Some interesting stuff about emissions
You'll have to say who you work for
. Yup, the emissions really pushes the manufacturers at the time from what I've seen.
For me personally, it's probably Impact Guns.
You can get 240v ones now very cheap and it's just incredible how much difference it makes on an older car.
Cable ties & Gaffa tape defo do 🤣,
Yup, agree, along with shrink tubing etc, but ECUs!
My Merc W108 280SE 4.5 had an ECU, and TBH I'm glad it did.
-On the non-ECU Injection pumped Mercs of the time, they're £2.5k to rebuild the HP Pump, with injectors being crazy money
-Sure, the transistor based ECU can go bad, but at least with a TPS, injectors and vacuum sources, it can be converted to a standalone ECU if the factory ECU died
. My Merc ran well however.
Loads of cars in the 60s and 70s had ECUs (well, Bosch D-Jetronic), including
-Citroen DS21 and 23 Injection Electronique ; these near enough put to bed that DSs were slow, espeically when coupled together with the optional 5 speed 'box.
-Opel Commodore
-Porsche 914 (that may have been L-Jetronic)
-Volvo P1800ES
Bosch went away from D-Jetronic apparently as it was quite expensive back then to make, and not fixable by unfamiliar mechanics. K-Jet near enough addressed all of that. The irony is K-Jet is probably harder these days for unfamiliar mechanics. In Ford and Merc circles, people moan about them anyway over the later EFI setups.
- Battery chargers. Remember those chunky ones, made of pressed steel, containing a heavy transformer and a rectifier? You had to watch them, so they didn't fry your battery.
The irony is, when a battery has gone completely flat I have to use my Grandad's pressed steel battery charger to get it to a point where the CTEK will notice that it's connected to something...
The MXS series have a 'Supply' mode which can do the same
. They just chuck out 12V. At least my MXS 10 does
It really wasn't that long ago when going down the local motor factors and talking to the guy down there about whatever car issue i'm having, or talking to mates about it - magazines & manuals. Now I can read up and learn how to do almost absolutely everything to my SAAB, lookup an answer to almost every single problem and assist others with theirs. Parts supplier shops, other motor factors and a list of carefully curated phone numbers to people who have hoarded bits for years was the only way to get stuff, and now eBay is my mecca for parts, and various forums answer questions.
Saying that though - I miss waiting at the newsagent 5am for the 'Kent Diamond FreeAds' and buying a mk1 1100 golf 4 door for 175 quid ... all before breakfast! I loved trawling for bargains
I've found the opposite. The internet has helped alot, but
-There's alot of mis-information out there
-People tend to make stuff up.
The latter caught me out on my 944 : "Yeah, you don't need to remove the dash, the matrix slides out" on a UK form. That's true on a LHD car, but on a RHD unit, unless you saw the bulkhead and steering system you can't do that
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