What? All engineering problems have been expressed mathematically for the last couple of centuries, there is no point in teaching engineering principles until you can use them with maths.
Yes because home schooling is going to produce a generation who are able to integrate brilliantly...
In the last 65 years we've gone through a cold war that looks like it is going to rear its ugly head again and currently the largest superpower in the world is going unopposed invading countries and effectively waging war against people of a certain religious faith and at the same time using it as an excuse to bring in restrictive legislation. Even in this country there is a real danger of a party that has no shortage of alarmingly direct links to Nazi Germany ideology getting into power.
Then there's the still very real issue of nuclear weapons, which weren't in the world 65 years ago. The world is far from civilised and the odds are far higher than ever before, learning from past mistakes is essential.
Unless you wish to work as a parts replacer (which does not make you an engineer) maths and physics will be absolutely essential even for simple things like working out sizes and areas of components. Equally building, electrical work and plumbing all require extensive use of maths and physics if you don't want buildings that fall down, burnt out electrics or pipes that don't flow properly. Someone has to do it and its far better to work for yourself or get others to work for you than to be the uninteligent labourer at the bottom of the pile.
No you cannot. There has to be a valid reason for the disclosure of personal details.
I would have thought the simplest approach would be to speak to your insurance company who should be able to advise you on what to do (obviously don't file a claim on your own policy though).
If you seriously want to be able to keep up with an R500 then you'll need something serious, a production based racing car will be out of the question unless you've got a six figure budget, if you wanted to go down the sports car route the fastest 4 cylinder Radicals will be able to keep up. If you have to have a V8 and keep up with the R500 then you'd need to be looking at a very well sorted Ultima on slicks or maybe a T70 could keep up, any Cobra or GT40 replica that vaguely resembled the original would be blown away. Other than that your best bet would be a F5000 car, which would be absolutely terrifying and not something to be taken lightly. Maybe the F1-67 would be something to consider, looks very nicely put together and a lot milder whilst still being pretty wild but it isn't going to give an R500 a fright.
Aside from the issue of trying to build two cars at once I think you should consider something slower than an R500 to start off getting used to a light weight high power RWD track car. It will be borderline too wild and scary to start off with, what is the sum of your track driving a Mini? People who start off racing in high power V8 racing cars just because they can usually end up struggling to build up confidence and then being put off when they have big single car accidents, I can think of several people I know who've done this, one who ended up with broken legs in an F5000 car and one who ended up with very serious injuries in a Cobra replica.
A Rover V8 powered seven will be dull and uninteresting on a track compared to a good K series engined car.
Halfords Pro tools are no where near as good as Snap On tools. They're not suitable for professional use, we occasionally have had to buy them when we're desperate, most of them have been broken pretty quickly. The other notable thing about Halfords range of tools is they are ridiculously expensive, they cost far more than the (non-Pro) Clarke tools.
You can't make a comparison between two different units, irrespective of what the fuel in the American test may have been it is the only fair comparison.
As duke said LMA Eurosaloons is the place to race these cars, I think they're eligible for Britcar but are not competitive, the lowest class cuts off at around the S2000 level (our E46 touring car is currently outright champion 
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).We hired a brand new Ford Taurus X when we went to California, we literally had to wait whilst they got it off the transporter and removed the protective wrapping from it. Within two weeks of reasonably light use (no small children) various bits of trim were past their best, most notably the roof lining that decided to fall off the rear. I've also serviced some of the more popular cars in the UK, notably Neons, Voyagers and Cherokees the build and trim levels of each one is pretty poor compared to European cars.
Taking the Ford hire car we have two similar European Fords, a 1998 Ford Galaxy and a 2001 Ford Focus. The Galaxy has been used and abused and apart from stinking of dog and having oil stains in the back still works perfectly, the seats haven't sagged the air con hasn't had to be serviced, the roof lining is still attached the only bit of trim that has been broken on it is a surround for one of the rear seat belts. The Focus has a fully working interior except for the boot struts which need replacing and the indicators have stopped self canceling. They both have pretty spartan interiors, less fake leather and tacky metal look plastic and they're both built strongly. Even the 1999 Cougar that I'm stripping has an interior that is generally in a better state than that Taurus came out of the factory with, despite clearly being abused with loads of evidence of small children (I removed a few kilos of toy soldiers wedged under the seats when I stripped it).
Yes and the build quality is superb, everything is ridiculously robust and it requires very little maintenance, total opposite philosophy to an American car, there was so little to go wrong in the first place that very little has gone wrong with it
That's great to hear and the sort of thing that I am after, as an engineering student I don't think I could really forgive myself for using an H frame, I also don't like the idea of a side impact with just a door skin and no door bars, so I'm not going to cut any metal out of the drivers door, will also help shift the weight bias to the inside
I've spoken to the guy from Tornado Motorsport and he says he can do me a rear roll bar and stays with a single drivers side door bar for £200. Will take the car down to him when I've got a weekend/a trailer sorted.
No it is not producing 260bhp with a re-map, there is no way Volkswagen spent millions mapping the thing in the first place so badly that someone can press a few buttons shoving a bit more fuel in and making vague changes to timing and get a 30% increase over standard. A proper engine mapper could maybe get an extra 10% increase in peak power but better performance across the rev range at the expense of making the car totally impractical for road use. Of course the rolling road man can make a few changes that don't do a lot then keep some throttle on during the wind down and get the machine to produce a totally bonkers engine power read out.
Well start with the basics, if your going to have to transfer power to the rear rip out the transmission tunnel, fuel tanks and the entire rear suspension. Now it is necessary to extensively strengthen the rear of the car, trying to do this without intruding on interior space in a car that is already to cramped isn't going to be possible, the car needs to be designed to take 4WD in the first place. In a competition car you can get away with having to retrim the interior and get all the structure of the car from a rollcage.
Before you change anything you're racking up a bill of £5000+ to get it done professionally. You'll have to then sort out gearbox/drive transfer/differentials (front/rear and centre) get bespoke uprights designed and manufactured. Once you've got that sorted you'll need new suspension arms designed and manufactured, new shocks all round and if you don't want a horribly compromised car you'll have to redesign the front as well.
Once you've done all this you'll be racking up a bill nearing six figures if you want a half decent result, the car will have some disadvantages but the advantages will outweigh it if you're using the car for some forms of competition use. If you started with a 4WD or RWD car you'd spend a fraction of the cost and get a better result. If you try and convert it by just seeing what works/fits you'll end up with a horrendous mess that will be far worse than the standard car. The only way to get it done reasonably cheaply is to take the complete running gear and suspension of a working 4WD car and put it into a FWD shell, the resulting car will never be as good as the donor, but I can understand the appeal of a Mini bodied Scooby
The ST is bright orange and anything but understated...
Yep the old boy racer bolt on power... :doh:
Not this again, anyone can do basic stress analysis and produce drivetrain and suspension components for a powerful front wheel drive car. Producing appropriate drivetrain will be a fraction of the cost of developing the engine when done properly (rather than by Corsa tuners). There is no limit to how much power a front wheel drive car can safely have, if it has too much for the tyres it should simply spin the wheels produce some torque/understeer, similar to a RWD car but just easier for the average muppet to handle. Front wheel drive cars may get boring when they have enough power to spin the wheels (probably anything more than 150bhp is too much for driving satisfaction in a typical hatch on typical tyres) but they're perfectly safe and easy to drive with more power, there is no limit t how much power any layout or basic design of car can have if designed correctly.
If they have to produce homologation cars I'd suspect it'll be more like other recent homologation runs with cars that are produced but never properly put on sale to the public with most of them ending up as competition cars or being disassembled again. The drivetrain would have no relation to the road car at all and the costs would be huge, so I can't imagine it being like another Cosworth. If Ford wanted to do one they'd have to approach it as a proper road car, at huge cost, which isn't going to happen in this economic climate. They had developed a 4WD road version of the mk1 Focus but it was never sold.
Its very simple, unless the driver in front can find a very satisfactory reason why they suddenly had to brake sharply on a straight piece of road they are going to be entirely responsible for the vehicle behind failing to stop in time and ending up in the back of them.
For £300 it's a pretty straight sound car, the reason it looks such a mess is surface rust and filler left over from the previous owners appalling filler work over what were probably only minor dents. In order to do it up as a road car it would need a new bonnet, new or upholstered seats, the sunroof mechanism would need replacing, the radio would need installing (amazingly it came with a decent one loose), would need a new bonnet cable and front grill (had evidently been cracked trying to release the bonnet) not to mention other bits and pieces like the badge which the previous owner has managed to get filler on. It wouldn't be worth doing it up as a road car given what decent ones go for.
A lot of it is more down to the build quality of cars on the American market, you lot tend to be much keener on lots of fads and a sense of luxury new for as little as possible without any concern over quality. European cars are typically much better built and now most become economic write offs and get scrapped because of relatively minor faults (ie. a head gasket) a long time before any rust appears. I've just picked up a 160000 mile Ford Cougar for £300, drives fine, very tatty exterior (paint/filler/surface rust where the previous owner has made a comically bad attempt to smooth out some minor surface dents and probably cut the value three fold) but most of the interior is exactly as it came out the factory in a car that has clearly been used and abused. There are lots of good examples of desirable cars going for under two weeks minimum wage over here, and certainly no reason why anybody in this country should actually feel forced to take out finance to get a reliable, economical and safe form of transport.
There are sometimes when it is necessary to borrow, buying a car isn't one of them seeing as people are practically giving away good second hand cars at the moment.
Interesting thought, but personally I reckon the bank will look much more favourably on me when I need to take out a mortgage or a loan if I don't have a load of cars and TVs that I'm paying off with the same wage. I absolutely refuse the idea of a credit card, it is just a retarded concept that only ends up in debt, I want my card to be directly connected to my bank account, if I can't afford something now I can't have it simple as that, and if I have to go overdrawn then that will be a psychological kick in the balls rather than just racking it up onto another piece of plastic.
I absolutely hate the way student bank accounts work, with large no hassle low fee overdrafts, the concept of taking out an overdraft with one bank account and then putting it in a savings account and earning interest on it is something I just cannot get my head round.
What's the point? You are driving a cheap mass produced Malaysian car, why on earth do you want to debadge and modify it simply to increase your street cred? If you want to turn it into a cheap and cheerful road rally/trackday car then go for it but you should be starting with putting some decent (not necessarily high performance) tyres on it getting the brakes up to a high standard and putting full harnesses in, after which I'd precede to strip the car somewhat (but do not remove the headlining/all the trim unless you really want a proper competition car). If you've done all that then maybe consider strut braces a bigger anti roll bar and maybe some better quality dampers (do not start your suspension modifications by lowering the thing). If you're not going to be driving the car at the limit (which by the sounds of it given your economy concerns you're not) then do not bother trying to make performance modifications.
If it doesn't feel great to drive, does scary stuff under braking or it suffers from vibrations and you've checked the wheel bearings then a new set of tyres will make a huge difference, they're very expensive, don't expect to get much change from £200 on a car like yours with basic quality tyres (say a set of Eco Continentals), however no amount of modification is going to help if your beautifully refined chassis can't connect with the ground.
I've done the following to mine and had a good reason for each, none were senselessly bolting stuff on to it because I could.
Fire extinguisher (self-explanatory)
Rev counter - felt I needed one with trashing the thing everywhere, bit of a luxury.
Fitted a few interior lights to it - got a packet of stick on battery powered LED lights from Woolies, they're really convenient both for map reading and lighting up the boot if you've got a car with rubbish interior lights (took me a couple of days to realise there were any in it).
Set of Continentals - used to have four different brands I'd never heard of and its behaviour under braking was terrifying, with the new tyres I both feel much more confident it isn't going to swap ends when least convenient and it rides a lot more stably.
Four point harnesses - for road rallying, really didn't like the existing seatbelts (being tall the upper belt mounting was forward of where I sit and the tensioner was a brutal old fashioned type). As well as improving safety they also offer a lot more support, and are a cheap alternative to bucket seats (which I couldn't insure).
All the things I've done to it don't cost a lot, don't affect the insurance premium and whilst they don't make it any faster or add much of the bling you seem to be after all more than pay for themselves in terms of improvement overall.
They're regularly fitted as standard equipment to road cars, if the inferior bolt together ones are illegal then surely you can just get your welding torch out and make it a single piece
I avoid using credit or loans whenever possible.
Update: I'm now the owner of a rather tatty Ford Cougar, probably an inappropriate choice of car for short track oval racing but who cares it looks pretty 
Scrapping a vehicle without a V5?
I wish to purchase a vehicle for competition use and as such wish to declare it scrapped (not just SORNed because it is never going to go back onto the road). I have reason to believe the car is legitimate with 1 months tax and MOT left, however, the owner has lost the V5. What should I do if I wish to purchase the vehicle and then scrap it immediately?
I wonder if I can just tell the previous owner that I want the vehicle scrapped and then be fairly safe seeing as they are likely to do so as it will only result in liability lying with them if they don't sort it out?
I wonder if I can just tell the previous owner that I want the vehicle scrapped and then be fairly safe seeing as they are likely to do so as it will only result in liability lying with them if they don't sort it out?
Really? You have some experience of it? What I saw was cars that looked like they'd been prepared on a shoestring, some quite nicely done like the Calibra that changed hands for £300 recently. Some others only had H frames, far too gash for my liking, and the one on the MX3 was welded so appallingly badly the weld between the horizontal and vertical members on one side had cracked completely. What are people spending money on then other than engines (which I don't really believe seeing as most of these cars couldn't put the power down they had).
We don't have access to any welding equipment at the house where we wish to build the car, and given the fact we have no garage hammering and grinding will have to be kept down to a minimum. There is somewhere where we can make lots of noise and use MIG and acetylene welding, but access is restricted. A box section rollcage is an unbelievably gash solution and really no harder and only a little cheaper to make than a tubeless cage, I am experienced in cutting and fitting tubeless cages to a high standard, it is really not that hard, and if I happened to have a suitable bender lying around I would consider making a good full cage then getting someone to weld it into two halves and install it as a two part bolt in cage, but I don't have this option available to me.
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG