Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Richard Porter. I'm Johnny Smith. And this is On the Other Side of Things, the Smith & Sniff spin-off in which we answer your questions. We probably know how this works by now, don't we? So we answer questions that you've sent us to hello at smithandsniff.com.
Is that how it works? That's all there is to it, really. Okay. Well, yeah, and because you write Ottersot in the title, we know that it's a question, unless someone's playing a trick on us, and that's cruel. Yes.
um but i've got one right here by a chap called keith keith mcrail hello you pair of jethro tull fans i am actually keith but thanks back in the 90s i was working in a local motor factors we had a lady come in to collect a head gasket her husband had ordered earlier that day Later on, a man came in asking for exactly the same head gasket.
When we said it was the second one that we'd sold today, he told us, yeah, as my wife was taking the bus home, she folded it up and put it in her handbag and thus ruined the head gasket.
LAUGHTER
His question is, have either of you ever heard of anything similar? And P.S., he's added a bit of extra as a P.S. We usually found out lady customers had a lot more sense than the men off of the street. And when I started in another motor factors back in the 80s, Our counter staff were all women who really knew their stuff and were well-respected in the local area.
Us guys were kept in the back stores making brake pipes and relining brake shoes, usually buffing off extra bits of highly toxic asbestos liner with an angle grinder and no mask. Different times. Cheers, mate. Thanks, mate. By Keith, a.k.a. Beaker. But that's a whole other story in brackets.
Because his mouth hinges open from the bottom, right?
I love the mouth. I call my cat that sometimes because my cat's got what I call a trapdoor mouth. So this is really good because I do very much miss the older style autofactors and there are still some about.
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Chapter 2: What funny incident happened with a head gasket?
And when you know there's a wealth of knowledge behind the counter… They're great. And I've talked about them previously. The one that my brother goes to that I go to sometimes with the heavy breathing, wheezing guy with a keyboard that sounds like it's from a BBC micro. Plus the vat. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly. Plus the dreaded. Yeah. Just exhaling really slowly all the time.
Like the last breath of a dying body. Yeah. But this is different. This killed me when I read it. Folding the head gasket to put it in her head.
Folded head gasket. I just... It's the conversation when she got home and he went, did you get it? Did you get the head gasket? Oh, yeah. Hang on, it's in my bag. And he's looking and he immediately clocks that the handbag is not as long as... the car that he's working on. And he's like, he probably knew what was coming, but he's got to go. It's in there. Yeah. Hang on.
I'll just get it out for you. What have you done? It's, um, it's, it's a, it's a, imagine it's a wonderful scene to imagine, but, uh, Have I ever seen anything similar? I don't know. I mean, you sort of read these ones and they get repeated around the internet, don't they?
Like some guy in an American car forum going, saying something like, my brakes were squeaking, so I put a bit of oil on the discs and things like that.
Oh, yeah.
Everyone sort of piles in.
Yeah, you wash your car and then you WD-40 the discs and the calipers. Yes. Just to keep them shiny. Yeah.
One I saw the other day where a guy was very proudly showing off on some, I can't remember what the car forum was, but he was rebuilding his engine. He decided it'd be kind of cool to paint his pistons. What? He showed a picture of one painted and one pre-painting. It was a bit like, what are you doing, you wazzock?
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Chapter 3: What irrational car dislikes do the hosts share?
Yes, photographers love them.
Yeah.
Yeah. And I bought one of those and it's very handy because my old laptop used to get crap underneath the keys and then they wouldn't depress properly. And all he did was he gave it a little squirt of air and that would clean it out. And it was great. Were you combing Weetabix onto your keyboard again? Yes. I was just grating some Parmesan over my keyboard for a while and then look what happened.
But the thing is that unlike most cans of stuff... That air, you're not supposed to shake it before you use it. Oh. And if you do, it's actually a little bit of liquid comes out, which is not helpful if you're squirting it into a keyboard. So you do not want that. So you do not shake the can. But it's sort of reflexive to shake a can before you use it, I think.
Yeah, yeah. Like juice, like orange juice or something, I always give it a little shudder.
Yes. Yes. That's the thing. Someone goes, oh, by the way, the cap on that orange juice is broken, so just be careful. And no matter how many times you're told that when you get it out of the fridge, you will shake it. And this is the thing. The can of air, I'd go, oh, no, the H key's not depressing properly. I'll get the can of air.
And I'd grab it from the cupboard, I'd give it a good shake, and they'd go, ah.
right now i've got to leave that for an hour till it's settled down again yeah and it you know just sort of being hoisted by your own petard do you know i wish i'd talked to you a couple of years ago because i had a keyboard that i liked very much but it was getting some bits of detritus down the keyboard and it was a semi-translucent keyboard so you could see what was down there
So I decided to take all of the keys off and find a small old paintbrush and paint and just dust around it like an archaeological dig and then put all of the keys back on. But I took a photo of the keyboard and I thought, there's got to have been a quicker way to do this. It feels like a very long winded way of doing it.
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Chapter 4: What American classic car should you consider buying?
Yeah. We made a video with one, didn't we, years ago? Yeah. But actually, I think the reasons I don't like it is that it is almost exclusively owned by Absolute Helmets. And the other reason I don't like it is actually, I think, not irrational. I think it's rational, which is that some of that car is not as good as Mercedes could make it.
It's deliberately got those very sort of thunky door fits because that's what the G-Class has always had since the 70s. When they redid that car completely, they could have engineered that out, but they didn't. And frankly, they could have made it a monocoque and make it drive better because...
there's no need no one takes those off-road do they not anymore they're worth too much yeah no exactly so it's sort of it i don't know i i it just annoys me because it could be better and it could be nicer to drive but unfortunately the absolute peni who buy them seem to like it the way it is yeah um yeah i that's that's one for me I think. I don't hate them.
I just kind of go, I don't get why some people get a visible stiffy for them. A lot of car journalists as well. And you go, if you really like that car, then everything you ever say about how important handling is, is immediately voided. True.
And we've talked about the G-Class before. And I say the best ones are the base model, non-AMG ones. As soon as you AMG it, it's just all kinds of wrong.
Yeah.
yeah there we go and i don't really like range rovers but we won't go into that keith well yeah well we've you've been there before haven't you but i do i really like range rovers but that's um i just i don't think they're good enough uh and they're too expensive for what they are and the parts are too expensive and they go well the parts are expensive and this is what drives the theft of them apparently so yeah that is true
I don't think they're too expensive for what they are because more like the thing with the Range Rover is that Land Rover keeps sort of upping the price because they're trying to find a point at which people don't pay that. It's mad. I wrote about this once when I reviewed the current Range Rover that when British Airways was losing so much money on Concorde.
they did a survey of people who flew on Concorde regularly. And of course they're all like rock stars and CEOs and stuff. And they said, one of the questions was, how much did you pay for your tickets to fly on Concorde today? And without fail, all of them went, don't know, didn't book it myself. It was probably about 10 grand. And the truth was it was five grand.
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