How nice to wake up in the morning, turn on the pc, check out GJ, and read all these wonderful comments! You make a gal feel gooood! Thanks all! Yes, a lot of patience is needed when you mosaic small knick-knacks with tiny pieces of glass. I had to use toothpicks to clean out the excess silicone that squeezed into the grout lines and that would sometimes knock the mosaic out of place. leveta - I bought the 1/2 inch glass squares pre-cut from an ebay store in America. I could never find glass like that here in Oz for the price I paid. She also has an excellent shipping price and I can get 2x as much glass from her, plus s&h, for about half the price than I can get here.

Fill the tank. Check the mileage reading on the odometer. Run it till it's about out. Fill tank again. Subtract previous mileage reading from current one. Divide that by how many gallons you put in the car. Then post that number. Your 15 gallon tank and car wasting gas discriptions are meaningless. If it's leaking fuel, you'll smell it even if it's just a little. If you don't feel a misfire, the plugs and wires are doing their jobs so leave them alone. If it's burning gas as fast as you suspect it is, there ought to be visible emmissions...cloud of black smoke following you around. If you're going by what the gas guage says without checking, the problem could just be the gas guage. I've seen them read full for 200 miles then drop quickly to 1/4 tank, or drop quickly from full and stay at a quarter tank. If you're going to try to figure this kind of thing out on your own, you got to at least do the math for starters.

Thank-you for the compliment. The thing is I'm not alone out here, and I know a lot of guys that are even better techs than I am. Let's say that's one of the reasons that when I see sham stories like Danielle's on TV I simply don't roll over and let her say what she wants without challenging her. " what do you think of buying a new car and when the warranty is about to expire trade it in" People that do that enable the dealers to build the castles they sell the cars out of. One of my customers had a stroke about seven years ago, and has been disabled since then. He had been to the shop only hours before and I had done a pre purchase used car check for him, and at the same time I was fixing a battery cable on his Celebrity to cure a no-start. Of course it turned out that they needed the Celebrity to run, and suddenly they were not in a position to buy another car. Time passed, and while DV is still no longer working, the kids have made it through college and they have moved to a smaller house and are getting by quite nicely. About three years ago the Oldsmobile Aurora that was still a relatively new car for them when DV had his stroke lost the head gaskets. It's a 3.5l DOHC aluminum block known as the mini Northstar, so that means you drop the engine and tranny as an assembly out of the bottom. Every headbolt pulls the threads out with it, and that means I had to buy a special tool kit which rebores those bolt holes, and installs threaded inserts into which the headbolts thread back into. Combine that with some other service issues that were due to be performed and the total bill was close to $3700. This car was worth nothing in a trade since it was over 130K miles. I gave them their options, anmd let them decide what they wanted to do. If you "assume" payments of around $400.00 a month for a new car, then at ten months to a year they are essentially at the break even point. Except for the little detail of depreciation of the new car the moment you drive it off the lot. Every month past that is a bonus. There is always some risk in any decision. Have an accident with this, and it's gone and you don't see your money for the repairs back. Buy the new car, and while it's not likely that you get a bad one it is possible, and with your current car at least you do know what you have. Today she still makes the "car payment" to a savings account exactly as I outlined earlier. She of course since she was doing that had the cash available to go ahead and decide to fix the Oldsmobile. If the transmission failed on it today, she could very comfortably choose to fix it or go ahead and buy a new one with cash. When she hit 190K miles, she was in for basic services and asked me how much further will this car go? She still loves the car. My answer was basically what I said earlier, it can keep going till the day she decides she does not want to go further with it, or until I tell her it's time. Frankly, I don't think it's any time soon. At least not in the next five years anyway.....

Good idea to check out reputable repair places as one discusses various issues with friends, from time to time. Would one want to check such out with one's *real* friends/family, etc. on Facebook, etc? I suggested here years ago as a Christmas "gift" that we write down the names of all of the people whom we knew from school years on, then try to contact, with email addresses, etc., and send out request for such advice when one has such a need. ole joyful