MarkW

Yeah, she was well chuffed! To be honest, she drives the XC90 like a bloody rally car, so I'm not surprised she did well...

I went prepared, but the only place you could watch from was the bit in front of the refreshments truck with a 5 mph limit!

Top marks to my wife on her rally driving day at Tong this afternoon: she absolutely spanked all the blokes there and even lapped some of them! The instructor was convinced she drove a high performance car of some kind and/or drove for a living (paramedic was his guess) and was gobsmacked when she told him she drives a diesel XC90 and has a desk job. Nice work Vic!

I had to spend ages peeling superglue out of mine last month after keyhole surgery! In my case the cut was fractionally below the belly button rather than through it, but the surgeon was obviously a bit crack-handed with the Loctite! I'm not a big fan of having my nipples touched...

Don't have any phobias myself, but back in my scuba diving days I did once go diving at Capenwray with a guy who stood on the edge of the entry platform quivering like a jelly. When I asked him what was wrong he turned around, and with a look of sheer terror in his eyes said "I have a massive phobia of fish."

Or hobbled into it at any rate... So, it's agreed then: I post the knackered drive to you, you take a bad tumble on your next trip to the toilet, and then resurrect the data off it in the operating theatre whilst they're re-pinning your leg. Just PM me the hospital and ward number when you're ready...

So what you're saying is that I need to find someone who has done it before, possibly who has a bit of time on his hands but with full use of his fingers, and with access to a sterile working environment like... oh I don't know... say an operating theatre?

Cheers buddy, but it's toast unfortunately: I had my brother try it in his drive caddy at the time and he said it needed professional help, so I'm on the hunt for a reputable company that won't break the bank!

Morning all! I have a hard drive that I removed from a laptop about six years ago after accidentally killing it with a mug of tea. I've been meaning to see if anyone could retrieve the files off it ever since, but as none of them were critical I never got around to it. I've just come across it again in a drawer, and thought I should pull my finger out and get it done. Can anyone recommend a good data retrieval company, and is a light historical poaching in tea likely to pose any problems?

Since Edd China has left Wheeler Dealers I thought I ought to step up and fill the void.

That's pretty impressive customer service! I must admit I've been really happy with mine, and it is certainly considerably better than the one out of the car that I used to shove in my tankbag: you couldn't disable auto-flip on the display, so every time you went round a corner you had to try to read the thing upside down!

I know you're on the edge of your seats with this, so without further ado... Solder the power wires into a 12v plug and add a cable tie to prevent them being yanked out: Give it a good slathering of liquid tape to make it weatherproof: Plug it in: Spot on! Nice and neat, non-permanent, and most importantly still working: That's it! Don't forget to tune in next time when I tackle unscrewing the knackered stereo aerial and screwing on a new one.

For no reason other than that I'm bored at home on a rainy day I thought I'd finally get around to fettling the satnav cradle for my Harley. I know this is hardly riveting stuff, but humour me... Shortly after acquiring my faithful old ZZR1200 I bought a Garmin Zumo for my jaunts across Europe, which I hard-wired into the ignition. It's been a great unit, but it does have a whole load of wiring for accessories I never use. Hiding it all under the fuel tank and behind bits of fairing was easy on the Zed, but I don't want it permanently attached to the Harley. A simple stripped-down powered cradle that can be plugged into the 12v accessory socket in the fairing without a bunch of other cables flapping around is what's needed: Too much linguine! Chop it all off: Unscrew the ball mount and rear cover: There are two red and two black wires to the cradle. These two supply the power - all the others can be chopped off: Find the other end of the two power wires. They are wrapped together separately, whereas the other red and black are wrapped with a white and a green wire. A continuity tester comes in handy if you're stuck: Part II coming up...

I was worried about that, but I think I redeemed myself by letting them watch a couple of episodes of Hill Street Blues. "Judas Priest, Frank!"

It's the school holidays, and I've spent the morning trying in vain to work in a house full of boisterous 6 and 9 year old boys. In the end I rounded them up and told them that if they kept quiet enough for me to work I'd let them watch the sequel to The Thing - a movie so scary that they must promise not to tell their parents I let them see it. They are now huddled together for safety on the sofa, in terrified silence, watching Breakfast at Tiffany's "When does the alien appear daddy!" - "Any minute now. Just keep your eye on George Peppard..."

Indeed - metallic brown and orange! Looks awesome in the sunshine, but in dull weather it takes on the deceptive appearance of a massive motorised turd.

Thanks Mike. I loved the Fat Boy I took out on test and would have had one in a shot, but most of my riding is long-ish distances across Europe in all weathers, and I didn't fancy that on an un-faired bike. Plus the massive luggage capacity of the Glide is a bonus, and the stereo is a novelty!

Right, there's no way of tarting this up, so I'll just come out and say that this is what I traded my ZZR1200 intercontinental ballistic missile in for last year. I'm not quite sure what came over me, other than to say that I instantly connected with this oversized hog in a way I didn't with the mighty Z, which was remarkable only in terms of the obscene speed with which it propelled my rancid body down German autobahns: in all other respects I'd got a bit bored with it. Time will tell if this was the right choice or not, but if I really can't live with it I'll part-ex it for a 2018 Fat Boy, or abandon the whole HD dalliance and get a K1600GT. In black.

As a Speed Triple man I reckon the new 2018 Fat Bob could be right up your street: I took one out and was grinning for the rest of the day - it's the perfect hooligan tool!

Oh you'd be right at home with our lot!

The key thing I've learned so far is to pick your foot up as soon as you set off: leave it trailing behind you - even for a second like you can on a regular bike - and the left-side pannier will run over your ankle and pin it under the bike. Not cool. I actually much preferred the 2018 Fat Boy that I took out on test (aesthetically and in terms of handling) but I didn't fancy riding an un-faired bike across Europe. We'll see how I get on with the Glide, because there's no getting away from the fact that it's a bit of a whale: with me on it and a full tank of fuel it's significantly more than half a ton.

I'm assuming they've stapled them back in the right places: when the surgeon comes in 20 minutes before the op and says "Just remind me which side we're doing" and then draws a big arrow on you in biro, it does make you wonder...

I remember the vicar who came to our house after my gran died 26 years ago, who roared up the road on his bike (a VFR 750, if memory serves). After a couple of abortive attempts at trying to tell me that he knew that which can't possibly be known, or that he had special divine insight that was unavailable to me, he stuck to talking about bikes. We got on famously!

I'm back! It's been a pretty hectic few months here and I've not dropped by much. We expanded our business by building a new lab that is just over ten times bigger than the last one, doubled the number of employees, then acquired our biggest European competitor which doubled our size again, and are now in the process of opening two offices in Germany and one in Spain. In the middle of all that I found myself in hospital for the first time since the late 1970s, this time to have some internal organs stapled back into place after a slight 'motorsports' incident before Christmas dislodged them. Most significantly of all though, the mighty and much-loved ZZR1200 has gone. It was 14 years old and showing its age, and after another of my epic 800-miles-in-a-day blasts across Europe I came to the conclusion that my body (which is also showing its age) is beyond that kind of abuse. My wife also got shot of her ZZR600 at the same time, and the current occupants of our garage are a new HD 750 Street Rod and a 2012 Electra Glide. Any reservations I might have had about becoming a Harley owner vanished immediately when I took it for a test ride, and saw the effect its stage 1 tuned V&H exhaust had on a load of people coming out of the local bible school. Massive tick in the appropriate box as far as I was concerned, and the cash was duly handed over. I'm now getting it fettled ready for its first pan-European jaunt, which essentially means kicking the tyres and putting some Bob Seger on the iPod. We'll have to see how easy it is to live with long term, but so far I'm liking it!

This pair are the reason I recently quit the band I'd been in for the last six years: every new song suggestion was the kind of vapid, turgid dross favoured by the yummy mummies of the HG1 postal district. For a man who started his musical career as the bass player for The Nun F*ckers it was just too much to take.