This was my daily driver after having sold the phantom, I just couldn't stop playing with it and progress on the beetle was badly suffering the consequences!
It was a Mini Cooper S Checkmate special edition so has half leather, LSD, computer, Xenons, special wheels and a few other bits and pieces...
It was nice but at the end of the day lots of power through the front wheels just isn't my thing and it was very thirsty for such a small car!
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Well I decided to p/ex the mini for something a bit different and ended up with an Audi A4 cabrio V6 tdi
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I'm pondering over whether to get a single full width roller shutter door or not as it would be fairly pricey. I'm also not sure whether I'd have to replace this wooden lintel, it's full width and 4" x 8". Can anybody advise? Could I bolt on some metal strengtheners and leave it in place? |
The bug's new home and my new workshop! Finally got a double garage... I have lost a lot of alternate storage though so I've had a bit of a clearout. All walls and floors have been painted, I've welded up a frame to mount the compressor up on the walls and made a new workbench. |
I bought a couple of 7'x4' bike stores for outside storage, the drive isn't really full double width so it's no big loss of space. |
Sandblasting cabinet has a new set of wheels to make best use of space. |
You can see the compressor mounted up out of the way... |
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The spec is as follows:
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the front bumper comes off very easily, I took the opportunity to give it all a really god cleanout. What you see on the floor literally just fell out from between the condenser and radiator, I also jet-washed out a lot of rotting matter from the cores which is sure to help cooling. |
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Nothing too complicated, a few 3mm holes and 2.5mm tie wraps hold on some mesh that I cut from a sheet. |
The other thing I did was to re 'black' all the plastics of the intake as they seem to suffer quite badly from fading. I use Gtechniq C4 which is very easy to use and apparently gives a good couple of years of colour. |
I finally got hold of a pair of facelift rear lights. Bought separately off ebay worked out much cheaper than buying a pair together.. While I was at it, I also removed/sand-blasted/painted all 3 wiper arms as they seem to have suffered more than the rest of the car for some reason.. |
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2003 Porsche 911 turbo Options: Arctic silver paint Fully electric seats Silver interior pack Rear parking sensors Porsche Communication Management (PCM - Porsche sat nav) Bluetooth phone integration It has recently had about £10k spent on it fixing all the common issues as well as a front end repaint, only 61k miles and just had major service so it should actually be quite cheap to run! |
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I was never 100% sure about the silver on the steering wheel and I definitely haven't been getting on with the steering wheel mounted tiptronic buttons (particularly down shifting) so I decided to do something about it! A recent modification has been to adapt Mercedes paddle shifters to tiptronic Porsches so I thought I'd give it a go. Edition 9 do the conversion for £400 to your steering wheel and it is a nice plug and play solution but I thought I'd have a go myself. There are various brief descriptions of how to do the swap but none complete so here goes! |
Parts needed: Manual Porsche 996 steering wheel (if you want to get rid of the tiptronic switches) AMG C63 paddle switches: A171 267 00 46 I got them from Inchcape for £122 delivered |
Manual wheel and the pair of AMG paddles, they are aluminium and feel really nice. |
I found this to be the best way to eat into the steering wheel foam to fit the paddles, I then made a template using clear plastic to transfer the same shape to the other side, the last thing I wanted was for the paddles to be non symmetrical! |
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Here's the internals of the old tiptronic wheel, the connector at the top is for the tiptronic switches. The switches just connect to the steering wheel ground when pressed. Brown/red for down shift and yellow/brown for up shift. |
New switches soldered to the old connector to make it plug and play into the clock spring. |
The paddles have a blind hole on the back to attach them to the wheel. I found I could make a thread using some M4 button head screws. The short plate pulls the switch snuggly up to the outer surface of the wheel, the nut you see helps push out the foam to make a good fit to the slightly curved profile of the paddle. |
The manual wheel modified and ready to go in the car. |
Plenty of clearance and a good fit, the silver matches the other painted details in the cabin perfectly. |
All done, just like Porsche should have done in the first place! |
