just wondering

[bstardchild]

Ahem. Anyway. Yes, between you all, bstard et al, a good selling job going on... the car itself going for £55 and all (mine'll probably go for a price where the frame and basic powertrain components have negative value). Probably be prepared to offer a little for the wheels and stuff if i decide to buy (not sure on the towbar, though it might be more neccessary for a coupe - however, no trailer certification on my license!). Even if it IS in norfolk.
Suppose you attracted the kids because of it's bad-boy look hehe.. i'm going to go look over the spec list again, but i still have questions that it may or may not answer...
is it dropped?
what are the seats like? (if theyre dodgy fox style ones, i'll be visiting concept-e still)
how many clicks on the foglight switch?
whats the stereo like?
how much dya reckon clear indicators would be?

Seats are good but a bit of wear on the backrest/side bolster as you slide in and out - sport type seats with side bolters and bucket type squabs

Got me on the foglight switch

Stereo is period JVC Radio Cassette with front and rear speakers

Clear indicators - never looked for any!!!

serious ones: got any decent interior and detail shots? those outside pics look good, but to be picky - they're small, from a distance (showing whole car) and in the rain
why are you keeping the 6n in preference to it?
are those alloys therefore larger than standard (and needing a recalibration, even if just mentally, of the speedo) if it's "low" on standard steels?
the 5-speed is an 8p, or GT style? i cant remember... dammit....
hehehe...

I can send you some bigger pics and it rains lots round here so getting photos on a dry day is hard

Keeping the 6n purely cos she had a personal plate that was costing me money on retention and it needed to go on a car - I like the Coupe so much I thought I'd try a newer one - but for the plate I'd have stayed with the coupe

Alloy are std sized and tyres could be swapped to keep rolling radius the same so no re-calibration required - speedo seems pin sharp on curent wheels and boot

5th gear is a high gear so drops the revs and enables a good cruising speed on M-ways as opposed to gear where 70mph feels like you are reving the nuts off it!!!! So I guess that means 8p as opposed to GT

It doesn't lack pick up in 5th tho - seems to pull nicely right the way round the dial on the few occasions I've pushed the envolope

I'm a nice chap and unlikely to thrash it so much any more (well, maybe the first few times out... recipe for being wrapped round a tree yeah), it's a "good home" ... just theres so much i (and my bank account) can stand for in the space of 2 months!

Thats OK then.....

BTW is that rubbing strip on your door made of rubber rather than plastic? i have a feeling the door i bought was off a scrapped one in exactly the same colour and trim as yours (thereby definatlely pinning it down as an Mk2 one)!!

Sort of rubbery....... rather than hard plastic.

[Karl_CLCoupe]

The foglight switch might well be the same as the Mark3 with 3 positions (thats assuming they recycled some of the switchgear from the Mark2). That will mean the off, fronts on, and front and rear on? I took a guess there, as I only have the rear foglight which comes on on the last position.

Clear indicators, I can't say I've seen much of. Maybe get in touch with awesomegti (assuming they cover Mark2) or even Venom. The side repeators are Identicle to the Mark3s, so you could always get some Mark3 side repeators if needs be.

Karl.

[Tahrey1043]

right on with the rubberies - i had a door off a metallic sky blue coupe S then, no wonder it doesnt quite fit right with my mk3! b*stard scrappies done for me AGAIN! heheh..

i dunno if the switches were recycled much, from the interior pics i have seen, maybe the internal parts were but the external is different. was just wondering if i could swap mine over

well, just had a call from the garage, its 10 to 2pm, the tank is in, the pedals are fixed, and it's passed the MoT. time to go pay the piper (it's at least £200, i'll be "happy" with £250, for another 13 years* of usable petrol tank and pedals, and a year of saleablity) and see what his opinion on the rest of the car is and how i feel about the whole affair.

* hmmm, it's almost in it's 13th year of registration and most the way through its 13th year of build... could be something to do with the way it's feeling

[Tahrey1043]

£267 and some shrapnel, and that was at a regular-customer discount *ooooh* so close... then again i forgot this guys quotes never include VAT... doh. neither did it include him accidentally ripping a wire off my stealth shelf when removing it, the actual wiring seeming to hold togther less well then the pop-connection between plug and socket easy fix tho..

mot passed, new tank on ok, pedals feel nice and firm again.... apparently the rest of it has a clean bill of health and wont give me any forseeable trouble. i've fixed more or less everything that can go wrong with a mk3 after all
then again, he would say that, as i probably keep the old boy well stocked for cognac and cigars telling me it's fine when a shock's going to start leaking in a couple months time is a guaranteed return customer think it's time i went and got some hammerite and waxoyl-stuff (how much is that gonna be ?)

i'll give it a little while now, see if the thing comes back into favour once i've washed it off, vacuumed out and either put new seats in or given the existing ones a damn good scrubbing (boy do they look rough).

this whole affair has left me a little tight for insurance and tax though, and more so for non-car things i wanted this month (might get the clocks and seats still.... intake, later). will have to really pump wages dept for my missing pay to cover it, and get miss crashy to pay the lacking £30 for the scrap door (and either fix it, or pay the further £168 garage quoted me for a sand-down and respray on it - the paints just not sticking to the metallic laquer as she didnt bother to sand it in the first place!)

i have my eye on the coupe, even if it means reccommending it to someone who wants a warm hatch as a starter car but while the mk3 holds together i dunno if i can deal with having to replace it and all the umming/ahhing/expense/time that goes with it. if it continues falling to bits, then soytenly

[GroovyCarrot]

3 clicks on the fog switch (no mk2 switch gear was recycled, but all of the switches do the same thing)
Clear indicators £5-10 on ebay, £10-20 in shops. It's only a strip of translucent plastic and the bulb that needs changing on mk2s, so nice and cheap

Btw, if you're ever in a situation where you're looking to buy a replacement car again.. you -must- look at minis. Expensive, unreliable, hard to find in good nick, utterly impractical... but having just had a drive in one I have to say that they are the most fun you could ever possibly have on four wheels Just something to think about

[Tahrey1043]

hmmm i also just realised that the pedals went wonky on (tuesday ) the 13th

i did consider a mini at first when looking for a car, but for one thing the insurance is surprisingly expensive (probably something to do with the base engine being a 62hp 1.3 for the last 15 years of production..), for a second it has less than f***-all rear passenger and boot space, and a third they're total death traps! No crumple zones and the panels shear apart very easily in a collision (including the engine bay - where your feet are..)

Did however get to go for a short drive in one once, a slightly modded cooper (basically some custom trimmings and phat tyres - theres not much lowering that can be done! and the engine was identical to the regular version!)... just a couple miles up a twisty country lane and back - the first leg spent trying to get the choke set properly and getting used to the wierd steering wheel/pedal angles - maybe got up to about 50mph, but even that was good fun. Bouncy, but fun. Engine seemed willing to pull like a train from about 400rpm (very lazy idle!) to wherever (got to 30 in no time at all) and of course, the legendary handling was in good supply round all the pokey little bends. Felt like going karting but big-boy style Tried the same route in the (75hp) Punto i was then driving, didnt get from A to B anywhere near as rapid..

Be nice to rent/borrow for a few hours blasting one way and t'other, but wouldnt want to own one!

Been for a little random-drive anyway this morning after work, just to work the cobwebs out and remind myself of how the car goes and feels when it's not sick and i'm not trying to pull 70mpg out of it. Still sweet-as when going conservatively (45-50 down the lanes, you could hardly get finer), handling nicely and being an "easy" drive, still pulling surprisingly well uphill in top, still rasping like a chainsaw when being pounded on full throttle..... except a slightly worrying smell of burnt oil that came in during the latter stages and for a short while after zapping up a relatively steep, long hill, to the redline in 2nd and upto around 65 in 3rd... must check that out if it's the rocker gasket, i'll do it myself... if it's anything else... make-do & mend, really lean on josephine to put the door right, and sell up
Coupe would be nice, though i'm still thinking the brakes would take a lot of getting used to. Part of the mornings trundling involved putting those steep hills to good use - cutting the engine, pumping the pedal but good to work out the vacuum, then coasting up to speed (30-40) and whacking it hard. Then repeating with engine on, and twice more doing both ways in the same run for better comparison. Sadly I have to say, the servo DOES make a noticable difference to the response time, initial force of braking, and quite probably stopping distance. On the side of safety you can say the mk2 style brakes are probably a lot harder to lock up... but then that shows you cant e.g. reliably hit it hard so that it locks and back off a bit to get the hardest non-locking brake performance.
As it was, I did manage to lock 'em... a couple times. Not every time, and I was bashing it about as hard as I could. The feel of it was a lot more... how can i say.... "soft" (despite the firm pedal) and "progressive" (as opposed to with servo, which was more "loose" - without losing much feel - and "instant"). It might not really be noticable going from one car to the other, but testing them against each other in the space of 20 seconds or so really shows the difference. Without servo it pulled up fairly quick and you could feel yourself being chucked forwards with some squealing from the tyres as your foot finally drove the pedal properly home - with assistance, the nose dove sharply and the tyres squeaked right away, as soon as foot touched pedal and sent it carpet-wards, didnt even need to put more than 85% of my weight behind it. Kind of the difference between turning on your kitchen tap, and turning it on after attaching a 5m length of coiled hosepipe to it..
Don't get me wrong, it'd be fine for everyday use, even zipping down lanes so long as there wasnt too much of an emergency situation cropped up. I just hope maybe there's some other differences between the mk2 and mk3 systems that mean an actual pre-servo polo could pull up in roughly the same distance under full-force pedal hamming (it'd be a lighter car after all, maybe not needing quite such dramatic performance.... )

[GroovyCarrot]

I went from driving a mk2 clio with powerful brakes, a powerful servo and ABS to driving my mk2 polo with.. well, sod all. It took me a couple of drives pottering around the lanes to get used to it, but I now actually prefer the amount of feel you get without the servo to the strange numbness you get with it. Admittedly, the initial force with a servo is greater, but I find it's far more of a challenge to avoid locking up the wheels under heavy braking than it is to pull the car up quickly.. and once you lock the wheels up, the strength of your brakes aren't really going to make much difference.