Our Cars: 1998 Toyota Avensis 1.8GS
30 January 2015: Sound charades
The Details
| Current mileage | 149,560 |
|---|---|
| Actual economy | 35mpg |
Having invested in oil, an oil filter and a variety of drive belts, I’d imagined that this post from the world of free Toyota Avensis ownership would feature working on the car.
It hasn’t quite worked out like that, largely because when I’ve had the time to take spanners to the Avensis it’s been bleeding cold, wet or both, and when the weather has been OK, I’ve been somewhere else. Really, I should just get on with it.
I’m sufficiently ancient to have begun driving old bangers in the early 1980s, when many of them used re-heated 1950s bits, had a habit of breaking or needing regular work to keep them going, and the allure of fixing cars wore off long ago. However, in keeping with ‘spend no money’ aspect of maintaining a free one, reasoning that these jobs should be relatively straightforward, and that taking a sixteen-year-old vehicle to a garage would inevitably lead to irritating attempts at ‘up selling’ more work, I’m prepared for a bit of DIY.
The Toyota does need a trio of tyres, as these are all coming to the end of their natural lives. Budget covers will suffice, but I’ve discovered that bar the Ford Focus, not many vehicles share the Toyota’s 195/60/R15 tyre size, which means the cheapest ones I’ve found are £45 a pop. My fingers are straying towards eBay, where it’s possible I’ll find cheaper boots, but I'm not sure fitting them will cancel out any saving.
Speaking of eBay, I recently invested £5 on some in car entertainment accessories sourced from it. These were a pair of cassette player adaptors, which look like cassettes with wires dangling from them with iPod-friendly jack plugs at their ends. Thanks to my meanness/inertia, the Avensis still has its original radio/cassette.
Being middle aged and incapable of throwing stuff out, I also have heaps of old cassettes. Some contain less-then-cutting-edge music, others are story tapes. Disinterring these from the bottom of a cupboard, I’m re-discovering venerable recordings of PG Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis stories, read by actors who are mostly now dead. My dad and wife have been augmenting these with tapes that, amazingly, they’ve found in charity shops, and I’ve ploughed my way through literary emetic by Jack Higgins and Freddie Forsyth, whose compelling awfulness made me listen to them to the bitter end. On long journeys they were better than 'You and Yours.'
But back to the iPod. About five years ago I ran a P10 Nissan Primera that still had a tape machine, and used a now lost tape adaptor to access stuff from the iPod, marveling at how well it worked. Not so the ones I’ve bought for the Avensis. Both make everything sound as if it’s been played under water. They were very cheap, but I do feel unreasonably ripped off. I guess this proves that one piece of car DIY should involve fitting an inexpensive, off-the-shelf CD/radio with an auxiliary jack plug, but a friend is offloading a cardboard box worth of tapes, which I’ll have to listen to first –perhaps when I’m working on the car.
« Earlier: Too much information? Later: Final reckoning »
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