When replacing my unsatisfactory Ford Ranger it was a real struggle to figure out what to buy. As said, I didn't want another pickup because they're poor off road and expensive on it. Shoguns are too heavy and expensive to run. Land Cruisers are horrifically expensive to buy used (Clarkson's fault) - and they're almost the same length as the pickup because it's based on the same chassis. An old Defender would have been great but they're still thirsty and to get a decent one you need to spend lottery winner money and then the same amount again getting it sorted so you're not spending every weekend underneath it fixing it. Old Jimny's that aren't rusted out are getting hard to find and for the amount of road miles I do getting to and from work they're under-powered and consequently not that economical. plus I want to be able to tow a bike trailer from time to time and an asthmatic 1.3L petrol engine doesn't really cut it. In the end, after a lot of research, I plumped for a FL2. I managed to find a really clean, low mileage one that had lived its life as a town car in Taunton away from the salt. I paid £1500 to have it professionally Dinitroled. The dealer I bought it from who specialises in "presige" LR/Rangrovers, big Beemers, Jags and Mercs etc, said he won't have any of the latest LR models in the showroom and won't accept them in part-exchange. He knows that six months after he's sold one the phone will ring.. But he'll shift FL2s and clean proper Defenders all day long. What I'd really like is a ladder framed chassis medium sized panel van with 4wd. Proper load bay in the back with solid bulkhead, reinforced floor and gusseted roof so you can fit a heavy duty roof rack, high ground clearance, split ratio box but the size of a Peugeot Partner. Basically a compact swb single cab pickup but with a van body on top instead of a pickup tub. But no one makes one except custom builders.
That explains a lot. I remember when we had the Beast From the East in 2018 and I passed several 4x4s stranded in the snow on the road I then lived on in my very much RWD E46 BMW 330ci, but I just assumed the drivers must have been at fault.
Depends on the 4x4. Toy 4x4s tend to have wide wheels and low profile tyres which are worse than useless in snow, how ever many drive wheels you've got. If they're all spinning you're going nowhere. All terrain tyres aren't great either though they're better than road tyres. I suspect the type of person driving them had a lot to do with it. Back in the day when we had proper snowfall nearly all cars were rwd and had skinny cross-ply tyres that cut through the snow. People learned how to cope and the cars they had were better suited to it. A good few years ago I was on my way home from work in my little fwd Peugeot van when it began to snow heavily. It was settling fast and on the main road people were panicking and slowing to a snails pace or stopping altogether rather than pressing on at a careful speed and maintaining a longer distance to the car in front. I could see gridock from sheer lack of progress leading to mass strandings. I dived down a side road which I knew was a short cut. It was a gamble as it was a minor road with some steep hills but I knew it would be quieter. At the steepest hill I met a line of cars, drivers all sitting there looking despondant with their wheels spinning and no idea what to do. I wasn't going to join them there for the night so I got out and reduced my tyre pressures to 10 psi and drove past them up the hill on a steady throttle. When I looked in my mirrors everyone was getting out of their cars and letting their tyres down. Whether they remembered to pump them up again when the snow melted I've no idea..
Large family groups who take over small pubs and rearrange all the furniture so they can all sit together in the corner leaving no tables or bar stools for anyone else. These are usually the type of people who visit their local pub only twice a year (once always being Christmas day), only put about a tenner in the till and leave an enormous mess behind, but are the first people to complain when that local pub goes out of business.
And the sound would be a lot more pleasant on the ear than a lot of inane middle class chattering about how well Tarquin's doing at prep school.
I put Castrol R in my Suzuki GP100 stroker when I was 17 because someone told me t would make it go faster. It didn't. It seized it up solid.
I wonder why? I only ever used it in a KR1 and do remember thinking it was thin as piss. Like you, I was told it would improve performance but it did nothing so went back to my normal stuff. The oil pump on the KR was dead so I premixed. I wonder if that is what killed your GP? Might be too thin for a pumped system perhaps?
I think it was because vegetable oil and mineral/synthetic oil shouldn't be mixed. I didn't completely drain and flush the auto-lube system, or at least not properly, I just emptied the oil tank and filled it up with Castrol.
Ah, that would do it. When you are young you don’t know this stuff and bikes were cheap so we did all sorts of shit like this. I remember my mate Paul using glow fuel in a c50 we had as a field bike. When he kicked it over it just revved its nuts off and died never to be resurrected No one could swear like Paul and he was still effing a few miles later as we pushed it home.
I had a mate who ran an old Suzuki GT 380 on Castrol R very sucessfully. I don't think it went any faster but it certainly smelled nice. The GTs had Suzuki's CCI injection lube system. Maybe that was a factor that allowed them to run vegetable oil.
At Brooklands circuit in the old days, it was said the the paddock smelled of Castrol R and expensive women.
Not sure how they made it smell so good but for me it’s still the smell of Donington and Mallory in the 80s and 90s. Watching the 500s with the likes of Rainey and Schwantz, great days.
