katman

I wish mine had !!!! All I got when I bought my 96 Galaxy was the Remote Key. To get the black and red keys and to get the car reprogrammed to accept them it cost me

Thanks for reminding me. I got an OSF puncture on Saturday and then discovered I hadnt got a wheel brace. Luckily there was another Galaxy on the forecourt who lent me his. Must sort it out tomorrow. Keith

I think I prefer that to sitting in traffic watching the needle hit the red :lol:

With an engine like that you could probably drag the shed without wheels and still not notice the diference :) I remember reading an American Custom Van magazine many moons ago and in one review they felt that the standard engine may be slightly underpowered for heavy hill climbing etc and it might be better to opt for the optional larger engine. Standard was 5.7 litre, option was 7.2 litre. By comparison, a Ford Transit came as standard with a 1.6 litre with an option for 2.0 litre. Very few diesel transits at that time. (circa 1979) Regards Keith .... Transit 1.6 owner 1981-1994 when it died :)

Dunno but I have aftermarket Aiwa CD players (which say Sony on the bottom) in both my Galaxy and Hyundai and they have a line in that we use for iPod. Works fine :)

Maybe if you have a 6 litre V8 or something but certainly not a 2 litre Galaxy! Diesels have much higher compression therefore it would take more energy to compress the air in the cylinders therefore slowing you down more. At least, thats how I figure it to be :blink:

Would love to and will as soon as I can afford it. I much prefer diesels. Recently got rid of an aging Pug 309GLD which I bought with 125K on the clock, sold it after 6 years with 280K on the clock to someone who wanted a cheap banger for the Staples to Naple rally. He did nothing to the car other than the oil change it was due for and then completed over 6000 miles on the round trip with no problems whatsoever. Diesels just go on forever and the fuel economy is superb. I was still getting 52mpg when I sold it. Engine was fine but just about everything else was worn out. It looked as if it had been lowered but that was just because the suspension was knackered !!! It took an awful long time to get used to driving a petrol vehicle again. I found the accelleration to be rubbish because I kept changing gear FAR too early. I was changing gear at about 3000 revs and I still forget to change down when the revs get low. Also cant get use to lack of engine braking. I used to wonder why people kept using their brakes when all I used to do was lift my foot off the throttle. Biggest problem I have now is changing between the Galaxy and the other car. Its a Hyundai and the indicator and wiper stalks are the opposite way round :) There was a monster pick-up outside the other day...Dodge 5.7 litre. NICE :blink: Regards Keith

LOL :blink: My Galaxy is a Manual but last year I had a Seat Alhambra TDI Auto as a hire car for work. Initially I kept trying to press the non existant clutch when I got to a roundabout but soon got used to that. When I got back home and got into my Galaxy I was OK changing gears but kept on forgetting to press the clutch when coming to a stop. Dont know what MPG I get from my 2.0 petrol but it isnt much. The Alhambra was well impresive. We had 6 people on board with position 7 filled with luggage, aircon running and a mixture of driving at 70ish where possible or 0mph on large sections of the M25 car park for the journeys there and back and during the week quite a bit of round town driving from the hotel to our course and overall MPG worked out to be about 44mpg Would love a TDI Auto. Maybe when I replace my current one :)

Perhaps Bigjeeze has a windscreen from a Left Hand drive vehicle!

Dead speaker or broken wire in the door ? My rear nearside speaker is dead when the door is open but Ok when closed. Keith

I had endless music in my Transit back in 1981. :huh: It was a Sharp Auto Reverse Cassette but it did get a bit tedious repeating the same songs every 60 minutes though. I STILL havent finished building my InCar PC that will give me access to thousands of MP3 files and now that I bought the wife an iPOD that can plug into the radio in either car, I probably never will. I suspect I will use it for something else. Regards Keith

Hadnt considered that :huh: Will have a good look tomorrow and give it a bit of oil just in case. The other door could probably do with a squirt as well. Its only the nearside that does it and I wonder if someone pulled it out to start with. Regards Keith

Hi All, Anyone else got a problem the the rubber strips in the roof gutters coming loose? My nearside one tends to pop out when I open the tailgate and the last two feet wave about in the air if I dont notice it. The strips seem quite hard and inflexible probably due to age as the car is a 96 model. Luckily the guy at the car wash spotted that it had popped out just before I went through. Once pushed back in place it stayed there OK. Are these very expensive to replace? Regards Keith

Just an idea ..... Maybe an electrically operated damping device which is in the released positon when the igniton is on so that the seatbelt reacts exactly as it does now, but when the ignition is off* the mechanism is damped so that the seatbelt would retract more slowly avoiding the snatching. *Could also damp the seatbelts when the vehicle was in neutral with handbrake on so that passengers getting in and out of the vehicle would have damped seatbelts but as soon as the vehicle was moving or preparing to move, the seatbelts would be back to normal tension. I can imagine how painful this must have been. My windows have been smacked several times by the buckles and I am surprised they havent smashed! Keith

I was told that the milage should be looked at as a sort of sliding scale First couple of years 15000 per year then 12000 for the next 3 or 4 then about 6000-8000 per year after that. The theory explained to me was that in the first couple of years the higher milage is done by someone who buys a new car every couple of years. The second owner would like to buy a new car every couple of years but cant afford it so buys a fiarly new one and changes it after 3 or 4 years By the time the car is 6 or more years old it is often the second car used for shopping and the school run so a lower mileage. It could be total rubbish but there seems to be a certain amount of logic to it Regards Keith

Theoretically the idea behind the code is a good one, in practice, it is not that good. As has been pointed out, the software to "sort out" a radio is available to the criminal fraternity and since the internet became popular is even easier than ever to get hold of. The net result of this is that the ONLY people inconvienienced by the code system are the legitimate owners of the radio who have it stop working whenever the battery is disconnected in the garage, or they leave the lights on and get a flat battery. Sadly this seems to be the way with any anti-crime measures. Anti-copy protection on CD's means that people cant put some of their legitimately bought CD into their PC or some car CD players and have it play as it should. However because it can be played in a CD player the pirates can still copy it by taking the analogue output from the CD player and using the line in to record it. The copy is inferior but the person who buys is at the car boot wont know that until they get it home (not that they should have bought it in the first place but some people always will) and the criminals have still got the same profit. You buy a legally downloaded track from iTunes and it will only play on specific hardware whereas you can play your own CD in any CD player in the world. Diving off into the other thread about speed limits, many people drive "just over" the 30mph limit probably because modern vehicles seem to be geared such that "just above tickover" in fourth gear is about 33-35mph but because of a few who insist on driving between 45-60mph there are now thousands of road calming schemes, reducing limits to unacceptable low speeds, cameras, and speed humps etc. Do they work? ... not really. On the journey I used to make to work the limit for most of the journey was 60 on single carriageway and there were very few safe places to overtake but BMW's etc still insisted on risky overtaking forcing you to take defensive action. They then reduced the speed limits to 40 and the general traffic then started to bunch up. The same people were still overtaking but instead of overtaking a single car were now risking a line of several cars. Speed humps do slow traffic down but shake your car to bits and then people drive as fast as possible towards the next one before breaking hard just while they go over it. Getting back to the original topic I dont think you will ever stop criminal activity and whilst there are people prepared to buy a stolen radio or bootleg CD/DVD there will always be those willing to supply the market. The other thing to remember is that if someone has a Ford Radio, even if they dont have a Ford, it isnt neccesarily stolen. Coded radios have been around for an awful long time now, I wonder how many tens of thousands are sitting in scrapyards all over the country? Regards Keith

Just thinking back to when I was at college and used to look through Haynes manuals in the library. Most cars then seemed to have 43amp alternators with some bigger vehicles having a massive 70 amp alternator. I was deeply jealous of anyone who had an alternator as my Mini only had a 22amp dynamo. (it also only had two fuses on the whole vehicle!) How things have changed !!!! Keith

Excuse the possibly dumb question but I have to a ask it...... does tinting the windows have any effect on the temperature inside the vehicle. eg 1. no effect whatsoever 2. blocks sunlight so cooler 3. black windows make it hotter Also does it make viewing an LCD monitor easier by blocking direct sunlight on it? Thanks Keith

I think you'll find that the Driver and Front seat passenger use those seats....they just dont use the swivel facility :unsure: I know what you mean though. I have swivelled them once (well twice otherwise they would be pointing the wrong way!) and found it to be the most uncomfortable position ever. I would also like to see a center console. Remember in the seventies when all car accessory shops had loads of different center consoles :)

If they are in Black and White then you probalby had a setting wrong in your software and they have been created as NTSC rather than PAL. Regards Keith

I have to disagree with the last comment :angry: There *SHOULDNT* be a problem with no deliveries for a couple of days but due to the mentality of the great unwashed and the was the press play on things, I believe there will be a repeat of what happened a few years ago, it could even be worse. I have noticed that over the last few years an awful lot of normal filling stations have closed down leaving three supermarkets as the main suppliers of fuel in our area. The loss of filling station means fewer tanks in the ground holding reserves of fuel. Once you factor in people filling there tanks when they would normally only have 25-50% of the tank filled and there is then a blip in the apparent consumption of fuel. Once a few pumps/filling stations run out, even the more sensible motorists will decide they had better fill up and it will escalate :blink: In Great Yarmouth, we have problems with filling stations running out over bank holiday weekends due to the number of cars filling up for the homeward journey. I had to fill up daily during the last shortage as in normal useage I was using a tank of diesel every 4 days. The garages were limiting people to

Thanks VR6 Excellent. I will take a look on Monday. On the shopping list Current suspicion is speaker wires faulty on BOTH nearside doors and window control wires on Drivers door :-( I once had a Renault 16 and the one thing I like was that all connections to the tailgate were via spring loaded plungers so no wiring harness to break with over flexing. In fact, when I had a transit, I went to the scrapyard and salvaged some for the the heated rear windows and high level brake lights that I fitted to the read doors :-) Regards Keith

Hi All, I have a '96 Galaxy 2.0 and several bulbs are now blown in the instrument panel so the time has come to replace them. I cant see any obvious way of getting to the speedo assembly or how it comes out so was thinking of getting the Haynes Manual. Basically four questions.... 1. Is it "reasonably" easy to replace the lights on the instrument panel? 2. Are any special tool required ? 3. Does the Haynes manual cover dashboard disassembly? 4. Does the Haynes manual have full electrical diagrams for the car or only parts of it. Then I have to sort out the wiring in the doors as I have two speakers that cut out when the doors are opened and the passenger window cant be operated from the drivers door but works OK from passenger door and central locking. Thanks Keith Thanks

Sadly many of the smaller speciallist retailers have already disappeared. Not driven out of business by the Internet but by greedy chain stores. We used to have 3 specialist record shops in town and they were about the only place to buy records (obviously going back before the days of CD but the point it relevant). Then department stores all opened record departments. They didnt have the wide selection of the speciallist shops but did stock all the chart stuff. This took a lot of revenue from the speciallist shops and eventually drove them out of business. Same thing happened with the smaller electrical retailers and TV dealers who would ensure that a TV was properly adjusted when they insalled it for you. Dixons, Currys et all killed them off. B&Q, Homebase, Focus have destroyed the traditional hardware shops and ironmongers. Butchers, Fishmongers etc have been killed by Supermarkets. Its getting to the stage where if you want anything that isnt mass market you have no choice but to buy online as no one locally will stock it. I bought my wife an iPod for her birthday and wanted to get a USB Car Charger so that we could use it in the Galaxy. Tried about 20 shops locally and had no luck whatsoever. They do exist, Expansis have them for

I had a Mini that was a true British Leyland vehicle. Started life as a 1961 Austin Mini. Engine was replaced with one from a Morris Mini. Brakes from a Wolsey Hornet Interior lights from a Mk11 Jag Instruments from a Triumph 2000 Windscreen washer pump from a Rover 2000 My Galaxy is all Ford. Keith