We must all suffer for our Art. Some people skin their knuckles every weekend, making a little blood sacrifice to the gods of car maintenance. This evening I’m bidding on a Jaguar Mk.2, thinking it’ll be easier to live with than my current project. Bob disembowels an incredibly complex BMW. Somewhere out there, David…

It’s like the 1950s attempted to build a Mattserati: http://www.adrianstomcat.co.uk/Mattserati.htm

The gauge should start climbing. Once it reaches 24-26 inches of vacuum, close the ball valve.

figuring out why the air suspension buttons don’t work.

We already have an epidemic of distracted driving which is - partly - mitigated by new safety tech. If you drift out of lane whilst tweeting, your car will make beeping noises or flashing lights to remind you to look up from your phone for a few seconds.

I’m sure a Ferrari SUV will be their most popular model, but it’s too late. If they made it 10 years ago, it would have been enormously popular, the must-have car for everybody from oligarchs to Youtubers, and influential too. But now, it’s late and derivative.

“X is broken, but it should be easy to fix” usually means the vendor has already tried an easy fix, and failed.

Once upon a time I rented a Mercedes Sprinter which had a really big obvious emergency-flasher thing, not just a button, sticking out the top of the dash; I did something stupid and crashed and needed to turn on the emergency flashers urgently; but apparently I pushed instead of pulling or whatever, and the Luminous…

A suggestion for the random home mechanic rather than the pro: Forget about 0.00001" precision; you’ll probably never need it. Look at the battery instead. If you reach for a cheap digital caliper after it’s waited 6 months in the toolbox, it may need a new battery, so you can’t actually make the measurement til next…

they for some reason wanted a PIN, which my credit card doesn’t have.

Every car looks even cooler as a rally machine.

You need an Alvis Stalwart.

There are two kinds of old luxury Mercedes; the very expensive ones with immaculate maintenance records, and the cheap ones which threaten to cause you lots of future headaches. So what?

One of my colleagues decided to buy his teenage daughter a rusty old MGB as a “project”, figuring that it was a few months until she could get her driving license and in those months they could have a fun project together.

It’s a clever idea! If I was an up-and-coming movie star (disclaimer: I can’t act and nobody would want to film me anyway), a caravan or some kind of camper would be a good move. Apart from the convenience, and always having your essential stuff around you, it’s probably quite frugal too - 99% of actors aren’t earning…

Good catch!

The famous car-sales website that we all know and love, mojtrg.rs

Tina Belcher is wise.

It’s easy to get distracted by the building structure itself, but the site is about more than just the concrete pad. Modern high-volume carmaking sites benefit from networks of local suppliers, lots of skilled workers nearby, stuff like that - building those from scratch would be much more expensive.