I took my Tipo in to repair a single power window motor and the mechanics blew the cylinder heads, somehow. My guess is they went joyriding, or they figured they’d add a few more coins to the 159 bucks it would take to swap out the burnt motor for a new one...

Already knew that :p

I recently had a shop damage my engine while my car was there to fix the passenger side window, AC fan and fog lights, and I actually think I have pretty compelling evidence to prove abuse on their side. I’d have asked for your opinion, but since I live in Brazil, I thought it best not to. Still, an interesting case…

True, but again, it depends on the type of engine. If I could get under my Tipo, I could easily undo and pull out the oil pan, bearing caps and bearings. Being a Fiat, though, I’d probably need a full engine rebuild anyways.

That’s actually not so unlikely. If you have the right sockets, a way to get under the car, a way to pull off the oil pan without tearing into the suspension and the parts, it’s doable.

I once had my throttle cable linkage break off in the middle of the street... right in front of the only unoccupied legal parking spot in miles. I half mended it with duct tape, drove it home, then replaced the tape with zip ties.

Aye, cars will do that. My folks are always worried sick my Tipo might break someplace where murder is a popular sport, but so far I’ve only had it break down in garages, closed parking lots and the like. If it gets going, it’ll most likely go until it’s turned off, then it’ll crap out. Still, that kind of situation…

I crashed my 1995 Fiat Tipo. The car I grew up in, the car I learned to drive in, the car I learned to wrench in, the car I’ve owned in a form or another for over 20 years. Mundane as it is, my Tipo is kind of a big deal to me, more like part of myself than a car, and I crashed it. It was a dark, rainy Saturday, my…

If there are any rules like that here in Brazil, no one’s ever bothered to tell me, neither haa anyone ever objected to my improvised wrenching. Until last week, I didn’t have a garage, so I used the underground parking lot on my college campus. I Always made sure never to get in anyone’s way, easy considering the lot…

Sometimes, life just is weirder than fiction after all.

I’ll keep those in mind... the hospital where I study recently implemented a fully integrated computerized system to handle patient files across all services, which is a beauty compared to taking someone’s history by hand, but some evil genius decided files should be automatically sent to the printers when you’re done…

Yeah, printers are a product of the devil fo sho... They break all the time, and when you get them fixed, you have to perform alignments and cleanup, at which point you’ll have wasted your entire ink cratridges, so you go get more cartridges, and they cost more than a new printer. So you get a new printer, and a week…

I know right? That shit’s not only in color, but crisp clear. You know someone’s extra sympathetic and concerned when they have the money AND time to set their printer to color and high quality.

Should be about the same in all states, yeah. Brazil is only a federation in paper, in practice, the federal government has the last say on this stuff.

Interesting. Here in Brazil, IDPs are exclusively issued by the government through each state’s DETRAN (department of transit). They cost something between 45 and 50 reais, if I remember correctly, and the only document required to get one is a valid Brazilian driver’s license, probably because its mainly used in…

Hells yeah. GoldenEye was my first Bond movie AND multiplayer FPS. Took developers at least one generation to equal it on the console market, even decent FPSs released towards the end of the Nintendo 64 lifespan couldn’t equal it.

Any noise coming in from the clutch when the pedal is pushed. Those usually mean something isn’t being disengaged as it should, whether it’s the pressure plate, release bearing or hydraulic actuators, something is going bad and not pulling apart everything else.

Next thing thing you know, they’ll be trying to arrest people because they could eventually aquire the kmowledge to manufacture a bomb. I say the authorities owe this kid a project car to get his tinkering on, something new and hi techish just to piss off the millennials-hate-cars people off.

In Brazil, these larger tailights were introduced in the 70’s and promptly nicknamed Fafás, after the large breasts of local singer Fafá de Belém.

Here’s the Onix’s engine bay, for reference. There’s far more space than you’d expect for a compact hatchback, and most of that stuff can be pulled off by hand or with a basic screwdriver set.