car ideas

The mercs can be solved by having a straight through pipe made to replace the centre silencer, easily returned to normal for sale as well. Mate of mine had a CL500 and that sounded awesome...

You say you like the shape of the 2.5 A6s - which ones are you on about? The early shape (that ad I posted), or the later shape ones?

both are quite nice really, early shape quattro would be nice but seem rare and a bit more pricey looking on auto trader

The cheapest and best way into a decent V8 on LPG is to quit your job, apply for working holiday visa in Australia or New Zealand and buy a flight out there. Your 3k will easily cover the flight and if you're lucky, a workable LPG converted V8 Commodore or Falcon (if not, it's a working visa - you can save up the shortfall in a small amount of time).

LPG doesn't tend to crank up the vehicle value that much as the government provides a grant for up to 100% the value of a conversion for cars with 6 or more cylinders and every petrol station sells LPG. At the moment Unleaded is about 70p a litre, LPG half that. If in Aus, buy a car with Western Australia plates and you have no MOT headaches plus it will be easy to sell outside of WA as people love the cheapness of the tax discs and the fact there's no MOT. Your 3rd party insurance is included in your tax disc (no more costly than a UK tax disc) and top up insurance is very cheap if you want extra cover.

Then you can bumble around having a great experience, seeing amazing stuff in your V8 and finding well paid work along the way with miniscule living costs.

Play it right and you'll make money on your car and will have saved more than you spent while working and come home with as much money as you went in with, to buy another car when you get back and a fantastic experience under your belt.

I did it. I hankered after a VW camper for years, then found out how cheap they are in Australia so went there and got one. Sold it for more than 50% profit over the price I bought it for, 20,000 miles later. On top of this, the work I did meant I came out of the country with more money than I entered with. Net result was that for an 18 month trip for SWMBO and I, we only actually spent 4k so 2 grand each! Cheap holiday or what. If we had flown straight back from Aus rather than popping over to NZ to visit mates and dicking around in Malaysia on our way back for a stopover - it'd been little more than 1 grand each for the whole 18 month trip.

Now you're close to being debt-free you should really consider it - get out of the country while the economy is shit. You can have:

2 years working holiday in Australia (you need to do 3 months in certain jobs - agriculture, country pubs, mining to qualify for the second year) 2 years working holiday in New Zealand 1 year working holiday in Canada I think there's one for South Africa too but haven't looked into it. Your V8 will get carjacked there anyway ;) All the above have cheap V8s and cheap fuel.

What better way of owning a V8 than to drive it around an exotic location really enjoying it rather than the daily commute when it just makes you need to work harder to pay for the damn fuel?

If it is bad, you can rant about the owner on this newsgroup ;-)

Tom De Moor

were you pissed when you typed that last sentance? ;)

no but if you read it back pissed it all makes sense trust

If it is bad, you can rant about the owner on this newsgroup ;-)

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lol