New guy here....
At the weekend our previous car ate the alternator belt which, in turn, slipped under the cam belt cover, wrapped itself around the cam belt and - bye bye top end. Scrap one Laguna estate and your truly in need of a big estate to act as the family barge.
Quick bit of reading on here, scout around Fleabay and Autotrader and - this morning - picked up an Omega. 1999 (registered on the 2nd July - maybe somebody can tell me why they did not wait 4 weeks to get a 'V' plate on it - first owner was a Fleet Management company so maybe they didn't care). The Omega runs fine with just a few niggles (see my post elsewhere) - it has the GLS trim so not so many bells and whistles but those it does have all work (apart from the front and rear windscreen washers which have a blockage somewhere - daylight and better weather permitting I'll have a shuftie).
Pretty good with the spanners and I fancied something that was fairly easy to work on and has a good deal of support (plenty of that on this forum by the look of things - if only somebody did the same for the Laguna - e.g. to replace the starter motor on the 1.9 DTi you have to take off a gearbox support and the oil feed pipe to the turbo - Mr Haynes does not mention either
If you leave them in situ you are about 2mm short of space to get the new motor in there no matter how you twist and turn it.
So (hopefully - after a bit of tinkering, cam belt and brake checks the Omega will join the rest of the 'fleet' - 1998 Escort Encore (yes - the one with manual window winders) currently runabout for SWMBO and soon to be thrown to the wolves (17 year old Learner Driver - mini-SWMBO), 1989 AWD TL masquerading as a horsebox, 1978 DB 885 Tractor and a 1968 88" Ser 2a Land Rover.
I've not yet had time to really pull around at the Omega - it all looks straight and clean, oily where it should be and the steering/handling is 'tight' Auto box does what it should in all gears plus sports mode - 104,000 miles from new with main dealer up to 76,000 so (touching wood) it'll last as a lot longer than the 18 months we got out of the Laguna.
Cheers
Graeme
p.s. forgot to add - my only previous Vauxhall was a 1983 1.2 litre Nova Saloon (Whoooo!) which I owned from new for a few years - never put a foot wrong but was only doing 5-7,000 miles per annum
)