And lo, the era passed when the roads were clear and progress was made in a timely fashion. New term came to be and behold, the streets overflow with people carriers and jeeps.  Ignorance smote the world with increasingly large 4×4s and stupidity spewed huge, windowed vans containing one baby upon us.

As the seasons changed, unhelpful molecules slowed the pressing river to single digits and eventually bring the impatient flow to a standstill to let insignificant streams join the flow.

Woe overcame previously joyous denizens, woe, woe and thrice woe.

I have recently installed a set of db Audio 6.2c speakers into my Calibra front doors. The install process itself was a Herculean task, but that’s another story…

Not wanting to randomly buy some speakers online, I visited the Car Audio Centre in Hyson Green, Nottingham. As I have found with this shop before, most of the goods don’t have prices on. They ask you what you have seen it at. You tell them the website price and they go “Yeah, that’s web only prices, it is £more in the shop”. I asked for a set of Infinity components which I had seen on their website. Again, as many people have found with these guys they didn’t have any stock. What they did have however were lots of InPhase and db Audio stock. Hardly surprising, as these are their own brands. The shop used to be called InPhase Audio back in the day. So they tried to switch sell me onto db Audio.
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Vauxmoore , the Nottingham Vauxhall specialists, have just had a new site from FCS Websites . The new site uses some jQuery trickery for the internal tab navigation, and Jamie’s awesome FormLord jQuery plugin for the contact form

Click the image to visit their new website.

Got a leather interior off eBay for £60, it’s not in brilliant condition but I will use the subframes off the original seats and give it a good clean up before it goes in.

Also got a bargain set of 18″ KEI Force 10 alloys off Migweb and bunged them on. It is sitting too high now and needs lowering. I don’t want to do just the springs, as the original shocks are in unknown condition. That means a matched kit, which will have to wait while I save some pennies!

I thought the ride would be harsh on 18s, but it is about the same. The tyres rumble a little more, but the ride and handling is much improved. I had the front end polybushed at the same time as the wheels went on, so that is probably helping too. The polybushes worked out about the same price as normal crap rubber ones, and will last for as long as I have the car.

Pics to follow when a) I have the interior installed and b) Wordpress stops being stupid and not letting me upload stuff :/

Update: Turns out the Flash image uploader in Wordpress 2.5 is shit, so I installed the “No Flash Uploader” plugin and now it is working again.

A new website has recently been put live for Custom Solutions, a Leicester based engraving and fabrication company. The site is powered by Expression Engine by EllisLabs, our first site using their content management system. Previous sites had used Code Igniter, another EllisLabs product, but Expression Engine made the deployment of the Custom Solutions site even quicker.

Clive can now update his own pages and products through the easy to use administration system, and has been adding new products already! The advantage of having a content managed site instead of having each page hand coded is that the whole site can now be backed up in one go, and each page is guaranteed to be consistent.

Have a look at Clive’s engraving and fabrication at Custom Solutions.