Safe Speed Forums

Maybe I'm in the wrong forum, but this is a general section...

Why don't exhaust pipes on cars last very long? They sell us stainless exhaust pipes with mid steel welds. So the pipes hasn't rotted but the weld has cracked through and the pipe is still knackered. Surely it is not beyond the wit of man to develop an exhaust system that lasts longer than a few years.

Now cam belts. There must be a better way to drive timed valves than with a poxy rubber belt. Oh, but they run quite. Year right, not as quite as the engine is when the damn thing snaps. Gear driven cams please.

rant over

They rot from the inside, the engine produces water as a byproduct of combustion and this tends to collect in the bottom of the silencer boxes and rots its way out-cars used for frequent stop-start journeys suffer from rotten exhausts much more than motorway repmobiles mainly because the exhaust is almost always cold and the water that collects in the exhaust doesn't get a chance to be evaporated by a constantly hot exhaust like on cars used for long journeys. Exhausts also tend to fracture and rust if they are not hung properly and/or are shit quality (Kwik Fit take notice ).



These rubber belts are actually quite strong and only snap if they are overtightened or one of the idler pulleys or water pump bearings are shot. They are used because they are lighter, cheaper, easier to replace, quieter in operation and do not need lubrication-timng gears and chains can suffer just as badly if not worse that belts.

Regards

Andrew

P.S. It's always worth paying the bit extra for the manufacturers original recommended parts, especially if it is a popular make of car then the parts aren't that much dearer and last so much longer. [/quote]

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It's a scam........or possibly a scamola


Homer Simpson

The stuff that collects in the exhaust if you don't get the thing up to full temperature isn't just water. It's significantly acidic. Sulphur content in fuel is a problem for exhausts - you end up with sulphuric acid eating away your exhaust from the inside.

I did some work for an exhaust manufacturer in the 1980s.[1] At the time UK exhaust production capacity was around double the market size and a price war in aftermarket exhausts kept quality very low. I don't know if the overcapacity problem has been solved, but at the time there was often a huge quality difference between a typical aftermarket exhaust and the original equipment exhausts.

[1]It was on a very interesting and novel measurement system involving scanning lasers to characterise exhaust systems in three dimensions, mainly to verify production tolerance - something that's really hard to measure by conventional means.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Some parts are "consumables", rather like batteries and brake pads. It may be more cost effective to churn them out cheap and cheerful, than to invest a lot of effort is making them durable.

Timing belts seem to last the distance, and then some. I only drive heaps, and I never change the belts unless I'm doing some work in that area anyway. When they go, they go, and that's the end of it. But I've only ever had one break, on the way to work in a high milage Ford Cortina. In that instance, no damage was done to the valves and I fixed it myself at the side of road. I didn't get to work until nearly lunchtime that day.

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It's called engineered obsolecence! It ain't no conspiracy theory to say that manufacturers' testing is intended to establish that parts will have a certain lifetime which isn't necessarily the longest one possible.

YES your TV/fridge/washing machine will play up 3 years and 2 months into it's life (because stats show most people will take a 2 year extended warranty).

Luckily, I can fix the washing machine myself, whatever goes wrong with it. Hartills, in Birmingham, can supply any part. I can have a go with a TV, although fridges are beyond me. My advice - NEVER buy an extended warranty - total waste of money.

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Funnily enough, I was just giving the exact same advice to someone on another forum yesterday!

How did we get so conned? Why do we all end up paying good money to get a more limited form of redress than what the Sale of Goods Act already affords us for free!

Have Basingwerk and I finally found something we agree on?

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I'd rather have a chain than a belt. I'm told by those who've had 'em that they start getting noisy before they go, which would have prevented by cam belt nightmare about ten years ago. One day I started the car and wallop - no teeth. That particular belt had only been on for about 15K miles and was a proper VW Golf one, so I was less than happy. Towed it to my step-father's place as I had nowhere to work, we took everything to bits and found six bent valves... went to parts place and came home with six new valves which turned out to be the wrong length. Went back with bent valves to show parts people, lots of head scratching and checking the engine number with VW... turned out my Golf had a Polo engine in it WTF Virtually identical lumps apart from some minor differences in the head. Never solved the mystery of why I had a Polo lump, but went back home with correct valves and put the engine back together. B ll cks, only three cylcinders with compression. Oh no, please not a cracked head. Everything comes to bits again and friend of a friend etc gets it checked (x-ray I think). Cyl head turns out to be fine TF, but scratching our own again. Eventually suss out that a seventh valve was bent, but so slightly it wasn't noticeable by the usual method of rolling it along the edge of the workbench. It was just enough to cause compression loss though.
Basically a lot of arsing about for a few quids worth of belt. The new belt we put on was a cheapo one from CAF, ARE or Halfords, and was still on the car 2 years and 20K+miles later when I sold it. I'm now very cautious about cam belts.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

From an engineering point of view, it never ceases to amaze me that manufacturers deem it acceptable to fit "consumable" cam drive belts to engines where the valves and pistons can possibly conflict.

In the early days of toothed belts they were only fitted either to engines where their failure would cause no other damage (not counting competition engines of course).

If cam drive failure would cause engine damage then IMHO a chain is the correct engineering solution, end of story.

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Don't include me in that - I've never bought one! Why do some people get done? Perhaps they are in the thumb in bum, mind in neutral brigade, or the be-gutted underclass as my brother calls them. But I've got a bit of a beer belly, so I can't speak!

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Used to work for a company that was really in love with these (not in the stores so I didn't have to sell the bloody things, thank God). From seeing it myself from the retailer point of view I can only echo what basingwerk and JT have said. Retailers love 'em since they're basically a glorified insurance policy that usually costs peanuts and has a big margin. The ones where I was were along the lines of "if your new purchase keels over, gets damaged or stolen we'll sort it out". In other words, same cover as most customers would already have under Sales of Goods Act and household contents insurance. And since unexplained loss wasn't covered anything stolen had better have a police report or crime number, or the customer could forget it. I don't know if similar warranties for white goods and consumer electronics are exactly the same, but I've not seen enough of a difference to have been tempted to buy one.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

I think it's because people tend to believe things they are told by people they perceive to be experts, or in authority or whatever.

Joe Bloggs goes in a shop and the salesman tells him that if his TV fails after 12 months that they won't fix it, so he pays up for the extended warranty. The reason it doesn't cross his mind that the salesman is lying through his teeth is largely because practically any other salesman will tell him the same lie, so it becomes regarded as truth.

It's just like the "speed cameras save lives" mantra. If enough people in authority keep repeating the message it becomes regarded as truth.

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My Cortina was very old (.e.g 77/78 or so) so perhaps that was why I got away with it.

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I'm with you all the way - I've never been conned into buying an extended warranty.

But one recent event has caused a few doubts... After 26 months Claire's laptop suffered a catastrophic main board failure. No economic means of repair has been found. It's a write off.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

(If the valves strike the pistons in the absence of a working belt then they call it an "interference" design.)

Clearly many professional engineers disagree, otherwise we'd have no cam belts fitted to interference engines would we?

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I think a court would consider 26 months to be less than a "reasonable" lifespan for a computer costing hundreds of pounds. I'd strongly recommend pursuing a claim against the retailer who sold it to you - get your local TSO involved as they are useful in applying pressure, but be prepared to check the legal side out yourself too. In the most recent case I suffered from I found I was effectively "advising" the TSO about the letter of the law. Got my "out of warranty" item replaced though!

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CSCP Latin for beginners...
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...a further point:

When considering the legal implications with respect to retailers / mfrs / warranties etc, it may be helpful to picture where you would stand if you had bought a laptop from a retailer who had (say) built it himself with no other manufacturer involvement and no warranty offered or implied.

Would the law still protect you if it spectacularly "went pop"? If so, would such protection automatically lapse after 12 months?

It is important to remember that any warranty is additional to the legal rights you have as a consumer, it does not replace them. Furthermore, such warranties are actually in place to protect the retailer not the consumer - in effect they are an indemnity that the mfr provides the retailer, to encourage him to sell their product.

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Yep. That route is under consideration. Thanks. The EU rule of thumb is 24 months and clearly it could go either way.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I've never been conned into buying a laptop, either. Seriously, I used to mend laptops. Simple things like new OS's, broken disks, missing files, dead batteries or new screens, or dead keys. But motherboard problems (which I have sorted out on PCs) have always stumped me. Furthermore, I am convinced that laptops lifetimes are about 3 years, with a narrow spread. Many seem to go the same way, slower and slower until they stop. Laptops are hard to configure, hard to upgrade, hard to to mend and depreciate quickly and are easily lost or stolen. There is no room to move inside the case, and parts are custom to that manufacturer, not generic.

My advice, for what it is worth, is to stick with a PC running Windows or Linux (or even a Mac) but don't use laptops unless you really need portability. A paper notebook is more secure, costs a lot less and can do a lot that a laptop can and doesn't need charging!

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My god, basingwerk, that's the second time we agree in a single day.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety