Claim's Cabbies Corner. Kill crazy rampage imminent.

Talk about your cars etc here. Keep it sort of sensible and on topic please.
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Re: Claim's Cabbies Corner (Again)

Post by DodgeRover »

I've ordered one of those for holiday fun chucking pebbles into the sea, should just have bought some theraband for my old one but couldn't be bothered..
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Re: Claim's Cabbies Corner (Again)

Post by Junkman »

If you use a ball bearing ball it'd go through a human body from 300 yards away.
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Re: Claim's Cabbies Corner (Again)

Post by LynehamHerc »

Do you know from experience?
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Re: Claim's Cabbies Corner (Again)

Post by DodgeRover »

Junkman wrote: Sat Jul 20, 2019 2:58 pm If you use a ball bearing ball it'd go through a human body from 300 yards away.
Hooli are you sure there wasn't anybody stood in the phone box?

Mint imperials (the sweet kind not the automotive) make excellent biodegradable ammunition.
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Re: Claim's Cabbies Corner (Again)

Post by Hooli »

DodgeRover wrote: Sat Jul 20, 2019 9:54 pm
Junkman wrote: Sat Jul 20, 2019 2:58 pm If you use a ball bearing ball it'd go through a human body from 300 yards away.
Hooli are you sure there wasn't anybody stood in the phone box?

Mint imperials (the sweet kind not the automotive) make excellent biodegradable ammunition.
There wasn't afterwards.....no signs of blood either so I'd assume not.
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Re: Claim's Cabbies Corner EXCLUSIVE DARK WOB UPDATE

Post by Warren t claim »

Warren t claim wrote: Wed May 22, 2019 2:24 am I thought I'd bump this thread and lob another tale up.

Now my current taxi is a Hyundai Ionic as most of you from the censored forum know. Some may consider that a tad small for a 6'2" driver but trust me I've owned smaller which brings me onto this chapter.

Back in early 2003 a mate handed his Peugeot 306 hatch back to the garage he was buying it from. Now he always spoke highly of the car so I thought I'd step in and buy it as I reckoned that it'd be ideal for my mum to drive as she had just got her badge and was currently driving one of my 2.0 petrol Mk2 Mondeos. Sadly she hated the (admittedly) very heavy clutch in the 306 so stuck with the Ford leaving me with no choice but to drive the little Pug so I could make my money back on it. IIRC it was five years old at the time and had been repaired after a heavy collision to a slightly less than reasonable standard, the automatic wipers didn't work to the point that the wipers were only one speed and even lacking a self park function. Also the front spoiler had been replaced with one off a later model with round fog light apertures which naturally I failed to fill with fog lights. Despite all of this I bought it unseen and undriven for £4000 which was cheap for a five year old 306 Diesel back then. Within a minute of turning the key for the first time I knew I should have asked for a test drive, this particular 306 lacked something I thought it would have especially after Colin telling me how rapid it was and that's a turbo. Yep, I'd bought a 306 lxd non turbo! OK, although it wasn't the blown 306 I hoped it was it still had a decent amount of pull as thrilling*any N/A XUD owner knows and it also was super economical on fuel, nearly as good as my old Montego Turbo Diesel mentioned earlier. All seemed well for a few weeks, I even got used to the clutch until I needed to replace the front tyres. Only after the tame rubber fitter had put new front boots on that another problem became apparent. The alloys fitted didn't have centre caps or even a hole in the middle to balance them! As my tame (read cheap) supplier of previously cherished tyres lacked any sort of facilities to balance wheels on the car I had to hope for the best and as luck might have it I wasn't stuck with a 306 with wheel wobble so awful it could go on Stars In Their Eyes as a 1974 Avenger and finish at least a credible third. Despite all of this I didn't hate the car, some younger punters loved it's hot hatch looks and 50+ MPG made it cheap to run so despite some reservations I persevered with it. Sadly it decided to throw another hissy fit and blow most of it's instruments. I'm talking speedo, rev counter and fuel gauge. Fortunately, even though the fuel gauge was FUBAR the low fuel light still worked meaning I knew when to fill up. Fast forward to August 2003 Mutha_Claim is pulling out of the local hospital junction traffic lights on green (or at least that's what she adamantly said) In my/her Mk2 Mondeo 2.0LX when a P reg VW Polo driven by a 20 year old lad en route to his shift at McDonalds runs into the offside rear of the poor Ford. Obviously this leaves her without a car or job. Now even though I had a few Mondeos out on hire as taxis at the time I was reluctant to take a car back off another driver for her as the other lads I had in my cars were decent payers. Sadly for mummy dearest this means she'll have to work the Peugeot that she hates on days while I work it nights. A few weeks pass and I get a phone call saying that she's stranded at Sainsbury's petrol station and the 306 won't start. I scamper over there to discover that despite the vendor's assurances that "I'm sure I changed that cambelt for Colin" he clearly hadn't I was left with one dead 306.

What did I do next? Stay tuned for my next thrilling* instalment and I promise it won't take me five years to write it!
OK I'll try to keep this in order.

What could I do with a dead 306? Well, the manager of the company I worked for had an Omega that he wanted to sell. Not the taxi friendly 2.0 pez or BM dizzler but a range topping 3.0 V6 Elite that had allegedly been the official car of the Chief Constable of Cheshire Constabulary. It had been previously plated by another driver who sold it to the boss after one bank of cylinders seized (at 60,000 miles) and after being expertly repaired by the groundskeeper of a local rugby club who had loads of experience restoring classic British motorcycles it was once again on the road. No sane person at the time would entertain running a car that did 60 miles to a tenner of unleaded but fortunately I'm pretty far from sane at the best of times so I part ex'd the dead 306 for £500 against the £2500 he was asking for the Elite.

The Vauxhall was a 98 model on an R plate and by careful deduction based on the fact that I listened to the obituary to Alistair Cooke of Letter From America on Radio 4 on the Omegas radio places this chapter of the story firmly at the beginning of 2004. Anyway, the car had been de-plated so I has to relicense it meaning that I had to have it tested and go to the local town hall to fill out the relevant forms and pay the fee, My council insists on cars over six years old being tested every six months but luckily the big Vauxhall just scraped in before it's sixth birthday. I filled out the forms on the bootlid outside the town hall using the bill of sale and number plate as reference as the V5 had been posted off, this caught the attention of a security guard who rushed over to bollock me for using the bootlid of a car belonging to a visiting dignitary (the mayor of Chester had an identical Omega due to Vauxhall having a factory, correct at time of writing, on his patch). After putting him straight I collected the plates and went off to enjoy my first shift.

What was it like to live with I hear you ask? Well it did do an average of 22.6 MPG over a shift but I was expecting that, the autobox threw a shit fit that was cured for free by removing and replacing a connector that plugs into the box but other than that it was a great motor to smoke around in being full of toys and a hell of a lot quicker and smoother than my last Omega, a 2.0 GLS company car, Punters loved travelling in it, especially the ladies but one drawback was the streaks of fake tan left on the heated (both front and back) tan leather seats. It was the only taxi I've had to date that people would ring up and request to picked up in, Z List celebs that graced its sumptuous interior include footballer, Jordan shagger and mong breeder Dwight Yorke, the guy who played Ron Dixon in Brookside (he lives literally a stones throw away from Cavcraft) and chart bothering pop band The Coral.

After a few months of my tender abuse one of the self-levelling rear shocks decided to intermittently stick in the fully compressed position, a fault that was temporally fixed by playing a game called traction control roulette, a game where I'd switch the TCS off, put it on full lock, floor the throttle, melt the tyres doing doughnuts and the hitting the TC button again to see which direction is sped off in. Eventually this stopped curing the issue so I was forced to replace the rear shocks, not with the wallet-bursting bespoke Elite items but with a couple liberated from a scrappy off a lesser model. Another more serious problem that came to light was the occasional whiff of engine oil in the cabin. The boss said this was due to the oil filler being tricky to get at so some lube was spilt by the groundskeeper mechanic when he was rebuilding the engine, fair enough but the smell was still there after 6 months so I did some primitive (it was 2004) online research on the Autobahnstormers web site only to discover that it was the oil cooler buried deep into the V of the engine that was about to give up the ghost. Never mind, I'd had a good run for my money so deplated it and bought a cheap 250,000 mile Mk2 Mondeo that I'll discuss on here at a later date.

The Omega was valeted within an inch of its life and I treated it to a final indicated 145 MPH run up the motorway to the local car auction. With a heavy heart I filled out the paperwork for R***UCB and handed over the keys before heading off home. I'd barely made it off the industrial estate when my mobile rang, it was the car auction asking me to come back as there'd been a problem. I arrived back at the auction office expecting to be told that the car had finance outstanding but no! Being me I'd never bothered checking the V5 when I got it back from the DVLA so unknown to me my Omega taxed, tested, insured and licenced by my council with the displayed registration number R***UCB was actually R***YCB! Knowing full well that I'd be refused entry to that days auction if the knew a car was on false plates I just pretended that I'd written the wrong details down, amended the paperwork and fucked off sharpish grateful that I hadn't re MOT'd the car and was selling it as seen without test as at the time taxis were not given a MOT test certificate as they were tested to a higher standard. That evening it sold for £860 which wasn't a bad result for an untested car that I'd had my use out of so at the end of the day I'd have to chalk up my 3.0 Omega taxi experience as a success.
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Re: Claim's Cabbies Corner THE OMEGA MAN

Post by Warren t claim »

Did an early morning run to Liverpool Airport yesterday. A trip of just over 20 miles. I had the benefit of a pretty full battery to start with which helped the economy a bit but even I was surprised to get this.



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Re: Claim's Cabbies Corner Fuel Miser

Post by Junkman »

What about The Climate™ Improvement®?

A scandal!
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Re: Claim's Cabbies Corner Fuel Miser

Post by Uncle Albert »

Yes, I'm afraid you need to do some carbon offsetting, Warren, by driving something with at least 8 cylinders on the weekend.
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Re: Claim's Cabbies Corner Fuel Miser

Post by Undercover Shitter »

He needs to get another Omega 3.0 to use as a taxi. If he does that for a few months Merseyside will soon be England's answer to the Riviera.
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