$3.75/gallon in California. Diesel is a little more expensive.

I like the middle front seats on the older American cars.

The regs about engine swaps differ between states, I suspect Queensland and maybe another state it's a little easier to drop in a bigger more powerful engine. Back in my earlier days of driving and messing around with cars it was a lot easier even in my state to do some mods, but now if I want to put anything other than another B3 in that car I would need an engineer's certificate. Add a turbo or supercharger to a stock engine and it needs a cert, the only thing you could get away with now are internal changes that would require an engine teardown or a dyno to detect. You can't remove emissions gear. You technically can't slap on an improved carby or swap over to injection without having it all checked out.

It's all drama now as far as I'm concerned I mean, yeah, it's possible to do a nice engine swap with turbo, stronger gearbox/drive shafts and improved brakes too, but you can't just do it all then take it in to be certified. You pretty much have to plan out everything in detail and get the engineer to ok it. Then you need to document the whole project fairly thoroughly including pictures. When it's finished you take it to the engineer and he checks everything. Depending on how long it takes to review and sign off on the whole thing it could be expensive (well, from my point of view anyway).

This car is small and light though. A freshly rebuilt B3 with some minor tweaks that will mostly go unnoticed won't be gutless. I need to research if the stock carby can be improved internally without altering the general appearance.

The AC I will probably remove completely though. I'm sure I will regret it in summer but paying for that to be fully working is a lot of money, plus as I said it will suck a lot of power. Disabled it is wasteful to leave the gear in there, takes up space so the bay is more cramped plus it's just extra useless weight.

As for the price of petrol, I think I paid around $1.05aud (about $0.81usd) per litre for E10 (10% ethanol blend) about 2 weeks ago.
Pretty sure the price has crept up a little now, but I shouldn't need to get more for a least another week. I live in the country, work in the city which is about 15-20km drive, but I'm only working 2 days per week right now. Sometimes I might have an extra day of driving to go shopping or pick something up, also visit family which is another 20km away but in another direction.

Oh for the days when petrol was worth nearly nothing. Way back when I had some modded cars with high compression I would drive to the local airport (small rural type) and fill up on aviation fuel right next to the runway. You need a dangerous goods permit for that stuff now

Be ready.
Now that Obama is re - elected (chosen lmfao) petrol will be back to nearly $5.00 a gallon.
Mark my words, will not be long to wait....

Disclaimer : really hope I am wrong, very much feel it will not be long though !

Hang tough everybody, the $**t is going to get Knappy

Cheers to the membership

Front washer motor on my 2005 Kia Rio has just died
My car has a rear washer too so the front motor is a specific type.
Genuine replacement is like $85aud or more depending on how long I want to wait.
I can get a generic replacement for $25aud

This is like back when one of the ignition spark plug coils went on it a couple of years ago...
It has 4, one on top of each spark plug. I worked out which one it was, looked up 1x genuine replacement and it was cheaper to buy a full set of 4 generic replacements
So I got the generic set and fitted all of them. I have 3x used genuine spares that I pulled (the ones that were still working).

Hang tough.

First media was cave drawings.
Pray we do not go full circle back to that as an alternative media out of necessity.

Einstein said WW IV would be fought with sticks and stones... (perhaps an occasional atlatl) !

Forgive my grim insight.
Bad week at the office lol

I like this guy’s videos. He has some good points on buying used vs new. You can put using your existing older car in the same category as buying used as well. I agree with him on the outdated safety features on much older cars and the fun/excitement factor on the new cars. Everyone has different priorities. I understand not everyone gets excited over a new car.

https://youtu.be/sZqVKa6Fqd0

A new car would be nice if I could bleed money easily without dying. But without the endless money, unlike most people, I can't justify having debt just to have a newish car. A house is worth having debt for, but I don't need to do that thankfully

This Kia I have, even though it's old, is the only car I've had with airbags
I've never had a car with ABS
Nearly all of my cars have been manuals, I have had a couple of autos but pretty sure only one was ever driven on the road.

Yeah I much prefer older cars, I can actually fix nearly anything on them. The way modern cars are going it's like all of them will have "No User Serviceable Parts Inside" stickers all over them inside and out

"Bad week at the office".... You guys are under so much pressure just now, it can't be easy, thinking of you.

Stay safe, stay strong.

We’ll get along better if you keep your election disinformation campaign to zero. I know you have issues but reality IS reality no matter what you’ve personally been diagnosed with. Climate change, COVID-19 and Obama’s birth certificate are all real.

I nearly flagged this post but decided to be more open about how insane/stupid/irresponsible you’re being. Nothing could be more obvious to me in 2021 than when our fiends say insane b******t we need to engage them on it instead of just chickening out in the name of politeness. There was as clean of an election as this shithole country has ever seen. The only major abnormality was the sore loser and the totoletarian tactics he used to try to stay in “power” (while rarely doing anything but holding rallies). I could just block you or flag you anonymously but I genuinely don’t want you in prison for attacking a country you claim to love. I don’t want you to join the Proud Boys or any other hilarious/tragic organizations.

Aside from election nonsense completely, I have no problem with $5 a gallon gas. Trucks are stupid and driving 20 hours a week because you chose to live in BFE is your problem.

What does “engineer” mean? Is this done for safety or emissions? And isn’t there some kind of grandfather clause for a car that old?

Here in Michigan you can change anything. You can register anything. It’s pretty insane. There are no inspections and we have brand new Tesla’s rolling next to 20 year old hooptie Trailblazers sitting on broken suspension, garbage bag windows, and no taillights.

In California (CARB) states there are blowers and headers and turbos and such that are pre-approved for sale, like the Jackson Racing Miata supercharger, but these are obviously expensive to develop and there are only so many in existence.

In most non-CARB states that do inspection, if they can’t see it’s been added/removed, then if it doesn’t throw a code it’ll pass inspection which, IMO, is a fine way of doing it. Mods at all aren’t the issue, but badly done mods.

It has to run in order to burn gas so I don’t see MGP being an issue at all.

I created this conversation originally to discuss alternatives to physical media. It turned into many other things since then, including CRTs, pirating copyright content, cars and now gas prices. Nevertheless, I am enjoying the information and opinion exchange here no matter on topic or not. I would like it to continue with respect and understanding. I am with signo on this. Let’s keep the politics and election out of this.

On a second thought, that front middle seat is probably the least safest place on a car.

Ah more inferring....
Its ok, it will pass.... just breathe and take your medication......

For the records, I am a free thinking moderate libratarian. Not republican or democrat .


Query : WHAT DID SOCIALISTS USE BEFORE CANDLES ?
Answer : ELECTRICITY.....

Flag away brother - censorship is the new free speech....

Hey substance, I will oblige your request and check my opinion.
However regarding my opinion about gas prices - I did type - hoped I was wrong.

Cheers

Safety and emissions.
No grandfather clause.
I don't think you're aware of how difficult it can be keeping a car 30+ years old on the road in say, Ireland (which is EU) or the UK.
Over here it is much easier as long as the car isn't modified.

Back when I first started driving people (myself included) would rip emissions gear off cars and swap a different carby.
Weld differential centers up to create backyard lockers.
Heat up coil suspension springs and compress them to lower a car. Or even worse, cut coils from springs.
This was back when you could still buy leaded petrol alongside unleaded. You could also buy aviation fuel without a permit.

There were a lot of crazy modified cars on the road, plenty were dangerous. It was only a matter of time that regs and fines would over-compensate for all the "fun"


Edit:
With the grandfather clause, maybe there still are some exceptions. I think with some 6cyl cars that had V8's dropped in and registered before a certain date those can still be on the road with a certificate. If they became unregistered at a certain point then maybe they would need to be certified. There might be some other exceptions. But I'm not going to read the whole current book of state regs to see what's current, last time I looked at it (over 10 years ago) it was bloody huge.

You technically can't even add large wheels to cars now. I think you can go +1 in diameter but I have no idea about width and offsets now. Not that that stops people from running large wheels on whatever. But have enough mods or "faulty" parts on a car and the police can put an unroadworthy sticker on it. Pull that off yourself and there's a fine. It has to have the defects fixed within a certain time frame or the car cannot be driven at all.
I've had defect notices before, many years ago. It isn't fun getting rid of them

Thanks man. I didn’t mean to direct that at you or signo. I felt the conversation was heading that way. If you have a long commute like I did in the past, you definitely feel it on your wallet when gas prices go up drastically.

I think I will be able to buy physical media for years on end yet.
But in the next 5 years are so. It will be more & more used stuff.
All the new stuff will be PPV on the net. Are some junk that Netflix etc
put out. That is not worth the time watching. I just did buy some L/D on EBay.
And they came in great shape. And packed very very well. I did buy all my L/D
from DaDons. But I can't get any info from them now. The web page is up & going.
I did send a few Emails to them. Asking if they were open. But nothing back from them.
You can buy. Check out etc. But no info from them. Zip zero.
Looks like I'm stuck with E-Bay And LDDB. For my L/D now.

I ordered a Kaleidescape Strato this week. This is their digital downloads only and a current 4K capable model. Their 4K exclusives are over 400 now and growing fast. I will continue to buy discs from boutique labels like Criterions, Arrow, Shout, Kino and alike but all barebones releases, Hollywood junk, and TV series will be digital. I will eventually add one of their discontinued disc based models to start converting my existing collection to digital.