What have you done to your car today?

Insured it, again.

Admiral are such con artists. Last year I paid £1100, this year their renewal came through at a whopping £3400 (admittedly I had been a naughty boy and picked up 4 points during the year), and due to them now employing the dodgy tactic of not quoting you online if you are an existing customer (basically forcing you to go along with their £lol renewal), I thought I'd shop around elsewhere. After threatening to leave they magically reduced the price to £2400 which was still more than Direct Line at £2200, so I went with Direct Line instead.

Fast forward 13 days, I'm now no longer on Admiral's books as an existing customer so they quote me online at £1400. As annoyed as I was with them and not wanting to give them money, £800 is £800, so I cancelled Direct Line under the 14 day cooling off period and purchased a new policy through Admiral.

Is this what I'm going to have to do every year now just to get around Admiral's completely bent renewal tactics?
 
£2400?! How old are you? Even with 4pts, still that is absurd.

As for shopping around, yes unfortunately but I had the pleasure of them quoting less than last year for me with Churchill and when I called up to ask if they could do it cheaper, they lower the price (the cheapest quote I can find was higher than the renewal letter). No faff at all.
 
I just received a new gear knob and boot surround for my 307. Should be fun trying to remove the old knob. Having watched a YouTube video, it's probably going to take a lot of brute force to pull it off.

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Raymond Lin said:
£2400?! How old are you? Even with 4pts, still that is absurd.

As for shopping around, yes unfortunately but I had the pleasure of them quoting less than last year for me with Churchill and when I called up to ask if they could do it cheaper, they lower the price (the cheapest quote I can find was higher than the renewal letter). No faff at all.
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IIRC he's 23 or 24 :p
 
Voxination said:
Insured it, again.

Admiral are such con artists. Last year I paid £1100, this year their renewal came through at a whopping £3400 (admittedly I had been a naughty boy and picked up 4 points during the year), and due to them now employing the dodgy tactic of not quoting you online if you are an existing customer (basically forcing you to go along with their £lol renewal), I thought I'd shop around elsewhere. After threatening to leave they magically reduced the price to £2400 which was still more than Direct Line at £2200, so I went with Direct Line instead.

Fast forward 13 days, I'm now no longer on Admiral's books as an existing customer so they quote me online at £1400. As annoyed as I was with them and not wanting to give them money, £800 is £800, so I cancelled Direct Line under the 14 day cooling off period and purchased a new policy through Admiral.

Is this what I'm going to have to do every year now just to get around Admiral's completely bent renewal tactics?
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cant you get an Admiral quote on the comparison sites when you are a customer?
 
Well it needed cleaning as it's been dirty for weeks so I took it from this:
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Via this:
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To this:
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38648602100_92c24e6594_k.jpg


Few observations from the 3 hours I spent cleaning the car today.

I have added 21k miles to the car since I bought it, many of them hard miles and track miles. It has taken its toll on the paint work and the rear bumper arches are paint free and there are some massive chips on the front of the car. I will need to have the car painted again this year, front bumper, bonnet, rear bumper and probably roof. I will then probably add some paint protection film to prevent this moving forward, thought cost between paint and protection is not that different.

The people who did the wheels last time have not done a good job. There are 4 blips I saw where paint has come away, They will say "stone chips mate" but this has never happened to my on the wheels before. They will get a visit Monday for a chat and see what they say, hopefully they will be gentlemen about it and fix the issues, but 'motor trade init'.

Car is getting serviced with added brake fluid change Wednesday. It also has a few bits that need looking at including the rear spoiler not sitting flush, gearbox whine (minor but I hear it), rear suspension knock (getting worse and like it was before, so at least I know the cause) and gearbox needs a reset as when really cold it struggles to de-clutch the auto box for a few seconds. Reset of the software will sort that I suspect.

Looks great in the pics, but up close there are quite a few things I need to address to make it mint and finally I am going to add a geo and maybe...MAYBE stick a noisy exhaust on it to help the V10 breath and get it mapped to 600bhp.
 
Noob question, will 1l bootle of dot 4 brake fluid be enough to change the fluid completely in a 7th gen 3dr 1.6 civic? I use to have left overs from 400-500ml when I did my bike, so I'm guessing 1L should do the trick?
 
Housey said:
The people who did the wheels last time have not done a good job. There are 4 blips I saw where paint has come away, They will say "stone chips mate" but this has never happened to my on the wheels before.
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I have this same issue. I didn't realise it when I collected it but two of my wheels were refurbished by the dealer. So I have two factory finish and two refurbished. The factory finish wheels are stll immaculate. The refurbished ones are covered in stone chips - its not a very good job and the finish is not very durable at all.
 
Raymond Lin said:
£2400?! How old are you? Even with 4pts, still that is absurd.
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He's a youngun like me. :p

£2400 to insure a 911 with 4 points at age 23~ doesn't seem surprising at all. In fact I'm not particualrly surprised at the £3400 quote either!

I am most surprised that he managed to get insurance for a mere £1400 to be honest!!

[TW]Fox said:
I have this same issue. I didn't realise it when I collected it but two of my wheels were refurbished by the dealer. So I have two factory finish and two refurbished. The factory finish wheels are stll immaculate. The refurbished ones are covered in stone chips - its not a very good job and the finish is not very durable at all.
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I also have two refurbed and two not, the original ones, again, are immaculate, and the ones that were re-done have a few chips here and there and one has slight flaking on a bolt hole where it has been caught with the wheel brace.

I don't know if its a different kind of paint, or if they weren't baked properly, or what.
 
[TW]Fox said:
I have this same issue. I didn't realise it when I collected it but two of my wheels were refurbished by the dealer. So I have two factory finish and two refurbished. The factory finish wheels are stll immaculate. The refurbished ones are covered in stone chips - its not a very good job and the finish is not very durable at all.
Click to expand...

Same. I had them done by my go to place Shorade last time and they were rock hard. Now I know that Shorade send them out but obviously will ensure the people who do them are quality. Down the road is a wheel specialist, they got good reviews and were of the same price. I had a look around, seemed to know their stuff and were doing many Audi's but it's now obvious their process/paint is not the same quality. I will have a discussion on Monday but I expect them to push back and make it my problem. Watch the news for a fire in a wheels shop Monday night, maybe into Tuesday morning.
 
Raymond Lin said:
£2400?! How old are you? Even with 4pts, still that is absurd.

As for shopping around, yes unfortunately but I had the pleasure of them quoting less than last year for me with Churchill and when I called up to ask if they could do it cheaper, they lower the price (the cheapest quote I can find was higher than the renewal letter). No faff at all.
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Aged 24, I wouldn't entertain paying £2k+ for insurance but the car is going soon, so would end up cancelling for a decent sized refund in a few months anyway.

It's a frustrating way of doing business, I understand why they do it, but it just feels so wrong and in dire need of regulation.

Rotty said:
cant you get an Admiral quote on the comparison sites when you are a customer?
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Nope, no Admiral Group company will give you a quote if they detect that you are an existing customer.
 
Went to replace rear brake pads on wife's S-Max but it didn't go too well. Last time I did discs/pads all round I remembered that pushing the piston in on one of the rear calipers (needs clockwise windback tool) was very difficult indeed and one side was very easy. I started off with the one that was problematic last time and got it to a point where the windback tool is turning the piston but it isn't going into the caliper any further so I can't put the new pads on. Had to pop the old pads back on for now which is less than ideal.

Faced with a decision on what to do with the car now. Obviously I'm not going to ditch the car just because it seems one brake caliper is knackered, but it has the following issues:

1). Big dents/scrapes on both rear doors/wheel arches
2). Bonnet release cable is knackered - closing the bonnet after opening it is a nightmare every time
3). There's an oil leak somewhere around the turbo. It isn't majorly leaking out though, but it's still there.
4). Rear trailing arm bushes need replacing
5). Exhaust downpipe and silencer are both knackered
6). I think the DMF is on its way out. It judders when pulling off in 1st almost all the time.
7). The previously mentioned caliper issue.

I think all of that lot excluding the dents is easily going to be in the region of £1.5k to sort out, if not closer to £2k. After which I'm still left with a dented 170k mile base spec S-Max anyway. It's obviously still cheaper than just buying a new car so I need to consider what my options are. Was going to get the exhaust and oil leak taken care of soon anyway, but with all the other stuff, I'm not sure.
 
Yeah, I've got the cash to buy a newer one that (hopefully) isn't a shed so financially it isn't a problem. This one was an ex-taxi so it's had a fairly hard life, but despite that it's been pretty good for us. If I did get rid of it I wouldn't feel too bad about it because it's given a good bit of use for the amount I paid for it.
 
Switched the dead battery on the mito - alarm went off couldn't figure how to switch it off but it got bored after 5mins and turned it self off (later found out that this can be disabled by twisting the ignition round to 'MAR')

Replaced broken passenger side door handle - hour of fun taking the door card off, fiddling with old door handle and replacing but all in all not that difficult and happy with the result.
 
Had the DSC, hand brake and ABS light come up on the dash a couple of weeks ago so back then I immediately looked at the rear passenger side sensor as I had to clean that up previously. Took that out, quickly cleaned it and put it back in. Then found out the next day (Monday) that the speedometer no longer worked (don't work on cars on Sundays!). Long story short, after buying a couple of genuine (used) and new (eBay cheap special) ABS sensors, none of them worked because despite the description in the listing they ended up being shorter than my original sensor despite being the correct connector type, so I'm not happy about that. Then today after spending the best part of a week without a working speedometer I gave the old one a proper good clean, cleaned up the reluctor ring and now I have a functioning speedometer again. I still have the three lights because it turns out that after connecting diagnostics to the car earlier in the week the front right sensor is showing an error and the brake pressure sensor is showing an error, so I still have those to sort.

Probably shouldn't have been a moron and should have just used diagnostics straight away. Problem is the bolt holding the front sensor in is just going to round off as soon as I go near it (already looked at it) so I'll have a think about how I'm going to tackle that one.
 
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