kws

Looking at the photos I have a feeling they probably use standard taper nuts, not shank nuts.

I need to buy some long shank nuts to suit the hotwires I just bought for my Marina. I haven't used or bought shank nuts before, so I presume I just need the outer diameter to be a close fit in the hole and as long as I can fit without bottoming out on the hub? Are there any precautions I should take since the wheels will be nut centric not hub centric?

Im over 200k on my 2nd gen Honda Fit CVT now, with no issues. The key is regular maintenance, but they did improve a lot over the years. What i dont like is when they program the CVT to act like an auto with stepped "gears"... what a waste of time. Looking at you Mitsubishi

Legs make great crumple zones though.

That's crazy. I'm sure my Honda Fit is only a 1 or 2 star car, but it's a damn good car and cheap to run. But no, I should scrap it and get a new car.

A not so quick call to NZTA confirms they have no interest in helping and it's a firm no on reversing a cancellation. I feel like there should be a grace period where it can be reversed. I guess they're of the mind that any old car off the road is a win, so why would they care?

My guess is the car was sold to a wrecker as part of an estate, and they dereg after they dropped it off (or had it picked up) claiming it was being taken off the road. You don't have to hand the plates in if you have a reason not to (like you sent the car to "scrap" with the plates still on). It looks far too tidy to just scrap it, would be a shame, but it's also a pain to have to do the rerego process. It's reason for cancel on carjam is "taken off road permanently"

If a car has been manually deregistered about a month, is there any way to reverse the process without having to reregister the car? Still has plates, had current rego at the start of last month but is now "cancelled".

You dont mean 3k MILES do you, which is almost 5K KM?

Why would you want to change it that often? I do 10k for normal cars, or 5k for highly strung or boosted cars. Good oils on modern cars will run further than that happily (or in the case of the daily, which is currently 4k overdue, oops).

Thanks. I had trouble when I first started working on SD1s where people knew how to do certain jobs on them, but it wasn't written up anywhere and they kinda guarded that information. Any information that was written up was generally vague and without images, or just spread far and wide across the interwebs and hard to find. That pissed me off, so from then on I've tried to kinda catalogue the work I do in such a way that either someone can follow it and work out how a job is done, or point them in the direction of a known resource. I believe it's helped some people to have the confidence to tackle jobs they may not have otherwise, but for most it's just interesting to watch my suffering

Not quite moving yet, just need wheels powedercoated and tyres fitted, but real close. Very happy to see the driveline working though, and no significant weird noises yet (just the usual gear noise in first).

Forget the booster, im recoiling in horror at how close it is to the clutch master. It'll cook the fluid in that and you'll have no clutch until it cools down. Very common in Subarus where the factory master heatshield is removed (usually in manual conversions) and people fit bigger dump pipes.

With the driveshaft all fresh and clean, all I needed to do was crawl under the car and refit it. While under there though, I thought it prudent to replace the last remaining fluids. Refitting the driveshaft was easy enough. I reused the old bolts but invested in some new locknuts to secure them. It turned out that the new center bearing has different sized captive nuts, so the old bolts wouldn't work. I got fed up with having to guess and buy bolts one by one, as all my stocks of spare bolts are of course Metric, and the Marina is Imperial, so ended up buying a kit of various sized Imperial nuts, bolts and washers from Trademe. With the driveshaft completely refitted I moved on to changing the driveline fluids. Both the gearbox and diff call for a GL5 EP90, which as it turns out, is a bit harder to find locally. I chose to go with a Castrol Axle EPX 80W90 instead, which is a GL5 spec EP oil. The gearbox was easy to drain and fill. The fill plug, which you should remove first, is on the RH side. Just a normal imperial square, as is the drain plug on the bottom. The old fluid, which has been in there for at least 25 years, wasn't as bad as it could be. It had a few years to settle at the bottom and was thick with a dark grey hue, that later changed to a dark brown. No chunks though, so that's a win. I pumped some fresh fluid through to help shift anything sitting on the bottom, and refit the drain plug. Just a smidgen over 1L was pumped into the box, and when it started to dribble out I refit the fill plug. A quick clean and that part of the job was done. Next was the rear diff. This was a bit of a pain as there is no drain plug, only a large fill plug. I tried a large syringe but it was taking way too long, so not wanting to be defeated, I grabbed the handheld vacuum bleeder. And I'll be, it worked a treat. Still slow because the waste fluid bottle is only about 100mls, but it flowed easily after a few pumps of the handle. After getting as much as I could out, which was about 10 bottles of gross, almost black, stinky fluid that had likely been in there since it was built almost 50 years ago, I filled it with about 1L of fresh new fluid. Once again, refit the fill plug, clean it off and done. Now that I had the driveshaft in, I could do something that hadn't happened in a VERY long time.... see if the driveline works. The first step was to install the pedal rubbers Mmm fresh. I did that now, because it's way easier to do without the seat installed, which was next on the list. What does having a seat installed mean? Sitting making vroom vroom noises of course! Then I fired the engine up, put it into gear, and eased the clutch out. It works! For the first time in 10-25 years, the hubs spun under their own power. Ignore the angry tractor idle, I really need to warm it up and give it a decent run, but I can't do that until we are out of the garage. So, when is that I hear you ask. Well, the wheels need to go off and be blasted and powder coated, and then the new tyres can be fitted. Once that's done, on the car they go, and the car can FINALLY come down off the stands it's been on since I got it. For now, I'll just be here reading my original Leyland Australia parts catalogue from 1975 Which is pretty handy really, since it shows me how things like the heater/vent ducting go together since currently it's all in a box and I had no idea. It's completely different to the Uk cars, and the heater box is actually the same as the Aus built Mini Clubman of the time. Soon.

These are great tips. I'm looking to buy a cabinet very soon for some light work at home, is there any disadvantage to the top loading style like repco has, vs the side loading style supercheap has? I'm thinking the top loading would be easier to load bigger items into, but has a bigger area it needs to seal?