1202 ALARM

In the autumn of 2018 the heater re-circulation motor (I'll refer to this as the HRM from now on) in my 2015 Skoda Rapid decided to fail. It had been making a grinding and clicking noise for a while and I had asked the local Skoda dealer to look into this during a routine service, which they didn't, but more on that later. The problem was that the motor failed in the re-circulate setting so the interior of the car steamed up very quickly and the windscreen couldn't be de-misted. Putting the air-conditioning on was a short-term solution up until the outside temperature dropped below 10 Celsius and that stopped working! There isn't a lot of information online about the Rapid because it is a less common model than other Skodas, but it shares a lot of design with the Fabia and Octavia so it wasn't too hard to get diagrams showing where the motor was and how it works. To get at the HRM I had to remove the glove box (7 Torx screws) and the heater motor (5 Torx screws), ...

Being a 1980s car, the MR2 doesn't have a DIN radio slot or ISO connections for car audio. The surround had been butchered at one point years ago to try and make a CD player fit and looked grim. On top of that the lid for the ash tray had fallen off and as nobody is going to smoke in the car I took the ash tray and lighter out and stuck the lid down permanently with epoxy. So I needed a 12-volt socket to charge my 'phone and to neaten up the radio surround. I got this lightweight radio in Lidl on offer. It has no CD, but plays back from SD cards and USB devices, which suits me for a summer car. Power output is low, but I'm putting a power amp in my centre speaker cabinet along with a pair of better speakers, so not a problem. All 4 outputs can drive the MR2's own speakers. The red panel will be covered in black vinyl from a big old handbag I got for 50p in a charity shop and the 12-volt sockets are a £1 adaptor from Poundland. Only drawback at present is the USB h...