cheers guys,

yea dj its hard getting the unwrap right, i kinda maybe stole your picture of the tyre pattern(im sorry, ill never use it for anything other than the bump map testing i was doing) because i was intrigued to see if i could get a good bump map, and i literally unwrapped the geometry into one long rectangle, it turned out pretty ok, my problem was the bit of geometry where the uv's at both ends of the rectangle where from the same bit of geometry, required alot of tweaking. lol