Everything Else

It's been a while but I think the VW box was the basis for the Hewland Mk IV and the later FT-200 gearboxes. Maybe you could slide in a Hewland gearbox

Far as I know the 901* gearbox was a net-new design. But you can also fit a later 915 gearbox if you flip the ring and pinion gears, and I think the same is true for the earlier 930's 4-speed gearbox. The much later G50 gearbox has to be run literally upside-down, but I understand that otherwise it goes in relatively easily.

Other swaps are possible - people do find ways to get things like 1998+ Porsche and VW/Audi gearboxes in, typically with cable shifters, but that's still an area I need to become more familiar with.


* The 911 was originally the Typ 901 , but Peugot forced Porsche not to use 90X model numbers for mass market cars, perhaps after the 904 was sold for both competition and street use in the mid-60s...

Not sure why you did it, but you're livin life! And that's what counts :-)

Because life isn't really about profits ?

@skywriter: Got tired of Europe, to be quite honest. Life's sure much harder here, but more redeeming, too.

@hamei: Well said, as always.

i feel the same way for the you-es & most of u-rope

i guess you get to meet real persons in afghanistan hakim. what's your favourite part so far, compared to europe?

@fu:

Life here is more immediate, I would say. Like I know EVERYone in my neighbourhood, EVERYone asks after your health and the family. Also people have good people-memory here. I take (standard issue) yellow cabs most of the time and over the (now more than 5 years) people get to know you. So it's funny to have a random taxi stop and address you by name, even after a year or more.

Life's simpler, too. I mean, ok, in Europe it's what - work, play, sleep, repeat. I guess we have more work and less play here. But it's the whole attitude. The fact that whereever you go, if you know people or not, if you're a guest you're a friend of God and you have to sit down and have tea and people will share their food with you even if they have barely any of their own.

I guess it's more heartfelt here. Given all the misery, I guess that's the only thing people have left. Each other.

Favourite part? A few years ago I met a guy who belongs to one of the ethnic minorities (ok, we have A LOT of ethnicities here, but this is a real minority), the Pashayi people. They have their own language, own culture. So I've been to their homeland twice so far, learned some of their language, in return they've treated me like their long-lost brother and I feel privileged to be able to go there because it's in the South-East of Afghanistan, pretty much a no-go zone for anyone who's not from there. I have beautiful pictures from there, just haven't gotten round to putting them up on my (barebone) website yet. Once I do, I'll give a heads-up here. Then everyone can see what I'm talking about.

Sounds like a rather xenophobic place.

@hak:

predictably, you get to live a real life over there. wish you make the best of it :)

ironically, we only get real when things go rough.

not so sure about the "play" part anymore (at least for the majority either in us or eu). more like, work / replace real social life with a "social" placebo on screen / sleep. repeat . gogol was right, madness is a feature, not a bug :)

@winni
xenophobia is what's being pushed back into eu/us as a norm, wrapped into the phony paper of "recession". mere survival for folks in places like afghanistan is a different universe.

I'd think that xenophobia is xenophobia. There are many Afghans in my home country and they aren't excluded from going anywhere, in fact, it'd be against the law. Well, strange exemption or exception then, don't you think? Also, how do you mean “survival”?

indeed it is. and just like any behaviour fueled by fear, it tends to a) drive people mad every time they lose a dollar here or there, and subsequently b) make people blame their neighbours next country/continent/galaxy for all evil


and i always pick a funky neighborhood to reside where no one's excluded from walking around but the bigger picture usually involves more than mine or your neighborhood


we don't have to spill any virtual ink for that, you could post a shot of the average guy in your neighborhood and hakim could do the same :)


a propos, where's you cool habitat at? & what do you think of the current state of europe?

I don't understand what you're trying to convey with the above.



You don't need to know my exact whereabouts, but I can tell you that there are tons of home invasions and robberies in this country. In fact, this week questionable figures (on a scooter) were at the door late at night.

@Winnill & @Fu:

thanks for your comments.

Winnill, I suppose technically you could call this xenophobia. Technically. Practically it boils down to thirty years of war during which the highly heterogenous "Afghan" crowd splintered even more. Most people don't realise that there is no single people called "Afghans". There's a myriad of different ethnicities and languages here. The only time they were "as one" was when they fought the Russians. After that things went bad and a lot of trust went away. So now, even from village to village and valley to valley, if you ain't from there you're automatically suspicious. That is until they've spoken to you, formal introductions have been made and you're accepted as a guest. Then it's an entirely different story. Complex country of ours here... I suppose in the West this is not as obvious, due to the higher homogeneity, ethnically speaking. Not that I want to be presumptious here but I guess the differences between a, say, Northern German and a Southern German are less pronounced than between a Uzbek "Afghan" and a Pashtun "Afghan". At least the two Germans speak roughly the same language.

Now that my Octane2 is DOA, I am seriously debating whether or not I should continue to run the machine after I fix it. I have the parts, but not the time; wife, kids, gym, books, job, side work, putting holes in cardboard, etc.

Still I'm catching up. But I've caught something outside the forum that I'd like to show you right away, the "Indy Guitar":

It is a US made Jackson straight from 1988 dressed up in a color called "Blue Denim". The picture is a bit misleading, both the guitar and the Indy are pretty similar in color. The Jackson is just a bit more of a showgirl, giving all when the camera is pointed at her. I just couldn't find an Indy that still looks as vivid as the guitar, despite the almost 10 year difference in age.