1202 ALARM

We recently upgraded to a new (to us) Nissan Leaf after over 4 years of successful and ridiculously cheap motoring in our first one. The second generation Leaf uses a Type 2 AC connector at the car end whereas the first generation used Type 1, which is now basically obsolete. New cables are £100+ so I decided to convert our existing cable instead. I had bought this from a mate for £50 because at the time Nissan didn't actually supply a charging cable, expecting home and street chargers to have a tethered cable. Some do, most don't. Anyway, when we traded our old Leaf in, I kept the cable. The dismantled Type 1 connector is shown above, ready for sale as spares on eBay to recoup some of the cost of the upgrade.  A new Type 2 plug cost £35 delivered via AliExpress and arrived in about 10 days. It was complete with the necessary 220ohm resistor which is connected between the PP pin and the PE earth pin to tell the car the plug is in and to draw up to 22kw from the char...

I needed a rear number plate to hang on the bicycle carrier or to fix to the back of a borrowed trailer. The stick-on number plate was £6 on eBay ready made up, but I needed a lightweight plastic something to stick it to. A lightweight plastic something which had been dumped in the forest a couple of miles above where we live after a failed oil-drilling exploration (yes, in Ireland, I kid thee not!) and it was exactly the right colour for a UK rear number plate. The 2 thin pieces glued at each side are to give the plate a bit of rigidity. A sweet upcycle. I'll put a couple of small holes at the top corners to feed cable ties or twists through.

The front nearside brake caliper has been sticking for a while.  It took a month to get a reconditioning kit from Renault, but taking the caliper off takes 5 minutes. Problem is getting the piston out. I've tried 3 different bodge methods to no avail, but putting the caliper back on the car and pumping the brakes came closest, so I'm going to try that again tomorrow. After that hopefully a good clean with fine wet & dry emery and fit the new seals and I'll get another few months out of it.

Well, we bought a much newer Skoda Fabia a few weeks ago and after much soul-searching I decided to give the Renault RX4 a chance and get rid of the old Fabia (MCZ).  This was no easy decision because the Fabia has been incredibly reliable and is still going strong at just short of 160,000 miles with no engine problems.  The problem is that it is handy to have one larger car and having spent £750 on a new turbo for the RX4 it seemed daft to sell it, so there you go.  I switched the insurance over to the Renault yesterday and the old Fabia will be off to the vehicle dismantlers (i.e. scrappie) tomorrow. I will almost certainly have a tear in my eye and I definitely do not want to be around when they start pulling her apart! I quite fancy one of these though, once I've saved enough up to buy a second-hand one.