Car appreciation... the aesthetics, the engineering, etc

that is bang tidy richie.

@jambon have decided lockdown 2.0 is sort our garage space. there is plenty in there what with the Fiat being so small. But bikes and wood storage as well as eventual beer making station need proper thought

Full garage envy right now - both of you!

that is a level of tidiness way beyond me. great work dude

Ah yes, I remember you mentioning these. Thanks a lot. I don't have loads of room to play with, but counting myself very lucky. Excuse the mess.

@jonny I still need to measure the space and think about what size project car/free space I want.

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before this garage, my cars have lived in a council lock-up, so organisation has been like one of those puzzles with squares and one gap. especially when the car was just a shell. the london garage looks like this atm:

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if anyone wants a genny, let me know!

or a roof box!

There's a pistonheads thread on garages. Obvs lots of aspirational stuff, but also plenty of tidied up council style ones. Worth a look.

I have nothing to offer and my outdoor brick shed thing is a fucking state.

An £8.5k kit (ex VAT, motor only) to convert a classic mini into an electric vehicle
https://swindonpowertrain.com/documents/Classic_Mini_Kit.pdf

It's probably £20k all-in to do everything you need... batteries, speedo, etc.

Really should register on Pistonheads, I'll have a search as this sounds useful. Ta!

Why is that blue rope and orange handle compulsory for every garage?!

Oh what are the genny details and how much?

Jonny Smith did a very good video on that a little while back

https://youtu.be/X4QgKJ85vd8

Today's bike ride threw up an amazing condition 1985 Citroen CX25 GTi Turbo.


When I got home I fell down a rabbit hole, and discovered the Citroen above is the exact car that featured in a Tyrrell's Classic Workshop vid on Youtube back in April.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMh1AlIbbs4&t=640s

The side profile looks so aerodynamic for the 80's...

....but according to the Tyrell vid not as slippery through the air as an Audi 100 from the same era which to my eye looks much more of a brick.

The CdA of the Citroen was 0.36 compared to the Audi's 0.3 according to Mr Tyrell, which is still pretty good today. Those flush windows on the Audi helped and has been widely copied since. Mr Tyrell also explains the meaning of the Citroen double chevron logo, which was news to me.

I then stumbled further into the abyss. The Audi was apparently the first car designed using 'shape optimisation', which I discovered from this lovely retro Belgium Uni Powerpoint presentation. I remember the pre-Powerpoint era, so I read this while imagining some spotty spod slowly winding a squeaking overhead projector in an echoey lecture theatre while dying a thousand slow deaths.
http://www.ltas-aea.ulg.ac.be/cms/uploads/VehicleAerodynamics02.pdf
I glazed over a bit before the techy stuff at the end, but there's some impressive vehicles in there I'd not seen before, such as the BMW Kamm Coupe and the Alfa Romeo Ricotti. The latter looks a total death trap and at its top speed of 135kph must have been terrifying. After seeing it I could not un-see the phrase 'many dead in mangled wreckage'.

And from cars that aim to slice through the air with as little resistance as possible, to my other spot of the day which bluntly sledgehammers the air in the face. Spotted in Shoreditch is this the most Mad Max over the top grill and bumper ever fitted to a production car? Its ridiculous but I still love it, and considering its now 67 years old, its still looking mighty fine. Behold the behemoth that is the 1953 Cadillac Coupe DeVille.

That Cadillac!

Great isn't it, you could probably fit a dozen gangsters just in the 'trunk'. Dead ones obviously, on their way to becoming foundations of a nearby new motorway bridge.

I love all the cars you find. There are 2-3 in my area that I need to caputure at some point.

My neigbour down the road has a minty fresh Jensen Interceptor that he drags out every 3 months or so.

really interesting. wasn't an avenue I thought I'd be interested in...

TBH I can't remember if I've signed up. I just add "pistonheads" to any of my random car daydream fantasy searches.

It's a bit like how this place was always an excellent source of bike information.

Randomly singletrack is good for cars, garages and misc DIY.

The problem with a lot of forums is that they're too big, so it becomes harder to track who is helpful and who is full of shit. For example, if you look on bimmer forums or e46 fanatics, everyone says that swirlflap removal is ESSENTIAL and you're thick/bonkers if you don't do it, and it has sort of become undisputable. However speaking to a mate who has owned several e46s and designs engines for Jag/LR, and our very own @Fixedwheelnut both confirmed that the failure rate in the more recent 4cylinder engine was negligible.
Reading the forums like that can do more harm than good for one's mental health.

I'm always amazed at the tekkers people have in this thread.

Was the failure negligible due to a design, fabrication or material change? Or that people removed, or checked as in was a known weak point? Then again the vanos solenoids are known issue. Things go wrong, some times problems don't appear till the cars are in the real world.

CX GTi turbo was/is rare always wanted one...in a rare car being both injected and turbo. There fore fucking awesome.

EDIT: I ended up with a diesel estate that was awesome in a throw anything in the back, and drive it with your foot to the floor everywhere.

No vanos in the diesel. The point is that the design of the swirl flaps is different across the engine size and types - and just saying “swirlflaps bad” isn’t actually that helpful.

Similar thing with the IMS bearing in M9X engined Porsche- if you listen to the forums you’d need to fire it into the sun to stop it killing your entire family, the very second you bought the car.

But at what mileage does the vanos solenoid fail...as every part has a finite life.

EDIT: Look my best mates sisters hairdresser fisrt cousin had the flaps fail.

You know the old saying "Never read the comments"? Some forums are basically all comments.