altezzaclub

Ah, a point Ken, but the real driver behind house prices is the Govt, Federal, State and local! (hobbyhorse of mine!) They control the release of land, the taxes on houses and the sale of them, the design & cost of materials used through their standards and the rates charged for "social responsibility adn wealth redistribution" If housing was left purely to the free market it would be dirt cheap, as any landowner could split his land up or build two houses on a piece and sell one, and the houses could be anything you want to build, a plywood shack or a mansion. I wouldn't get into the housing market for a year or two right now, its a bubble that needs about 25% trimming off the top to return to the long-term average, although that depends where you are talking about. The ratio of house price to average wage has gone crazy, so people have to carry far more debt than in the past, which means the Govt have to prop the banks up and constantly stimulate (give worthless pieces of paper called 'money' away!) to keep it all going. Hopefully it won't crash like it has in the USA, or you will owe more on your mortgage than what the house is worth. However you're right in that the massive climb in value will not keep going, so you won't make a fortune buying and selling house every 5years. All that will be paid for by you taxpayers over the next 20years, as well as paying off the higher debts. I'll probably still be paying taxes too, but I wouldn't guarantee being alive in 20years! That will signal the start of cheap housing for the younger generation as the baby-boomers move into retirement homes & die, leaving stack of homes for a decreasing population.

I did Felix, but I figured I should have got it on one of the four houses I bought with NZ money- either the first investment property or the one we live in. ....having poured over a million bucks in the local economy! (Which is a lesson for all you youngsters starting out..)

Get a 5K Its a cheap runaround and the 4K is very anemic unless you modify it up. The extra few hundred cc will make it a handy daily driver and you can always put in something better later on.

OK, so the light goes out almost immediately which means the pump and filter are getting oil up there. The "randomly" is a worry, its not a tappet gap if it comes and goes. Does it stay quiet once the motor is running and its gone quiet?? Can a lifter stick up and click until its lubricated enough to slide easily and allow the tappet gap to occur at the rocker/valve interface?? I wonder if a lifter is sticking 'up' against the pushrod and the tappet gap is occuring between the cam and the lifter until it settles down and slides up and down easily. The only other thing that taps is bad news... a broken ring causes random piston slap I've found.

No, I got ripped... I bought two rentals in Aussie before we moved here, & I got no rebates or subsidies for those because neither were a "family home". But when we moved here and I bought a family home.. "I'm sorry Sir, you don't get a rebate or anything because you ALREADY OWN A HOME" I appealed, and when the ATO confirmed their decision I took it to a disputes tribunal. Still made no difference, they are determined to rip off every immigrant they can. In actual fact the land tax ("stamp duty") they rip you $15,000 for was meant to end when GST was introduced and the Federal Govt gave the State Govts money from that to replace stamp duty. But being a Govt, always hungry for someone else's money.... Also, Australian conveyancing and rental management costs are much higher than in NZ, so they do make easy money here. Maybe its just part of a richer country, you earn more but you pay more so you are no further ahead. Rob- your scenario with the mechanics instead of the insulation installers needs the Govt to provide free car tuneups, so the garage gets overwhelmed from what is not a normal business expansion and employs whoever they can. ie- without the Govt intervention in the market, your quality of worker would be much higher. Yes, the insulation worker getting electrocuted or the mechanic dropping the jack on himself are their faults, but it would not have happened if the govt hadn't intervened in the market.

So now you have the engine out.... :lolcry:

Is the oil light working, coming on with ignition and going off when you start it?? In which case you have oil pressure and its not a pump problem. The filter problem would show as the light being late to go out, maybe 15seconds after you start it instead of almost immediately. What sort of noise does it make?

Any gap at all between the box and motor? 5mm?? Starter off? Flywheel blanking plate off? I assume you have all the bolts out and its just rusted into the clutch/flywheel a little. Take both out as a unit and take a look then.

Have you run it? If this is every time you start it, change the oil filter for a genuine Toyota one- We had that problem (noisy for 15seconds at startup) when we bought the car, and the oil filter had no/faulty non-return valve and drained itself overnight. If you haven't started it yet, what sort of "dry" sound? Clacking of tappets?

Doesn't that suggest its running rich? How is the fuel consumption? 7 or 8L/100km? or more? Float level in the carb? Needle and seat with a bit of dirt in there? Clubbie if you read this tell us what the outcome was with yours.

but accurate!

Yeah, slap on some Sigmas and get fully sick camber bro You don't need the inside edge of the tyres, they can blow away in a few thousand Km and by then the cops would have crushed it. What wheel aligment figures do you have at the moment, and what's the tyre wear like? If you don't know, get an alignment done and post the figures up, then we can start a discussion.

Not so fast! You don't want the "sand" from sandpaper getting in the oil, it will get ground into your bearings or grind your crank for you.. Even in the water it might scour the water pump seals. Its something that always worries me, even the little bits of gasket and shit can block an oilway and instantly kill rockers or cam bearings. I haven't found a really good way of cleaning the block without worrying about where the mess goes. Usually its too oily to use compressed air or a vac successfully. Certainly they're still better than nothing.

Forget it! The only way would be to drain it all and replace it, but it would cease to be clean distilled water the moment you tipped it into the radiator. It would instantly be dirty contaminated water. Adding a bit at a time though the overflow would never never replace all the old water, its the law of diminishing returns. Its hardest to get the last 10% out. There's nothing in tap water that won't be in your distilled water after a week except the chlorine, which would vanish when it got hot. Antifreeze contains sodium nitrite, which is the anti-corrosion chemical that breaks down easier than steel rusts, so it gets used up rather than the steel degrading. Just adding anti-freeze ("coolant" ) will stop it rusting.

This is the crucial part if you're not getting a head skimmed. I have a piece of 12mm thick machined steel about 120wide by 200long and it is a godsend for all metal surfaces that are meant to be flat- thermostat housing, heads and all sorts. It will leave a clean, flat even surface with some wet 'n dry paper lubed with engine oil.

It is a brilliant article! It should be framed 20foot high inside the Parliamentary debating chamber so ALL politicians can see it every day and realise how fking stupid they are and how easily they are ridiculed by a good journalist. Cash for Clunkers, $400/ton for CO2 Nuclear power, $40/ton for CO2 AND lots of electricity. Plant a tree $10/ton for CO2 Madness!

I reckon it will, but ask rob83ke70 as he fitted one last week when he took the SUs off for a rebuild.

isn't that odd- I could sell mine and Gregorys will get no money from the sale. I could copy it and give a copy to a friend and Gregorys will get no money I could load it up to a private server or a passworded area of any forum and Gregorys would make no money. but post it up here for us all to look at and they get upset!

OK, I have the two VT oxy sensors, two 18mm nuts to be welded onto the extractors and a Jaycar fuel mixture display..but no second car as the wife has gone up to Northern NSW for a few days to pick up the daughter in the Altezza. So the rolla went down to Central West exhausts to have the sports system completed. When I fitted the exractors they ran them into a 2" pipe and a 2" resonator, then back into the stock system. Now it goes from the resonator into a 1.75" pipe and terminates in a chambered muffler- Redback I think. It sounds great- too quiet for any of you young guys with a straight-through, but its hardly noticeable inside the car and growly without being raspy outside. It reminds me of an MG-B. Even came with a polished stainless tip! :jamie: So, mixture meters next week!

I'd push towards getting the Govt out of the transport industry altogether and letting private industry come up with the most efficient answers! Govt subsidies are always a dead end, they waste the potential of better ideas and the wealth of the subjects paying taxes. If ethanol can't compete on an even playing field now, then it is not the fuel for today. In 10years time when demand for oil exceeds supply then petrol will be 5 or 10 or 20dollars a litre and maybe ethanol will be attractive then. But it won't work with Govts picking winners- they didn't invent the car or the roads or petrol, it was all done privately, all Govts did was slow development by adding regulations in.

Start with it straight on top of the carb, it should fit with the clamp holding it on. The disadvantage of that is the warm air it sucks into the engine, which is less dense than the cold air outside the car, however the difference is not enough to worry about at this stage. Later you can put a gooseneck plastic/rubber tube that curves from the top of the carb into a straight pipe down to the filter where it sits beside the radiator getting cold air from behind the grill.

KE70dave- dead right!! never believe a politician, if their lips are moving they are lying! The only people who can afford to take up this offer will be old folks like me who can trade in a granny-spec Corolla on a $15000 Hyundai. The 6person family of aussie battlers driving a VN commonwhore won't have $30grand plus to get a new big car, so the $2000 will make no difference at all! ..and you can put wind-power with your Prius. If you walked in the bush with a shovel and made yourself a windmill, you would not get the energy back that you put into making it. Both wind and solar still cost energy to make overall, they need to move up a magnitude of at least 4 before they will pay. Oh- and your hybrids only help in traffic when you are idling a lot. I piss myself when I see a hybrid Camry in the country, knowing they'll never use the electric engine anyway!

..and the other way to look at it is that if you fit extractors you'll also fit a complete exhaust sytem to get rid of the gas that the extractors are now extracting more efficiently.... say inch and 3/4 or 2inch all the way through with a resonator under the passenger seat and a 2" dog-leg final muffler. So why not do the exhaust first and leave the extractors until later, as you can be sure the stock exhaust has more drag than the stock exhaust manifold. I think the stock carb can perform very well, but the killer is the air filter design. A re-design of the airbox or an aftermarket foam like a Ramflow will free the carb flow up a lot. Then you could put a ground cam in it, and have a carb shop drill out the carb jets to suit the new fuel flow you will need from the extra performance. So far that's cost bugger all and its done 80% of the performance increase you will ever get. Big carbs and extractors cost a lot per bhp.

Anyone work in L/100Km ??

One of those strange oddities of Aussie that amuses me.. The Govt takes too much tax off you, spends a whack of it on paying its parasites to look after it for you, and then gives back what's left to you a year later. ..and everyone thinks its great! Don't you think it would be better it they never took it off you in the first place?? I think NZ's Tax Dept must cost less than half Aussies' on a per capita basis. Wage and salary earners don't even file a tax return there, uness they have some outside earnings that don't get taxed by an employer. That saves a forest or to in paper! NZ also got rid of a slate of indirect and hidden taxes, which is why their income tax is not as low as here. I'm getting caned by things like stamp duty (read, house-buying tax) and a stack of similar ones that no-one counts in comparisons.