One thing that I’ve always been happy to do is go through other people’s rubbish. Simply, it seems to me – and has always seemed to me – that if you can get something for nothing because it is being thrown away, and that item is of use, it’s a win for you.

So right from the time I first got mobile as a kid on a bicycle, I’ve been happy going through bins and scouring the dump. In fact, I well remember early Sunday morning jaunts through the industrial suburbs near where I lived. The trips weren’t random; nope, I’d use the Yellow Pages to find the factories likely to be throwing away the items I was after, consult the street directory to locate the premises, draw up a map, and then head out to find my treasures. And very often come home with just what I wanted.

All pretty logical for a 13 year old.

One local factory made furniture and each week in their skip were five or so 1 metre-square pieces of plywood. They all had an odd keyhole-shaped cut-out in one corner but apart from that, they were completely pristine. So every Sunday I went and collected them, bringing them home on the pushbike. Another factory made insulation, and for no apparent reason discarded batt after batt of fibreglass. Another threw away copper tube, and another often had reasonable sized sheets of glass. Since my interest at that time was solar energy, it wasn’t a great step to construct my own plate-type solar water heaters, low temperature food warmers, and so on.

Thinking back, all I had to actually pay for was a few cans of matt black spray paint and some woodscrews…

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Those of you who have read the series (starts at Using Oscilloscopes on Cars, Part 1 ) will be aware that we’ve recently been exploring the use of digital scopes with cars. As we said in those stories, if you’re doing any modification work that involves input and output signals, the only real way to see what you’re doing is with a scope. Putting my money where my mouth is, I recently bought a digital handheld scope – a Fluke 123 Scopemeter. I got it secondhand but in as-new condition – it’s a product that I have spent nearly two years trying to find at the right price…

In addition to its abilities to display waveforms, it can also be used as a paperless chart recorder. That is, it can plot by means of a line graph the level of a signal over time. Both the time and level parameters auto-scaled, so it doesn’t really matter if you’re logging something for 10 seconds – or 3 days. You can’t download the actual logged numbers from the meter but you can dump the graph itself to a PC. So the logging function of the Scopemeter isn’t as good as you’d get with an adaptor working into a PC, but because of its speed of set-up and ease of use, it’s more likely to be used in everyday measurements.

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Took on a big job the other day. Well, it was big for me. As I have discussed in another column (Driving Emotion), my partner recently bought a 1985 BMW 735i – and I was saddled with the job of fixing the things that didn’t work. Things like the electric seats (which I have covered in a dedicated story), the trip computer and the climate control.

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For years I’ve thought that magazines that test road cars on the track are deluding themselves. The conditions on a typical race track are simply so far away from real roads as to make the judgements gained on a track worse than useless. And I deliberately say ‘worse’ because in many cases I believe that the outcome of a process that involves track testing road cars – and then writing a road test on that car – can be very misleading.

A road car is a car designed for roads. You don’t test a Formula racing car by driving it to the local shops and seeing how many groceries can be fitted in, so why test the handling of a road car on a race track? Race tracks are invariably smooth, they have one-way traffic, they have run-off areas (which immediately makes a nervous car feel less twitchy!) but most importantly of all, the driver always knows exactly the radius of the next corner, the length of the straight, what the blacktop does following a crest.

Simply, on a track you’ll enjoy a car more inclined to oversteer, with much faster responses, and with quicker steering than would ever be pleasant – and safe – on a road.

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For those of you who follow these things, my fiancée Georgina has decided to part with her Lexus LS400. We covered the buying of the car in AutoSpeed (starts at Georgina’s New Car – Part 1) and in the 2½ years since the purchase, she has been very happy with most aspects of it. If you haven’t driven one (and reading web discussion group comments about how it is a boring car, I know that many people haven’t!) you’ve missed a superb 4-litre DOHC V8, wonderfully communicative and progressive traditional rear-wheel drive handling (although in the wet it is noticeably tail-happy), and an amazingly high build quality and equipment level.

And the reason for the sale? Well, Georgina is returning to full-time study and the loan repayments on the Lexus are prohibitive for someone without an income. So the Lexus had to go, and a replacement had to be sourced. The new car needed to cost less than AUD$6000, and I wanted something that would be safe in a crash – as I have said before, the country roads around here are very demanding and we have seen many accidents in the three years that we’ve lived here, some of them fatal.

So, safe and cheap. But then things got difficult. I’d have been quite happy to see her in a two-four-something series Volvo – a 244 or even a sportier 242GT. But Georgina had completely different ideas – and wouldn’t be seen dead in an “old square” Volvo. Hmmm. So what about a Peugeot then? Having driven AutoSpeed’s press test Peugeots – including the 406 and 206 models – she thought that sounded good, until I showed here a pic of a 504 (“yuk!”) and then a 405 (“no, too old and boring” – and yes I know that the 405 is younger than the 504…).

It then started to occur to me that we might have a problem. Six thousand dollars isn’t very much to spend, and since I didn’t want her in an Australian car (pre airbags, their crashability is really quite doubtful, especially when compared with a Euro prestige car) and since an important part of impact safety is to have a largish car, the equation of a big Euro prestige and just $6000 didn’t add up very well. Especially since now the car apparently had to look good as well….

But we went out shopping, browsing the car yards that we knew from previous kerbside crawling were likely to have a good range of cars within budget. One yard in particular was a likely contender – we’d previously seen in it everything from a Honda Beat grey market import to a BMW 750iL! And this time they had an auto Volvo 740 Turbo wagon for $7999.

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One of the unheralded changes that has occurred in engines of the last decade is the use of resonant volumes on the intake. You know, those odd blind-ended boxes and tubes that you can see under the bonnet, tee’d into the intake. Sometimes they’re long and thin, other times they’re short and fat. Often they’re in full view but every now and again they’re hidden inside a guard or under a radiator cover plate. So what are these resonant volumes for?

And how do they work?

As the name suggests, they’re part of the ‘tune’ of the intake system. As more commonly understood with exhausts, the opening and closing action of the valves creates a rapid starting and stopping of gasflow in and out of the engine. Each time the inlet valves close, the columns of gas rushing in towards each cylinder are abruptly stopped. This creates a high pressure wave that gets bounced back along the intake runner. When it reaches the beginning of the runner, it’s reflected back towards the intake valves. If the intake runner is of the right length, the reflecting high pressure wave will arrive just as the intake valves are again opening – which will help jam in more air.

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The other day I was in communication with an engineer who works for an Australian car company. He’s also an AutoSpeed reader, and our discussion initially wasn’t about his company, but about a personal matter. Simply, he had read that I’d bought a 1988 Maxima Turbo grey market import and was wondering whether I’d like to buy the Nissan workshop manual for a car which came with a very similar engine. He had the manual but no longer needed it. The answer was that yes, I would like it, and over some subsequent emails some amiable negotiating went on over price.

That sorted, the conversation turned to a car that he was driving – his company’s latest and greatest.

In one email he described – at some length – what a wonderful car it was. He listed many other cars that he had driven and/or owned, commenting how good his company’s product was in this light. Since I have heard this from employees of every car company I have ever had contact with (ie ‘my company’s latest product is fantastic’) I simply raised my eyes heavenwards and sent back an email suggesting that I’d heard it all before, and could he come up with some faults that the car had?

This is an anathema to anyone who works for a car company: the current model is always so perfect that nothing could be better… until the next model comes out, of course. To give the man his due (I think he was genuinely enthusiastic about the product, not just pushing the company line), he responded with a few problems he perceived with the car.

Trouble is, they were relatively trivial…

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there’s plenty of plumbing through which air has to flow before it can become part of the combustion process. Then of course after the burn has happened, the exhaust – again, a long piece of bent pipe – has to be negotiated. The flow through these bends therefore becomes an important part of performance. Sometimes in automotive modification we tend to think that we are inventing something new, but there are plenty of other industries where the flow performance of long pieces of bent tube is critical to the performance outcome.

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Inevitably anyone who works (in paid employment) and also works on their own car (for fun) will spend a lot of time twirling the spanners in the middle of the night. And that means that – again inevitably – they’re going to have invest in some decent lighting. (It always puzzles me when I go into poorly-lit workshops – you can literally see the mechanics feeling around for things that – with decent lighting – would be obvious.)

As with most houses around here, mine is built on stilts and so the de facto workshop is located under the house. It’s dim under there, even in the middle of the day. The lighting that came with the house comprises two double fluorescent battens – for an area of about 60 square metres. Not good. I rigged some Portaflood-style 150W directional incandescent bulbs over my workbench, but the rest of the space remained pretty dark.

So what to do? I was undecided… so did nothing for two-and-a-half years.

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