My friend Tom has just been round to show me his new purchase: a 2008 Impreza STI. Typically I didn’t take a photo of the whole car, but I did take a picture of its brakes.

Ok, so they’re not floating or drilled like the 330d’s, but that is a multipot caliper, so I was pleased. I was significantly more pleased to be given the keys for a test drive. Turning from a T-junction onto a trunk road, let there be no doubt that despite a 100hp disadvantage, this car would ruin the M5. Grip grip grip grip grippy grip grip all the way through 90 degrees to the speed limit all in just a passenger’s gasp. Nice solid brakes, sharp steering, joyous.

It’s got a fancy trick variable centre differential. I tried to molest this in such a way that would, shall we say, make it behave more like the M5. Instead it just got a bit twitchy, and eventually my mechanical sympathy made me stop.  Having calmed down, I decided it’s a lovely place to be, despite not being as opulent as the big 5.

The turbocharged 2.5 litre engine certainly seemed to drink as courageously as the M5 too – around 21mpg for a mixed bag it would seem.

I love the way that the rpm dial takes centre stage on the dashboard, with the speedo as an apparent afterthought. The seats are dead comfy, and the controls are nicely driver focused – I especially liked the short shift gearbox.

The power all lurks relatively high up in the rev range and there is of course some turbo lag, but this is without doubt an extremely fun car, and on the road, undoubtedly a quicker A to B machine than the M5.

So bravo to Tom – it’s been over 7 years since his last Impreza, and indeed about 3 years since Smith moved on his WRX wagon, so I’ve certainly missed these machines.

I wonder if we might see this, the M5, and a certain E46 M3 at the Nurburgring later this year…?

Yesterday marked my annual trip to the Wyedean rally. Last year I took Brenden, the year before Robin, and prior to that Diane, but this year I took Snoop…

… to meet Barden…

I got up at 5:20, was out the door with the dog by 6:15, and met Alex at the Shell garage in Monmouth at 8:25. Alex had certainly done his homework, and we headed straight to Speech House to park up and find a tasty corner on SS3 where the first car was due to run at 9:51. On our way to what on the map looked like the best bet, we stumbled upon a chicane which, as a navigator (and indeed I imagine as a driver), would have shocked me. Foolishly I didn’t take a wide angle shot of the situation, but here’s an attempt:

So you arrive from the right of the photo in the distance, and the notes will tell you that you face a right-then-left chicane.

The track curves about 70 degrees right, then curves left again which is the track you see in the foreground. However, that’s roped off to the tree, as you can see, and the correct line is, as demonstrated by car 327 here, to continue right and then do a 90 left around the tree. However, let me assure you that at competitive pace that red and white tape from the tree isn’t really obvious at all, and it looks like you’re supposed to pass to the left of the tree. Which happened repeatedly, as demonstrated here:

Sometime people would get it right. Sometimes people would plough under the rope, then turn right around the tree, get confused, and then get stuck. Sometimes people would realise too late that they needed to turn right more, and oversteer into the tree. That happened twice. As a spectator, this was fantastic; I’m sure the competitors weren’t quite as happy about it.  Still, we saw some of our old favourites:

And then the really pacey cars were out:

There was one rather interesting point where some deer crossed the track, but fortunately they got out of the way before the next car arrived.

In the afternoon we moved to SS6, and found a more traditional corner, hoping for some tasty sideways action. We weren’t disappointed!

There were even a couple of E30s out to play – sorry about the blurry photo Robin!

Finally, right at the end of the day, I got to do what I love best – car rescuing:

This chap had managed to get the car to turn 90 degrees right okay, but simply slid off the edge of the track where he got wedged on his belly panel. A team of around 10 spectators got him going again, although he lost nearly 10 minutes in the process.

On the way back we encountered this sad sight – I hope they get it re-shelled okay.

Overall, another great day out. Thanks to Alex for his hospitality again – I’m already looking forward to next year!

Unless this is the first sentence of mine you’ve ever read you’ll know that despite being a BMW fan-boy, I am eternally disappointed by their brakes. It’s not that they don’t stop well enough, or that they overheat, it’s that the discs warp, and that happens well before the pads are so much as half worn. It was an ongoing problem with my E36 M3s, it was an issue with my E36 328i (until I upgraded to drilled discs) and with this 330d, the situation has been chronic. Here are relevant excerpts from my 330d maintenance list:

• 26/09/2010 – front discs replaced (warped)
• 11/06/2010 – rear discs & pads replaced
• 11/06/2010 – rear right caliper replaced
• 25/10/2009 – Front nearside caliper replaced
• 24/10/2009 – Front discs & pads replaced
• 27/09/2008 – Rear brake pads and sensor replaced
• 18/08/2007 – Front brake discs replaced (warped)
• 24/03/2007 – Front discs and pads replaced
• 01/04/2006 – Front discs & pads replaced

We got the car in March 2006, so in 5 years and 50,000 miles, including today’s episode, I’ve replaced the front rotors 6 times. Good going, eh? In the past I started replacing with genuine BMW items, then as the tedium set in, I reverted to ECP’s finest. This time, thanks in part to advice from Jim Marren, I’ve “invested” in BMW’s new drilled and floating disc offering for the 330d. So this morning, I set about the replacement job. Before – standard massive rotors:

Up we go – by now an all too familiar pose:

Wheel off:

Caliper off:

Carrier and disc off:

On the near side (the side that seems to warp worst), I’ve elected to also replace the caliper as I suspect it of sticking (it is nearly 14 months old now after all). ECP offer a Pagid refurbished item for only £97.20 if you give them your old unit, so I taped up the hose and nipped into town to make the purchase.

Now we get to the good bit. How’s about this then for a bit of bling brakey-brakey action?

So, what are they?

They are obviously drilled, but they are also “floating”, which means the outer disc part (that comes into contact with the pads) isn’t the same piece that the wheel is clamped to on the hub – the two different materials are connected by a series of “bobbins” that reduce heat transfer and permit some adjustment as the disc changes shape subtly with temperature. This is supposed to reduce the chances of warping. The drilled holes help with heat dissipation, removing gases that are created under braking, and even stopping a film of water developing on the disc surface in wet weather.

My E36 M3 Evos has floating discs; their brakes warped all the time. However, I fitted drilled discs to my 328i and the brakes were just lovely from that point on, so here’s hoping! Final information about the discs:

B34.11.2.282.871 – left disc – £144.17 + VAT
B34.11.2.282.872 – right disc – £144.17 + VAT

Pricey. Time will tell if they’re worth it!

Yesterday evening I was supposed to be attending a birthday party at the Rowbarge in St Johns. The Rowbarge holds significant memories for me as it is directly across the road from my best man Robin‘s childhood home and isn’t too far from where I now live, and has therefore been a regular venue for all manner of events, from a cheeky afternoon pint to landmark occasions. Yesterday afternoon I received a telephone call to advise me that the evening’s celebrations were to be relocated because the Rowbarge was on fire.

I couldn’t get anywhere near it by vehicle – for those that know the area St Johns Road was closed from the Ketch to the Renault garage. Apparently six fire engines were on the scene handling a fire that had broken out in the kitchen and quickly spread throughout the building. Today I visited the pub, and was shocked to see the state it was in.

The sign says “Due to fire we are closed for the foreseeable future”. I can’t help but feel so sorry for the landlords, Nick and Anna, who lost their son in a road accident in December 2009 and now have this situation to contend with. I would guess, without any real experience, that the hole in the roof was created by the emergency services to tackle the fire that had started from the rear of the premises, which now look like this:

The door on the right above is the side door from the beer garden into the extended restaurant area. The accommodation block, just out of shot to the right, appeared not to have been damaged. I will be interested to see what happens next.

** Update 20/02/2011 **

Four weeks on and it looks like this:

The windows have been covered with metal sheeting and the roof protected from precipitation. I’ll update again with any significant changes.

I’ve got a 40GB chunky PS3, and I’ve recently bought GT5 (Gran Turismo 5). It’s a good game, but it spends a lot of time ‘thinking’, especially when loading circuits. To improve matters it has an option to store a lot of this information on the PS3′s HDD, but it apparently needs around 15GB, and I just didn’t have that much space to spare, so I’ve replaced the drive. There are 3 distinct steps to this:

1. Backing up the data (wouldn’t want to lose valuable game progress!)
2. Physically swapping the drives
3. Restoring the data

The first issue I faced was getting the PS3 to recognise an external drive. I located the backup utility under the Settings menu, but it wouldn’t see my 4GB USB stick. A bit of reading revealed that it had to be formatted in the FAT32 file system. I popped it in my PC and did a quick format and plugged it back into the PS3, but that didn’t help. So I did a long format, and then returned it to the PS3 and made sure I could see it under the Video menu – I could. I then returned to the backup facility only to be told that it wasn’t big enough. This much was of course obvious to me; I’ve got a lot more than 4GB of data to backup, but I was hoping to be able to transfer it in chunks. This doesn’t appear to be the case.

I therefore grabbed an external 250GB USB drive. This was already formatted with the ext2 filesystem for my Fedora box, so when I plugged it into my PC it was ignored and I had to use Windows 7′s disk manager utility to sort it. If you need to do this, right-click My Computer, choose Manage and you should find it in the tree under Storage.

Using this tool I created a 32GB (32768MB) partition on the drive – this appears to be the largest size supported by this tool on Windows. I’ve read that programs to format larger FAT32 partitions do exist, so if you’ve got a larger lump of data to backup I guess you’ll need to investigate that option (or maybe exFAT will do, but I’ve read about issues), but fortunately I didn’t need to. Actually I think I could create one on my Linux box. Anyway, once I’d created the partition the drive appeared in My Computer and I was able to use Quick Format to pop a FAT32 file system on there. I then connected the drive to the PS3 and it was recognised, and we were in business!

So as you can see, it’s not a swift process. It may be worth nothing that there’s a PS3 to PS3 backup utility which works over a direct ethernet link. However in an attempt to honour copyright protection this process wipes the HDD once it has finished, so I chose not to risk the data on my PS3 slim. Frankly given how long it takes they should supply another PS3 to keep you entertained while you wait! Plenty of time to blog though! Eventually it finished, and just to be sure I attached the drive to my PC and saved a copy on my server.

Then it was time to change the drive. Tools required: a small flat-head and a small cross-head. Use the flat-head to pop off the plastic cover:

Then undo the centre screw (blue on my machine).

This allows the HDD casing to be slid right and extracted.

Here’s a comparison of the outgoing 40GB 5,400rpm Hitachi on the left, and the new 500GB 7,200rpm Seagate on the right. I hope the extra spin speed translates to more performance!

Refitting is as ever the reversal of removal. Once done, fire up the PS3 and it’ll want to format the new drive:

That doesn’t take long.

Then connect the external drive, go back into Settings, find the backup utility and restore!

The restore process was quicker than the backup, but I’m not sure why. The new drive is of course faster, but writing is normally slower than reading. Overall then, over 10 times the space (and perhaps a quicker drive) for £47 (ebuyer).

Result – look at all that space! Now to let GT5 have its way…

16 months ago I sorted out the exterior lighting at the back of the house, and I intended on doing the same to the front soon after. This weekend, I finally got around to it. I started at 8am on Saturday, worked until dark, restarted at 10am today, and finished at around 3pm. It was cold, and it rained – a lot. Why didn’t I do this in the summer?!

This job was a little more complicated than the back, mainly because the house didn’t have any outside lights at the front when I started. Well, it had a 500W flood-lamp that some oik had mounted above the garage door in a rather ropey fashion.

I know: what a fugly house. Anyway. There’s a light in the porch, which was once upon a time outside, but has long ago been converted into dry space. It was a rubbish light, so I started by doing away with that and examining the wiring situation so I could evaluate my options.

I really wanted to achieve the following:

1) A better lamp in the porch (easy)

2) Outside lanterns like the back garden (moderate)

3) Separate switches for those two circuits (hard)

A root around in the porch ceiling space quickly revealed the ground floor lighting ring main and the to-switch loop cable. However, there was no chance of threading another control cable through the ceiling space to the back of those light switches. So I went across the ceiling, and through the wall instead.

It’s not pretty, but I’m sure we’ll find something to cover it all up at some stage.

So that’s a spur coming from the lighting circuit down from the ceiling into the junction box. The control loop goes from the junction box through the wall to the back of those switches (good fun with a giant drill bit!), and then the switched power cable runs from the bottom of the junction box and through the porch wall to the outside wall.

The inside switches now look like this (note, we haven’t decorated the hall yet – there’s still a bare plaster ceiling etc – so the mismatch around the switch panel will get sorted at a later date).

Nice bright porch light – just 15W and considerably brighter than its predecessor.

That’s about as far as I got on Saturday. Today I set about getting the lanterns up and running those horrible cables, plus I removed that nasty flood lamp.

I managed to hide the cables on the garage lights under the roof flashing, but the ones on the porch are sadly far more obvious – as is that junction box under the left porch window. In the spring we will try to plant some shrubbery to hide them!

As night fell, cold, wet and shivering, I was able to admire the results of my toil.

So now night-time trips to the car and the bins are much easier! It’s not quite enough to work on cars though – I’ll have to get flood lamps on stands for that, but I’ve always wanted to own some of those anyway.

I appear to have come down with a cold – no doubt aggravated by today’s exposure to winter. Still, I’m especially pleased with the results.

I get up when I want, except on Saturdays when I’m rudely awakened at 5am by Robin’s sick joke of leaving the heating on overnight. I seized the opportunity to catch up with the online world, and once Jamie had left for work at 6am, I had a good shower and felt decent for the first time since I left the UK. Today was always planned to be hike day, so at around 9am Robin and I headed to Sierra Madre to meet up with his friend Will. We weren’t looking for an all day hike, but Robin wanted to show me close up the magnificent mountains which can be viewed from his porch. On the way there I spotted some deer on the side of the road – something that Robin hadn’t seen before (but then, he doesn’t see much).

Here’s a Google map view of the area. We were setting out to explore the beginning of the trail up Mount Wilson, in the San Gabriel mountains. Mount Wilson’s peak is at 5,710 feet (1,740 m), and we started from Will’s house which is conveniently situated right at the end of the trail road, at around 1,000ft above sea level.

It has been a reasonable day in Pasadena – around 19 degrees with sunny spells. As such, the going was immediately hot work.

We were soon able to take in fantastic views both over the city and of the landscape.

After half an hour or so we had covered about a mile and a half, so we stopped at a stream. We had only intended to go this far – a 3 mile hike sounded fine – but we had plenty of time so decided to go further up Mount Wilson. The next stop was at a disused camp site another couple of miles up the trail, so that’s where we went. The going immediately got a bit tougher: the track was narrower, steeper and rockier. There was plenty of evidence of wildfires in recent years, and it wasn’t hard to see why they weren’t quickly contained – we really were in the wilderness. These mountains got it all: hot sun, snow, wind, and fire. Here’s Robin under a fallen tree just near the disused camp site:

From that check point it was another 2 miles to a ridge point, so we decided to soldier on. However, we soon changed our minds after about a mile! I was reminded of a comment recently made by the H-man: “it’s not a proper walk unless I have to use my hands”. The path was very narrow, very steep, rocky and slippery, with a sheer drop to one side. With altitude our lack of fitness was more obvious, and in the clouds it grew cold with very little visibility. So like a bunch of girls, we turned around – but not before confirming that we had climbed to over 4,000ft – a 3,000ft delta. I was pleased enough with this as it is significantly higher than Snowdon, my previous highest climb. Perhaps one day I’ll return and reach the summit!

Going down was fun though! Bounding down the same slopes that we had laboured up was extremely rewarding. At pace it was of course a little dangerous – put a foot wrong and it would have been all over – but that’s part of the fun. I would describe it as being the on-foot equivalent of rallying! We managed to descend 500ft in 15 minutes – at which point I captured Robin looking radiant in his sun-hat.

Here’s a graph of our descent over 90 minutes captured on Robin’s iPhone.

Once we had finished retracing our steps and had said goodbye to Will, there were only two things on our minds: beer and burgers. So first stop was ‘Tops Burger’ – for my inaugural gen-u-wine American drive-thru fast-food experience. What a menu!

We both opted for a 1/4lb Tops avocado and bacon burger, and we chose to share a large fries. This turned out to be a mistake: we should have shared a burger, and shared a small fries! We drove straight home to crack open some beers and enjoy our meal on Robin’s porch.

The burgers came pre-cut with ‘Fancy Ketchup’. Just look at all that filling!

Lunch time!

The burgers were thoroughly enjoyable! We did manage to eat them both, but there was no way we were going to eat all of those fries. We ended up throwing most of them in the compost bin, but before doing so we weighed them: 538 grams. That’s right – the remainder of one large portion of fries, having been attacked by two ravenous hikers, weighed over half a kilo. Astounding!

Thoroughly full we tidied up, and I showered leaving Robin to do a spot of gardening.

The rest of the day had been spent mooching around the house and the ‘hood. Robin made a lovely sausage goulash:

Jamie arrived home from work, and we enjoyed a smashing meal. Here are my wonderful hosts:

So now for my final mountaineering act of the day, I’m off to the highest non-bunk bed in the world:

Just a quick note to celebrate the first day of my visit to see Robin and Jamie. After a 10am departure from LHR-T5 on BA279 (all rather civilised) I arrived at LAX at before 1pm local time courtesy of this sky-chariot.

It took over an hour to get collect baggage and clear customs, but eventually I got through and was able to  join Robin on US soil for the first time in 18 months. Late October it may be, but I was whooshed to Robin’s home in the E30 325i convertible with the top down, and what fun it was! Here’s a photo of Robin’s car back at his house:

And here are some photos I took on the way there:

After a brief stop at Robin’s house to touch and feel everything that I’d already seen by Skype and blog post, we headed off to meet Mary and the highly amusing Edmund at the Rose tree cottage – a traditional English tea room.  Having sampled what I’m sure is the finest tea on this continent, we moved on to Pasadena, and visited Lucky Baldwin’s English bar. This place was littered with the flag of St George, and served plenty of ales – although it did remind me rather more of a continental bar than an English pub.

From there we moved on to ‘King Tacos’ – where we sampled some cuisine which looked like this:

Despite its appearance, it was extremely tasty, and cheap too! We then retired to Robin’s to catch up with Jamie, where I’m writing this blog post. I’ve been up for over 24 hours now – it could well be time to retire. I hope to report more tomorrow!

I got stuck in the M5 last weekend. Pulling the interior door handle didn’t open the door, the action was a bit sloppy, and the handle didn’t return when released – something certainly wasn’t right.

So I popped the screw cover off, and then paused to take the photo above. Once that screw was removed I could open the door by pulling the entire handle assembly forwards. From here I deduced that the door mechanism was okay, but the handle assembly had just failed with use over time.

A quick bit of correspondence with BMW saw a replacement part (B51.21.8.226.050) ordered for £28.  I hoped I would be able to perform the replacement without dismantling the door, so I used a pair of mole grips to hold the mechanism in place while I removed the old handle.

A comparison of the old and new handles:

I then noticed that there’s a little black arm on the back of the handles into which the door mechanism slots, so that the handle can tension the release cable correctly. This meant that there was no way of replacing the handle without dismantling the door. Fortunately this isn’t difficult: with the exception of a single screw in the air vent inlet, the rest of the door is (alarmingly French-like) snap fit. I worked my way around the edge of the door with a large flat head screwdriver and was soon able to get moving again.

I fitted the handle to the mechanism behind the door card, as shown below.

Here’s a close up – you can see the little black arm that tensions the cable – it works much like a bike brake lever.

Fortunately I had a few replacement clips for the snap-fitting door card, as some were inevitably broken. I have now run out though – I must re-stock but I’m unlikely to remember. Refitting was then of course the reverse of removal, and I’m now pleased to not only to once again have a fully functioning door release, but for it to be nice and new and shiny.

There has been a fair bit of “concern” in the media now that Facebook have launched their new Places feature in the UK. Some of these concerns relate to privacy, some escalate that to safety. “Facebook has gone too far” they cry, “now everyone knows where you are”. Hmm.

I would suggest that Places hasn’t really changed anything at all. The risks associated with notifying internet users of your location haven’t worsened. As social media becomes more and more mobile and media rich it’s not at all uncommon for a person’s location to be deduced from the content they produce.

Facebook wall updates along the lines of “Enjoying a meal at Prezzo with the girlfriend” have been commonplace for years. Yep, you’re out, and your house is empty.

Twitter is significantly more concerning in my view. A geotagged Twitpic around the home? That’s where you live. Tweeting that you’re about to enjoy a week-long holiday abroad? Bingo.

So here’s the thing. Facebook’s Places hasn’t made anything any worse. Facebook’s privacy controls ensure (by default) that only your Facebook friends will see your Places updates. If you’ve got any sense you’ll keep it that way, and you’ll do the same for all the other content you push to that site, including photos and wall posts.

It’s all too easy to complain. Facebook helps me stay in touch with people who have moved away. Facebook’s Places will help me feel more a part of their lives, and its ‘nearby’ feature might just help me catch up face-to-face more often with those more local friends. There are of course risks with publishing your movements on the internet, but we’ve got controls to minimise that risk should we choose to use it.