I started building my new drag car on the weekend. It will be a VL Commodore, using a RB30 Six cylinder turbocharged engine

I already have the engine back from the machinists. I had the block chemically cleaned, bored 20 thou, honed, o’ringed, tunnel honed and decked true to the tunnel.

 I also had the con rods linished, shot peened, PR bolts fitted,  match weighted and balanced. The crank was OK as apparently the RB30 crankshafts are nitrided from the factory and only needed a linish.

I also got a bull acl bace series bearing kit and acl race series low comp pistons.

It should be a strong motor and i will post some photos shortly.

Yesterday i was driving into the city and i witnessed something i had not seen before.

As I was entering the tullamarine freeway merge i noticed flashing red and blue lights. Then i noticed that there were three police motorcycles, 2 police 4 wheel drives (unmarked) 3 light trucks and armoured van and a honda staion wagon. All vehicles were in a convoy in the right hand lane except the motorcycles. One motorcycle would stay at the rear of the convoy making sure no other vehicle attempted to get anywhere near the convoy while the other two motorcycles went and stopped traffic on the off ramps to let the convoy past.

I have never seen this before and cant help but wonder what was in the armoured van and the other light trucks. Was it money, drugs, explosives or possibly nothing. They could have been just performing a excercise…. Who knows

Anyway i have also uploaded a picturte of the armoured van for people to look at.

I have been trying to contact netcomm’s service centre in sydney for the last week and a half and all i get is a message “Due to a large number of enquiries we are unable to take your call. Please call back later” and my call gets disconnected. This is absolutely ridiculous and there should at least be a feature where someone can leave a message. And before you say why dont you send them an e-mail. I have tried that too. No reply

Seems netcomm have lost our business and i will be sending all of our products back with an invoice.

I work for a small IT constulting business, and instead of being out servicing my clients I am now starting to spend more and more time chasing up my suppliers. It’s simple really, i order something that they have in stock, and by the time i have paid for it they have shipped the goods out to larger clients like the harvey normans or wherever.

One particular item has been on back order for two months, when we ordered it we were told there would be a 1 week delay. This is embarassing for us as the customer is now undersdtandably very frustrated as she wanted the part for her sons notebook so he could start using it at school this year.

And yet we are held over a barrell, being told “Oh, that part has to come direct from the manufacturer. So we dont know how long it is going to be but i will ask the purchasing officer for that vendor and he will call you back” so we wait for a call back and guess what, they never do. So we call again and then we get told “Oh sorry there seems to be a mix up, your order was cancelled by our purchasing officer” OH MY GOD. And it never ends.

It is not as if we could just use another distributor. We have to use them and they know it. Customer service is not in their interest because they do not need to have it.

Talking to other businesses like ours we often recieve comments like “Yeah, they are really hard to deal with but we just use them because we have to”.

I think it is about time someone, or everyone chooses to do something about this. It is unacceptable that we have to pass on the costs from dealing with these idiots to our customers.

 Have a nice day

This is my first blog so be good to me.