Lost it

I just bought a few sheets of wet and dry at 800, 1200 and 1600 grit and a tin of clear laquer. Pennies really. About an hours work. These kits are ok but you are buying a box with the same stuff in it bar the laquer. If you are really patient you can use toothpaste. But you might get fed up of the smell after an hour or so...

Only bad thing I've found with them is that the output volume level is a bit lacking. Which doesn't matter as long as you remember to lower the volume before going back to normal radio or disc.

I've kind of never took much notice of these "Track test" comparisons. I don't drive on a race track, or a test track, I drive on A and B roads that can have broken, worn, new, oil and derv, pea shingle, lots of rubber and repairs, concrete sections etc. And none of us really drives in such a way that we simply must have that last couple of feet in a crash stop in the rain else there would be multiple car pile ups every time it rains. Or we would none of us have a licence... No. I drive off Hayling Island, on an A road with any number of road surface changes and ages, I join the A27, turn onto the A3M, turn onto the M25, turn off at the A41 Watford junction and drive on the roads from that point to work, and those roads are shot. Even my Nexen's have never given me pause where grip is concerned, I have no real urge to discover the last nth of G force on these tyres,and I very much suspect not many Lexus users are like that either. So, When I get my "winter rubber" on, I will stick with what I know, and install Goodyear Vectors.

Well, when I bought my RX 300 it had a mixture of tyres on it, one of which was over 8 years old and was probably the spare at some time in it's life judging by the state of the rim so as I was a bit tight budget wise, I spoke to my "tyre guy". He mostly does motorcycle tyres but he knows others in the trade. I wanted reasonable quality, good wet weather, a make I have heard of (not a chinese "Hooflungdung" special) and didn't really care about wear as I would be going onto 4 season Goodyear Vector's for the winter months anyway. The Goodyear Vector 4 season Mk1's worked very well on my AWD centre locking diff Jaguar X type, so the next gen version should be even better on something with a bit more ground clearance as I kept rubbing the undertray in the X type, never got stuck, but left some interesting furrows behind me. He suggested these things: https://tirereviewsandmore.com/nexen-cp521-reviews/ Have to say, they aren't the quietest tyres in the world, but the recent monsoon conditions on the M25 didn't phase them at all. And they were cheap, under £300 for all four fitted. I know they are basically light truck tyres, but I kind of like tyres to have stiff side walls anyway. They don't squeal anywhere as much as I expected them to, they are quite soft on the tread though. I won't be taking it off road unless I fall asleep at the wheel and dive into a field. I've done over 5,000 miles on them, mostly motorway driving and the noise on the concrete bit of the M25 between the A3 junction and the M3 has to be heard to be believed..they have lost just over 1mm of tread depth. So they should last me until October when the winter rubber gets installed. Might get someone out of a jam if they really are skint. But I completely don't understand the thinking behind someone buying an expensive car and putting chinese ditch finders on it. Madness. My usual choice is Dunlop or Goodyear.

Well, a quick search brought me this...

I watched them physically pull a Merc headlight off the front of the car once to change a side lamp. They hadn't noticed it was an LED type unit. The customer was hopping, but he took it there...

Ouch.... I'm building a new Aldi, and there's a Halfords close by. I keep seeing Mercedes, BMW's, Jaguar's, Lexus vehicles pulled up outside with someone from Halfords pulling the dashboard apart fitting dash cams, and I always think, you know, you have a car there worth almost the price of a half decent motorhome and you are taking it to Halfords to have work done? I would hate to be the insurance underwriter, these staff are not technicians, they are shop keepers and shelf stackers.

Remember it's not a hybrid, and it's in as good a state of tune as any other one could be (because I've done it all myself) so as I usually average 30 ish with my 3.0 Jaguar's, I didn't think 27mpg was bad for a car that has the aerodynamic qualities of a cinder block. Rarely goes over the speed limit if at all because it's not the kind of vehicle that encourages that style of driving, it's on tyres that have exceptional wet weather performance so they won't be particularly good road friction wise and all in all I'm happy with what it's giving me per petrol station visit.

Mines still doing the same mpg, and it has for over three weeks now so it's doing very well. I will need to consider a hybrid when I wear this one out though.

My MOT guy says the same. If it's not fitted, it's not a fail because a tester cannot check if it's secure if it's not there. There are no components attached to it, it's simply a cover. And he's been doing MOT's since I was in my teens, so if he doesn't know...

How much do you think it being a hybrid has helped with this? I'm still clocking circa 27mpg on my daily run.

I stuck a bottle of ZX1 in mine too. Didn't make any difference to mpg but the engine is very slightly quieter. I'm pretty sure it works better in a car that hasn't had regular oil changes, but one that has been serviced right, you won't see much improvement. Tried it in 4 cars now, always had the same result. Engine slightly smoother, a bit quieter but no mpg improvement. I'm not about to risk one supermarket and one decent fuel in mine, with the moonboot on it's a bind having to get out half way home to top the tank up... And as I've said, it's no cheaper than the "proper" stuff where I live on Hayling.

Well, I was T boned off my bike a couple of weeks ago, I've been "fitted" with a walking "moon boot" thing as my left ankle got thoroughly rogered by the BMW that T boned me. Lateral Malleus cracked and some soft tissue damage, so it's broke. 6 weeks of moon boot. Great fun. Not an unstable break though luckily. I had a lot of "fun" changing the spark plugs last weekend, the old ones don't look like they have been in there for 120,000 miles, but the car definitely runs better now. Might be because two of the plugs in the rear bank were barely finger tight. So my transport to work is the Lexus RX at the moment. 900 miles and a bit a week... I tried the Jaguar, I could get in easily enough, took me about 3 minutes to get back out, I think I know how Douglas Bader felt when he got his leg stuck climbing out of his aircraft all those years ago. Moon boot got stuck on everything... I use Esso or Shell, normal grade. But I went into Sainsbury's and got a "Double points and 5p a litre off" ticket so I thought I'd use it and filled the car from the idiot light. 69 litres. Call this unscientific if you like, but for two weeks I have done more or less the same journey. Starting at 05:30, off Hayling Island, onto the A3, off at the M25, to the A41 then to my work site at Century Park. Then home again at about 17:30 so I miss most of the waiting around on the M25. 190 mile round trip. And I can get two days from a full tank easily. No real worries, I put 68 litres back in and off I go again. Except I only got 356 miles from the Sainbury's fill until the idiot light came on, and had to top up with expensive south bound A3 BP garage fuel. So I didn't actually save anything. The weather wasn't much different, I always run the climate control in Auto, no more or less traffic than normal, just a loss of quite a chunk of miles from one fill of supermarket fuel. So I won't be using it again unless it comes free with a hot and cold running chambermaid option.

I'd agree with your man. Denso or Toyota, nothing else. It's not only that the car will run rough, it's also the risk that your engine will eat a cat because there's unburned fuel being fed to it. I wouldn't be "experimenting" for the same reason, if the OBD code tells you which one is failing, I'd change it for new.

Look again. Those little packs don't contain Copper based grease. If it's supplied by the pad manufacturer it's either a Silicon based grease, or a rubber grease. Certainly won't be copperslip. Any half decent motor factors will happily sell you little sachets of the right lube to use. If they know what they are about. If you buy "supermarket" pads usually they don't come with any lube, or slides, or indeed anything. But people have been watching the likes of You tube etc. and listening to idiots that tell them to use copper grease that it's probably too late now. By "Supermarket" pads I mean the cheap stuff sold by the likes of Euro Car parts. Again there's a minimum standard where brake pads are concerned, as long as this E number is stamped on the pad somewhere they can sell them. There are good pads, there are budget pads. There aren't "Good Budget" pads. And the people selling Copper grease don't actually know what you are going to use it for. There is no legal reason for them to put on the container "shouldn't be used on brake components" so why do something that will potentially lose them sales and money? Have a look on just about any site you like where engineers, proper ones with letters after their names (not Hotpoint) and you won't see them recommending copper based lubricants on brake components. If you ever go to a race track meeting ask the professional mechanics. Take any brand new vehicle apart and guess what you won't find on the brakes? Personally I believe that now, more than at any other time you really do get what you pay for. And sadly "I've always done it that way" is not an excuse for doing it wrong in the first place. You wrote "then surely the public, vehicle manufacturers and various government bodies would object just in case legal vultures got involved". The answer is no, because we aren't quite yet in that level of nanny state where the Government who frankly know nothing about anything except maybe what their pension will be worth are telling us what we can and cannot do. And like I said, there's no regulations that say a grease manufacturer has to put "Warning this stuff might be slippery" on the tin. Yet.