Month: May 2008

I missed out on the XR3i – I knew someone who had one but when it came time for my first proper car, it was an Astra Mk1 1.6. One step away from the original GTE 🙂

Fun car too – it rightfully got the “Buggy” tag. Pretty old though, it had so much rust on the front valance that it looked like it had a beard.

Congrats on the new toy! I have had Focus’s (or is it Foci?! LOL!) as hire cars before and they are good little cars. I even got a turbo one once which was fun!

I had a XR3i’s. I used to love it.

Went to Car Craft earlier, did the deal and ended up driving home the new toy 🙂

It’s a Ford Focus ST170, which means a little bit bigger in the body and a 170bhp engine. Kinda like the XR3i to the RS Turbo if you remember back to those days … It’s silver and I may end up taking a snap of it some time. 6 speed gearbox, which will take a little getting used to after the 5 speed in the Puma. Half leather seats with lumbar support (nice!) and cushion height adjustments.

It’s a bit of a wrench passing on the Puma but with the MoT test coming up in August, I really couldn’t afford to keep it. The little silver buggy has been a very faithful servant over the past 7 years and has given a good bit of fun too. Shame Ford don’t make them any more ! Trouble is though, the MoT would have needed :

Brake cables redoing
Handbrake fixing
ABS/Traction Control repairs

I knew about the brake cables from last year, when it was an advisory note. The handbrake’s been fairly useless for the last few months. That didn’t overly concern me as the handbrake only works when a car is stopped. The linkages are different to the link from pedal to brake and the feel of the brake pedal plus the stopping ability said those were working just fine. (Except for some strangeness probably related to the ABS!)

There’s probably some more things too that would have needed fixing, like the £1000 bill a few years ago when a heap of little things went wrong, all at the same time.

So – new toy … and I have a guaranteed service & replacement warranty thingy that should keep it low cost over the next 3 years – well, outside actual cost of ownership that is. That’s what comes with going up a size class … The emissions are worse and we’re starting to get taxed on those. Plus the economy isn’t great, it’ll use about 30% more fuel than the Puma. However, I only do about 7-8000 miles a year, so that’s no big deal for me.

I didn’t see you on the WW list. Mind you it is pretty long! better late than never! Nice airbrushing!

Good luck with the car hunt! I’m very happy with my MX5. Great fun adnjust sailed through it’s MOT. Not bad for an M reg 🙂

[biggrin] 7 years is a very long time for our family 🙂 I dread to think how many cars my sister’s got through in that time …

Had my first car for only about 18 months but that had to go as it was pretty much learning only. Second car lasted 4 and a bit years before going crispy in a pillar of flame. (In someone else’s garage)

Third lasted me about 18 months before I probably made a mistake by getting a Rover. Ok – it was shiny ! And had way more toys than the Belmont. The Belmont was still going strong (at 130k miles !) though, so it’s a shame we moved it on early. We’d probably already fixed everything that was likely to go wrong !

Rover had lots of trouble while I had it … This one has done really well, although 80,000 miles could be its limit. (More later!)

Seven years? WEll, that doesn’t too old to me…lol. My car is twenty years old…! And we have those inspecyions here in the U.S., as well….But my car is in very good shape and I LOVE my car so….I on’t need to change it.
Much Good Luck finding what you need!

Thanks for the visit and the interesting comment.

I’ll be off car hunting tomorrow …

MoT time is looming – for non-UK people, that’s an annual test that all cars have to take to prove that they’re roadworthy. I’ll need to spend money on mine again for essential repairs and I’ve had the car for over 7 years now. Time for something newer with fewer miles and more toys.

I’m looking at a slightly bigger one next time, as Ford have seen fit to discontinue the rather excellent Puma. Probably something to do with also retiring the Fiesta, which donates the underlying bits for the Puma. The new Fiestas are a little small and the place I’m going to doesn’t have anything interesting (i.e. has power+toys) apart from a Focus ST170. There’s a few interesting Renault Meganes there but there’s two problems with those :

1- The arse of the Renault Megane is not something I want to be looking at in the morning.
2- Internet research suggests they have very questionable reliability

We’ll see what we find tomorrow, hopefully this Focus will be in good shape. It definitely looks like the valets have given it a good polish.

PS Going for a Focus also means IpodFM stays viable 🙂 My sister also has IpodFM but it doesn’t work too well in her MR2 because she can’t remove the aerial.

Lol – most of the reason for the airbrushing was to hide where the sheet wasn’t big enough on the edges 🙂

cool pic

sheets were meant to be wrinkled