Barry

Obesity is rarely a medical condition. It’s usually a lack of self control. I don’t eat much sugary stuff. I’ll maybe buy a bar of some nice chocolate and keep it in the fridge and eat it slowly over 9-10 days. Why should I pay more for my chocolate when these fatsos will just pay the tax and continue to get fat? Taxing sugar won’t make a difference. I’m a heavy smoker, I smoke 1-2 packs per day. When they introduced the smoking tax, it didn’t make a difference to me. Sure a pack of cigarettes costs twice as much but they’re still cheap. Try buying a packet of cigarettes in my country, you won’t have much change out of 50dhs, and that’s an every day habit.

The electricity to charge the cars is probably already coming fossil fuels. In my country we have a saying, you rob Peter to pay Paul. It basically means you’re a dog running around in circles trying to bite your own tail so you can eat something but you never achieve anything other than hurting yourself.

Ok, plan B, equip the recovery trucks with small generators capable of producing 12kW. If you can get a 10% charge in 30 minutes, it should be enough to take you where you need to go. People (recovery companies) need to think about stuff like this because this is where the industry will eventually lead to. BTW, my ideas are trademarked and patented. If anyone want to use them, I need 51% profit share 😬

Keep one of everything but keep it in good condition. Look what happened to Mk1 and Mk2 Escorts. They were crap when they were new but a rusted out Mk1 Escort will cost you 10,000 euro now when you could have bought one for 500 in the 90s. Even the shittiest of shitty stuff like Morris Marinas are going up in value. I know a guy at home who paid £9,000 for a Mk3 Cavalier SRi a few weeks ago, wasn’t even a red top, it was the 8v. Last one I had I sold it for £300. It’s a numbers game. The cars start to die off and get scrapped, nobody cares so the numbers drop. Eventually people grow up and have some savings and want to recapture their childhood so they go looking for old cars. The old cars are all gone so survivors can command a higher price. Basic supply and demand. It’s a long game to play but you can become very rich if you’re willing to play it for a long time.

That some MoVlogs level click bait there Gaurav bhai 😂 I though Toyota were actually cancelling the LC. I think the LC will still be around long after we are all dead and gone.

I’d like to see someone invent an emergency battery pack, something like the size of the old style battery boosters that you could carry around in the boot like you would carry a Jerry can of petrol. Not a full charge, but enough to get you to the charging point. I don’t think it’s such a major issue anyway. You can stick a high wattage inverter in the breakdown trucks which can be used to charge the dead car enough to get it to the charging point. But, I think @sertac is right. Treat it like a petrol car, watch the fuel (electricity) gauge and don’t let it run out you wouldn’t let your car run out of petrol, why would you let it run out of electricity. I think the electric car companies are missing out on a trick putting solar panels of the roof of the cars. It won’t generate massive power but you could leave your car in the parking lot when you’re at work and get a little boost.

I heard something about 100% tax on alcohol coming to Dubai. Don’t know if it’s true but if it is I guess I’ll just have to start making my own moonshine.

After a year working with electric tints I can say they’re cool for the first week while you show off to your friends but after that, they’re a pain in the ass. Realistically, you’re not going to adjust your window tints up and down every 5 minutes, you set it to on and leave it alone. They’re fantastic for office partitions and stuff like that but on a car they’re unreliable. The electrical contacts are very fragile, it’s just a small strip of copper tape and when the car is bouncing around, it gets dislodged easily. When this stuff loses power, it frosts over, so you can’t see out the window which means it’s a big no no for windscreens. The inverters to run it are pretty unreliable too. You’re stepping 12VDC up to 65VAC with a cutted waveform and cramming it all into a box the size of a cigarette packet, which means things overheat and burn out. I guess the failure rate was around 20%. I did design and build a reliable power supply prototype but I couldn’t make it any smaller than a shoebox and you can’t fit something the size of a shoebox behind your dashboard. Like I said, for buildings it’s awesome, but not for cars. I spent more time doing repair work (free warranty work) that I did doing fresh installs (making money). The company closed 2 weeks ago so that tells you all you need to know. I’m not a fan of tinted windows anyway unless it’s on a show car. I find it harder to see properly at night.

Roll bars/cages on a road car are never a good idea. Sure it looks cool, but unless you’re wearing a helmet and at least a 4 point harness, you can crack your skull wide open on them in the smallest accident.

It’s is mainly a diesel thing but EGT good information to have anyway to give you an idea of how rich/lean the engine is running. You’ll get this data from the lambda sensor anyway but it’s always good to have as many reference points as possible.

Just something else to throw out there. If you have an Android head unit, you can download Torque or a similar app onto it, use the Bluetooth dongle, and you can have real time live data displayed on a full size screen as you drive. Better than looking at a tiny phone screen. Installed this system in a G65 a few months ago. Total cost for head unit and dongle was under 1,500 plus my time to install it, but this is something anyone can buy the parts and do themselves. Dragon mart has all the stuff.

Stone tablet and copper chisel is more your era 😘

@desertdude you do realise that the OBD port is for more than plugging crappy eBay code readers into? How do you think the rolling road tuners remap ECUs? They connect through the OBD port. Heck I can even flash and reprogram ECUs through the OBD port with my shitty 12k dhs computer. If you think the OBD port is only for connecting crappy Bluetooth dongles to your phone, you need some education on vehicle diagnostics.

Carol Shelby died in 2012. It’s not a real Shelby. It’s just ford trading on his name.

If you have OBD to USB cable then you can use any software you can get your hands on from code reading to remapping

I have a USB to OBD cable for sale. Original Porsche cable. You can connect any OBD equipped car to your laptop. The possibilities are endless. You can download generic maps and increase horsepower or you can download basic software and read fault codes. Any software is all available on torrents. Price is 100 dhs.

New to this Instagram thing. Who are you all following?

The only reply I can give to this is that this is the difference between a parts fitter and a mechanic Any monkey can screw parts on and off but not everyone really understands what the engineers were trying to achieve. Where I’m from, most of the mechanics here would be classified as helpers with a bit of knowledge. It takes a 4 year apprenticeship before you are even allowed to call yourself a mechanic. You have to complete at least a level 5 qualification. If you want to call yourself a technician you have to reach level 7. The biggest problem is the people who go around 5 garages looking for the cheapest job. Quality doesn’t matter. Only price. As long as it’s working again, who cares. Even if it’s going to break down again in a month. These animals make it hard for people like me who do a good job and charge accordingly. I would rather have less work than lower myself to their standards.

It’s specially formulated grease with conductive particles to maximise electricity transmission. In theory, you can use any grease, EP2 works, you can even cover the battery posts in Vaseline if you want. The main aim is to keep the air away from the connection to prevent oxidisation.

Sure. I’ll be at the shop on Saturday. I have a lot of spare cool stuff so I’ll make you a nice little care package full of stuff you didn’t even know existed 😬

What is it the kids say now? Ooof! Screw extractors can get nasty fast. If you snap one you’re not drilling it out unless you have a milling machine and a 500 dhs titanium drill bit. If it works then everything is cushty. If it doesn’t you’re in a whole new world of shit. Be careful using them. @shadow79 if it gets really bad I have a helicoil kit here you can borrow. I think there are 2 big points to take away here. 1 - Spark plugs don’t need to be murder tight. You don’t need to swing off a 1/2” bar with a pipe on the end. Use a torque wrench. 30 Nm is plenty. It’s such a simple job anyone can do in a parking lot so you should do it yourself 2 - A little bit of copper grease is your friend. A little, not a lot. Back home my mechanic friends used to laugh at me for using copper grease on everything when you might not see the customer again. I always said think about the next guy who might be working on the car. When you get a car in the shop and you see parts with copper grease, it makes you smile. It’s good karma.

Mathias is a top class dude, both professionally and personally. I’ve watched him design and fabricate some funky stuff that I would have no idea about, all from an idea he gets in his head. He designed and built the crazy lengthened and widened Jeep CJ chassis with the dual front diffs along with the suspension system to make it all work. I’m not a big recommender because I don’t want bad work to come back on me but that’s one guy I would recommend to anyone who needs any welding or fabrication work done.

How often do you see battery terminals with post grease on them though? I’ve never even seen it on dealer serviced cars. Servicing in UAE generally means an oil and filter change, if you’re lucky they might blow out the air filter with an air line. I have a few spare cans of battery post grease if anyone needs some.

This good advice and no offence intended, but the no spark triangle mechanics look for is air/fuel, spark, and compression. You need these 3 things to make an engine start.

Starter motor you mean? Hammering on an aluminium alternator doesn’t sound like a great idea.