Loz

It's been a while since i've been to the Pod but last time I went we we're caught out by an issue that's caught many people out apparently and that's arriving in the sleepy little village of Podington some miles away from the actual site! As you can see in this little vid I made of the trip A nice old guy came out to tell us we'd gone wrong, said he normally kept a sign up in his garden for the busier weekends lol I'm off to the Main Event this weekend & I don't want to repeat the mistake, Is it safe to whack the postcode NN29 7JQ into the sat nav? Will I arrive at the right place this time?! Anyone else ever been caught out? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJZUmkZ3LWY

To fix the stripped thread you could have it Helicoiled, though it might be more straight forward to swap out the diff cover. Have a word with the guys at Foresterspares.co.uk they break Foresters so should be able to sort out what you need.

Finally got round to wiring up the spare wheel mounted sub, very pleased with it. :D

All I can tell you is what I've learned from my recent experiences with my two month old purchase. From cold, mine was okay, but after a bit of driving the judder pulling away from junctions and in traffic was getting pretty bad. Replacing the clutch & heavily worn flywheel helped but it also turned out my gearbox was also FUBAR. :( I'm guessing this is probably a worst case scenario & most definitely not the reply you want to hear. Fingers crossed yours isn't as bad as mine was!

No, it was Kwik Fit, Though there's seems to be a good choice around the £300 I might pay a little extra for a really good company. I take it 1st Central are best avoided then?

Insurance runs out end of May, Aviva sent me a renewal quote of £1000 :o So I completely bought into temptation of free cinema tickets & went for a mooch on a certain comparison website & came back with a quote of £279. Happy days!

Refitted my standard interior, ran the active sub leads and phono leads through the cabin and spent an hour looking for somewhere to feed the power lead into the engine bay and then admitted defeat.

Hmm... Odd collection but here goes; 1. First car was a 1985 1275 Metro Mayfair. Loved that car, never let me down drove all round the country in it, should have never sold it to buy... 2. Suzuki SJ413 unknown year. Cowing thing, ripped off good & proper.I was too young & naive to know better, we don't talk about it now. 3. 1993 Peugeot 106 Diesel. Meh 4. Smart Pure City Coupe. 2002 Properly into these little cars, was a member of the Smart club for several years. When I bought the car it was 69bhp standard, when I was done with it, it was at 115bhp from 600cc lol That's when I discovered short wheel base, RWD cars can spin quite easily. :o 5. 1994 Rover 100 Stripped out fully welded roll cage, ally door panels perspex rear & side windows, fibre glass boot & bonnet. 1.8 VVC engine with Quaife LSD sat on lowered & individualised suspension, single box 1.75 inch s/s exhaust system. Drove it daily 40 miles a day to work (nearly went deaf lol) & took it to hand full of Auto solo's. 6. 2002 MG ZS 180 Good cheap fun. 7. 1994 MK1 Mazda MX-5 Love these cars, flappy headlights, great driving position massive fun to drive. Even more so after it got a set of Jenvey ITB's mapped on an Adaptronic ECU! Will definitely get another one of these in the future. 8. 1993 Mazda MX-3 coupe Bought this for cheap transport for £300, kept it a year only had to put petrol in it & one ABS sensor (those things are like hens teeth for these cars btw), was a little sad when I sold it to make way for my current car, my; 9. 2006 Subaru Forester XT Wow had more cars than I thought!

The owner of garage that did the work on my clutch, has a Fozzie the same colour, at first I thought it was him! Can't believe how many Foresters I've seen around my way this week, its always the same when you get a new car isn't it!

Sadly I didn't sorry. Apart from being interminably shy it was also a lady driving and I didn't want to bother her tbh. :D It had a Rossi No.46 sticker on the boot, so it might have been hubbies car.

Sat at the car wash in my Fozzie, just off the Bridgenorth road just outside Wolverhampton. :)

You really, really don't want to drive around Birmingham, the islands around brum may make you go postal! :D

I've owned a ZS180 & loved it, my only advice is to make sure the cambelt has been changed, it's quite a costly job on the V6, mine cost me around £750 to get done. Listen out for ticking for in the intake plenum, the VIS motors can fail & it's a bit of a pain. Also, pop on the forums and look for the Sheddist clutch kit, the upgraded parts vastly improve the feel of the clutch, partly by removing a flimsy bracket & replacing it with a stronger item (I added a braided clutch line to mine at the same time). The plus side is they're good fun and there's no shortage of spares going & with a decent exhaust they sound (almost) as good as a Scooby! K series engines have a bad rep, but replace the plastic dowels with decent metal ones & a quality upgraded HG & they can be fine. My 1.8VVC lasted me a *couple years with no problems. :) *I sold the car after that btw lol

Cheers for the comments guys. Reverse is a little notchy but it's okay & third sometimes needs a little firmer push but theres no crunching, the whole box still feels a little agricultural to me, but I realised today I was comparing it to my previous car, a MK1 MX-5 probably not a fair comparison! I'm sure my worries will disappear once I've got to know the car better. :)

Nothing to see here move along

I've not had my Fozzie long, but since I've had it, it's become clear the clutch wasn't as it should be even though, I had receipt from the previous owner showing it had recently been changed. After masses of clutch judder & difficult hill starts, I knew I had to bite the bullet & get the little red bus some professional help. I dropped it off this morning at Foresters Subaru Spares in Bilston and when I came to pick it up this is what they found... A heavily worn & cracked flywheel, It seems the previous garage neglected to change/inspect the the thing when they installed the clutch, no wonder i was having trouble. I also asked them to change the diff & gearbox oil just for my own peace of mind, it was just as well too! The diff oil was okay but the gearbox oil looked like it had never been changed, it was so heavy with metal particles it looked like silver paint when you stirred it, I'm now worried how long the gearbox will last, but we'll just have to see. The car now drives so much better, the difference in the way the clutch feels is like day & night compared to when I dropped it off! A big thanks to the guys at FSS, really nice down to earth blokes who clearly know their Foresters, i'll be definitely be using them again in the future. :)

I haven't tbh, I've taken the car to a local Forester specialist and explained all that's happened. For the moment I'm confident they'll cure it, finger's crossed!

Mine warms up quickly and I was just as surprised as you. :)

Dropped the car off for a new clutch and flywheel, the guys suspect the flywheel was never changed last time. I may have also just bought a full leather interior which will be fitted at the same time for me. :)

Yeah there's still room room around the wheel in the pic, I was quite surprised to find a full size matching alloy wheel in there tbh. :)

It's pretty severe, especially when performing a hill start pulling out of a junction (I think the hill assist doesn't help it) I get violent judder & clutch slip, pretty embarrassing when in a pokey 4WD that can't pull itself up hill :D It was supposed to have a recently fitted clutch when I bought it, I can only guess the previous owner must have ragged the hell out of it before part X'ing, I'm going see a local specialist this week & see what he says. In happier news; I bought a new powered sub last week to compliment my newly fitted head unit & even though I've yet to wire it up (I'm not looking forward to routing the leads!), I just had to try it out in it's new home.

Tried to free up the boot handle a bit and attempted to remove boot trim to see what's going on in there, gave up because its cold and I didn't want to snap any plastic parts. Then I came in and read up in why my clutch shudders so much when warm. Sigh...

You could try a mobile fitter?

That moment I found out it was the aerial. Sigh...

Repaired the botched head unit wiring and fitted a new double din head unit in place of the single slot left by the previous owner. Cocked up a little though, the model I bought isn't compatible with steering wheel controls, D'oh! Still, all my door speakers now work and it'll do me until I can find a Blaupunkt Cape Town 945 at the right price. :)