Digsy

Hang on hang on hang on You can't come in here with a two line post suggesting you've designed your own cylinder head with dual variable cam timing and lift and then not tell us the rest! If I'm right then practically no one even in OEM world is doing dual variable valve lift - maybe no one at all, yet. Who's variable lift hardware did you use? Adapting the 2JZ head to variable valve lift on its own is going to be a proper old tear up unless you used the switching tappet from INA (as used by Porsche). Did you get as far as casting the heads?

With repsect that's completely wrong. Increasing the geometric compression ratio increases the efficiency of the combustion process by inceasing the amount of energy that goes into gas expansion (as opposed to being lost as heat). The downside is the risk of knock at high loads when the cylinder is at its most full at the end of the induction stroke. Engines are terribly inefficient at low loads beacuse the actual compression ratio is tiny because of the partial cylinder fill when the throttle is partly closed. this is why you never get knocking at low loads. In fact the better the cylinder fill (the higher the volumetric efficiency) the more likely you are to have to reduce the compression ratio (i.e. as is usual in a forced induction engine).

Removed at your request (might want to edit your quote too ). I thought it was a relevant discussion even if you chose not to do it.

And a couple of old ones with input from me: http://www.mkivsupra.net/vbb/showthread.php?81673

I bet its cheaper for Toyota and Subaru

I can see a day when we are forced to do all the sorting at home. The recycling centres already have skips for pretty much everything from shoes to newspapers to clothes. Once we also have a corresponding wheelie bin for everything at home, its just a short step to say "well now its all sorted out, it will be much easier if you just take it to the tip yourself when the bins get full". And that will be the end of refuse collections. Its the one "big brother" conspiracy theory I actually believe will happen. All Councils want to recycle but the infrastructure costs must be huge. Much simpler to push it onto the tax payer little by little. Oh - and I absolutely refuse (no pun intended) to wash up rubbish. That's simply more "processing" costs being forced on to us. Water and sewerage are being tipped as the next utility costs set to soar, so if anyone thinks I am using a litre of water to rinse out a tin can they can think again. As an aside, I must be one of the most green people in the developed world as far as rubbish goes. It usually takes me a couple of months to fill up a wheelie bin. And, no, provided the lids are kept closed properly they don't smell.

Apologies, I misread your post. Will reply to your PM tonight.

I just noticed that your £500 figure only leaves £200 for running and the rest is finance. I think you will find that is a bit tight, but as mentioned above it depends very much on how you use it and how you want it maintained.

You can run an NA on 95 RON with no problems.

Until very recently I ran an NA Supra as my daily drive, doing between 20,000 and 13,000 miles a year. I started out with main dealer servicing and then as the car got older and it became apparent I was going to be keeping her a lot longer then planned (9 years in total) I dropped back to independant garages, and then to doing it myself. Being a habitual budgeter I did a massive spreadsheet with all the "usual" running costs in it and worked out what I needed to put into an account each montth to make sure they were always covered. I can look tonight at what the initial estimates came out as. I can tell you that most recently I was putting in £400 each month and not spending it all. If you PM me with your e-mail address I can send you as much info as you want. I think the big diefference will be insurance as I was 31 when I got the Supra, but you can easily work out the additional amount.

No, Opera (web browser). I have IE installed too but I don't use it because it is dog slow.

On a monthly basis, somewhere much lower than the former but more than the latter. Probably in the region of £30 per month when you add them all up. I don't know if you can go that far back but starting if you start in 1996 when I first bought a house that's a total of nearly £6k in premiums.

I noticed yesterday that 99% of the time I cannot post on the forum using my phone as the text box for the reply appear to be greyed out. It was fine before. Have we upgraded the forum to the point where it is no longer compatible with older WinMo phones?

I have never and would never take out any kind of a financial arrangement without PPI that covers me for accident, sickness and unemployment. The only exception is my latest mortgage which I overpaid initially, and that entitles me to take a payment "holiday" for any reason up to the amount I have already overpaid. As I see it, its the only sensible thing to do in the current financial situation if youi dont want to be saddled with paying off a large loan when you are potentially not earning. I'm sure if I added it all up from past mortgages, car loans and credit cards it would make a nice tidy sum but as I'm a habitual small print reader and went into it all with my eyes wide open I couldn't bring myself to claim it back as there is no way I could ever justify to myself that I was mis-sold anything.

She didn't go for it in the end. The repair job was way too bargain-basement when viewed close up, and not worth spending the extra to put right.

She did find that a couple of insurerers wanted an "engineers report" even though its only a cat D. Also found a few references to people being told the same thing online. Is this becoming a requirement?

Selling on wont be an issue. She keeps her cars until they fall apart around her. Everything else seems to check out, so provided it hasn't been fixed with newspaper and filler she might be on to a winner.

Good point. Cheers!

The dealer is being very open and up front with any requests for information that I ask for. He has just sent me a scan of the front page of the V5, but this shows the owner's address as being from Wales. I am assuming that this is the guy that crashed it. The car was bought from the insurance company by a dealer in London. Do car dealers do not have to register the car to themselves in the interim period? Would he have had to register it to himself before trying to sell it on?

I'm sure there was a thread on this a few days ago but I can't find it, so apologies if its a repost. I'm supposed to be travelling to That London tomorrow morning to look at a repaired cat D write off that my girlfriend wants to buy. If its legit then its a bargain. We both know our way around a car to check it over, and the usual HPI check is underway. Apart from that is there anything special pertaining to buying a previously written off car that I should know about? Thanks in advance.

Fillet rolling is an extremely common process now. Even "cooking" engines use it. It raises the material's fatigue limit by putting localised compressive stress into the most highly loaded parts of the crank. In order to initiate a crack, the loads must first overcome the built in compressive stress to create a tensile stress.

The bottom line with torsional vibration dampers is that in OEM world they are specifically tuned to the engine, or a faimly of engines. A generic aftermarket damper will not be. I am willing to be proved wrong but its an involved process requiring computer simulation and physical high speed vibration measurements made on a running engine on a proper engine dyno, so I simply do not believe that aftermarket parts are made specfically for each engine in the same way that OEM ones are. Having said that I have worked on plenty of engines that had power levels "around" OEM (certainly within the realms of BPU) that used carry over dampers without issue. However, if you plan on doing something extreme, like significantly increasing the input pulses to the crankshaft or significantly increasing the RPM (both to get more power) then you run the risk of putting the cranktrain outside of what the damper is designed to handle, or bringing a new resonant frequency inside the engine rev range. I'm sure there are loads of high power engines out there running with all sorts of setups but unless a tuner out there has access to OEM levels of development then I can virtually guarantee than none of the setups will be properly tuned. All engines have an achilles heel (whch the MK3 head gasket quite obviously is) but the logic doesn't extend to "OEMs don't know any better than aftermarket". It costs tens of thousands of pounds and a lot of skilled people to develop a cranktrain. Incidentally, the stock pulley has a torsional and a bending damper. None of the aftermarket ones I have seen do.

No offense intended to Jamie, but it looks like it says "Santa Poo" above his car.

Also check for wetness around the bellows at the end of the rack, because if the end seals in the rack intself have gone fluid will seep from there. Another place to check are the threaded unions on the valve body where the pipework joins to the rack. One of these (the return connection) is a short hard pipe with a plastic sleeve over it. Mine developed a tiny pinhole leak under the sleeve.

Err...is there a hidden camera in this thread? There are 365 days in a year, 28 days in a menstrual cycle and the sun doesn't revolve around anything (not in this solar system, anyway). This feels a bit like a cut and paste from some neo-feminist claptrap.