Well still no reply from Fosslinux to my email notifying him of the
aussies.space Web/Gopher server being uneditable. Hopefully he
hasn't stopped checking that email address entirely now. I'll just
keep on typing these things to myself again in the mean time. A
short one this time anyway because I've only got half an hour.
At the expense of a minor injury that appears set to rob me of
painless use of my left thumb for the rest of today, I finally
finished the jobs on the Jag. Well not entirely because there's one
part for a minor job that's taking ridiculously long to arrive, and
I've still got to get the new tyres and wheel alignment (the latter
is now even more wrong than it was before), but the big things are
over with. I took it for a drive yesterday after finishing the
final little task of fitting the fuel filter (where it eagerly took
advantage of the chance to spray petrol in my face, as usual), and
I seem to have indeed fixed all the issues. Well, the new valve
cover gasket might take a little time to be sure that it won't
leak, but that's a minor one anyway (oh how I hate the jobs where
you have to keep surfaces clean though - the curse of open workshop
in the middle of a dusty paddock).
Given how it went last time I took the car into a professional (who
turned out to have forgotten to tighten the driver's side front
wheel nuts after the inspection, by the way!), I'm a bit nervous
about taking it to a tyre place for the new tyres and wheel
alignment. I don't know how people choose tyre places either. The
place I went to last time seems to have since been sold, so it's a
blank canvas and I've got four kind-of local (less than an hour's
drive away) ones to pick from. The tyres themselves are a bit of a
mystery too. There's a huge choice of brands and models, but the
descriptions all tend to be rather vague. Ideally I want one that's
designed with at least some accomodation for the constant
pot-hole/puncture abuse that cost the lives of most tyres I've had
before, but that seems to narrow the field down from ~15 choices to
1 (or two, if you count that the models listed by the tyre seller
don't match those on the same tyre manufacturer's website). The
tyre places all seem afraid to put pricing and stock information on
their websites, so I submitted the "request quote" thing on a
couple. Yet there's no clue about the cost of the wheel alignment,
except what the mechanic charged before (and that's probably
irrelevent, even for getting them to do it again), so what I save
on the tyres at one place might be made up by excessive
wheel-alignment fees compared to another where the tyre price was
higher. Sigh, a choice without facts to choose with is worse than
no choice at all. I guess I should phone up, but I hate dealing
with complicated number/name things over the phone, and tyre model
names are full of those. I'm sure that's deliberate, to cause
exactly this confusion and have the buyer reduced to, "umm, err,
which of those is better than?", whereupon the seller picks one
from whichever brand they get a bonus for promoting.
Funny how the one generic part that I need to get for the car -
tyres - is the one where I have the least ability to convincingly
find a good deal. Still, although you need to buy from specialists
and wait a while, I've proven again that most parts for the Jag
aren't actually more expensive than equivalents for a 'sensible'
car, provided you look around.
