk" the same protocol to make the CD changer work and/or have the same connectors. There possibly are but again you would have to cut and splice wiring and try it at your own risk. I didn't need change the amp, just remove it, so there was no cost involved (the head unit had the power I needed from its own built in amp). Because I use my ipod, there was no need for the CD changer for me, hence why that was removed also. This would have a positive side effect for you, as you mention you use the boot for work. You would be surprised how much room is freed up in the boot when the Amp and CD changer are removed ;) The link below I did for changing the bulbs in the Air con control unit should cover what you need. Head unit removal Cheers Rick

Will the gas struts pop off the pivot ball joint so that you do not need to remove the nut? Or pop off so that you can get a socket on?

Are your figures based on what the computer says or actual calculations based on miles covered and gallons added?

What happened in the end with this one mate or has the snow held up progress? No progress so far mate. Currently "between" jobs which is why the timing is a right tw*t. Hoping to have some more contract work coming up (fingers crossed) and seeing as standard GS prices seem to going up, I may well be in contact with Gord/Charlesworth to try and get the old girl back on the road.

I changed out the head unit on my Mk1. I think you will struggle to find anything that will work the factory CD unit in the boot. I used my original Sony single Din unit that I have had in all of my cars for the last few years. I like the "blacked out" appearance. I ditched the amp in the boot, the CD changer and the sub out of the rear shelf. I did use the exiting wiring to get the sound to the speakers, and just ran new cabling to deal with the Vibe CBRA10 sub I have in the boot. Because I have the ipod adaptor for my Sony head unit I can control all of the ipod playlist via the remote commander control for the unit and see all track details on the head unit. Works great for my non-audiophile ears! A couple of my threads covering the fitment, although not a huge amount on the wiring side as that was just a case of cutting and splicing wiring into a set of ISO connectors (so that I could fit the parrot Ck3100 hands free kit into the system. fascia parts fascia fit Parrot handsfree sub removal

finest1, in response to your PM, the struts menyioned in a previous thread I was discussing boot struts seem to be no longer available. I did find these on ebay.com for $59 (£41.50 GBP) and shipping from the States is $31.50 (£22 GBP). Not sure what that compares like in price compared to the re-gas suggested further up the thread.

Cheers guys. Not looking good though. The problem was the fact I was heading to Derby to fetch my kids so got recovered to Derby. I now live in Basingstoke and the quote to recover the car back from Derby is £400!! The local garage that normally do any work that I don't have time for have quoted a ball park figure of £600, just waiting for Lexus Derby price. If I have to do it myself, it needs to be in Basingstoke. All in all, the cost is looking prohibitive. Thinking of trying to pick up a cheap standard Mk1 GS (if I can find one) and swapping over all the mods and "Sport" stuff over and then breaking and scrapping the Sport. Difficult decisions :(

I was a possible, but not anymore. Head gasket went on Friday night, so the car may get scrapped now :(

This thread may also help ----> clicky

Cheers Aido. I've sent a parts request to Lexuspartsdirect and will see what they come back with.

Does anyone know if there are any Lexus Main Dealers (in the UK) that do mail order parts and even better do online ordering? Cheers Rick

I do my own servicing although I've not done any "how to's". I'll try and remember the camera next time. Not much is need for an oil change. The filter is in a sh*t position and you can't get it off without some oil going down the engine and steering rack/subframes etc. It is one of the reasons why I asked questions on here before about remote oil filter kits so that it could be moved to a better location. An oil filter wrench is a must of course to get the filter undone. I'd agree with ihpj, I use an oil extractor that goes down the dipstick to remove the oil, no idea if it is the same as the one he mentions but makes life dead easy rather than catch cans under the car and the sumplug out. Oh, and one more point, the engine oil needs to be hot when you drain it, try and do it when you enough time to let the engine cool again before having to remove the filter as it gets pretty uncomfortable with your arms wedged down the side of the engine bay when everything is hot :tsktsk: Air filter is a doddle. I can do a "how to" for that today easily enough as long as it stops raining Spark plugs are not so easy. They need the throttle body removing and I'll try and remember the digicam next time I do those.