wuvvum

Posh Mk3 Fiesta Good things wings are non-structural...

Have we had this yet? Diesel 404 with suspiciously bright red paint. Non runner but it's only an Indenor - how hard can it be?

LOL

You're a very clever dog if you use a knife and fork to eat your breakfast.

Wow, that's a late one!

On the subject of unusual Ford saloons, a Mk4 Mondeo saloon drove past me yesterday. I was dimly aware of their existence but I can't remember the last time I saw one on the road.

Nice shiny early R8. Not cheap though mind.

Please buy it and post a photo of yourself driving it.

Jensen 541.

I have a brake pipe spanner. It wouldn't go over the nut - there was so much rust on it that what should have been a 10mm hex was more like 10.5mm. I'd hammered the 10mm open spanner onto it to try and knock the rust off so I could fit the brake pipe spanner on. (It didn't work.)

Yesterday was not a good day. I got up bright and early (by my standards) and went out to have a crack at doing some more jobs on the Maxus. After spending some time trying, and once again failing, to persuade either the bottom ball joint or the track rod end to come free, I decided to go underneath and have a go at cleaning up the inner sill where it needs welding. I then noticed a small hole in the very back of the inner sill on the edge of the wheelarch. I poked at it and it quickly became a bigger hole. Big enough in fact to stretch part way behind the outrigger. So it's now going to need two bits of welding rather than just the one, and the "new" bit I've found is on a curve so it's going to be more complicated to do. I couldn't do a lot about that so I decided to have a crack at the brake pipe. This did not go well. The union where the pipe goes into the flexi was rusted solid, and just rounded off when I tried to undo it. It didn't help that access is spectacularly shit - the metal pipes go up between two crossmembers and then loop back downwards to join to the flexi, so it's impossible to get any decent sized tools in there. Stupid bit of design. At one point during my efforts to get the union to undo I noticed brake fluid dripping out. Initially I thought I'd managed to loosen the union but actually it was the brake pipe that had snapped and was pissing fluid out. So I then had to run around like a twat undoing the brake pipe at the front of the van (which fortunately came apart relatively easily) and plugging the pipe so the master cylinder didn't empty itself of fluid. I was getting extremely pissed off with the van by then, so I brought the newly acquired C5 round to the house and gave it a good hoover out and wipe down. I then drove it to Norwich, and on the way back I got a phone call from my mate who I'd swapped the Dodge Caliber with for the Citroën, telling me that the Dodge was fucked. So I went round there, we swapped back and I headed for home in the Caliber. He wasn't wrong. There was no boost whatsoever, the turbo was making a strange rattling noise, and after about a mile it was chucking out so much white smoke that I couldn't see the road behind me. Fortunately the roads were fairly quiet being Sunday night, but the few cars I did encounter coming the other way all had to brake as they got past me because they couldn't see where they were going. The car would just about manage 50 on the flat, eventually. My mate had added some oil as it was below the minimum on the dipstick, and I chucked another half a litre or so in to bring it up to where it should be - in the 12-mile journey home, it had used all that and most of the rest of what was in the sump, and the oil pressure light started coming on a couple of miles from home. It got me back, by some miracle, but the back of the car is now covered in oil droplets and there's a puddle of oil under the exhaust where it's dripped out. Removemycar are going to give me £385 for it as scrap, which is quite a lot less than it owes me but there you go. I'm officially done with modern* diesels. Today went slightly better - I managed to persuade the brake pipe union on the van to come apart, and I also found another union which I hadn't spotted before halfway down a crossmember, which means I only have to replace 4' of pipe rather than the full 16' I'd initially thought. In fact as luck would have it I had an offcut of copper brake pipe exactly the right length, so I'm going to make it up and fit it tomorrow and the van should at least then be mobile again...

I had a little visitor in the shed today. And that was about the only good thing that happened today.

Had a singularly unproductive day today. Spent a good couple of hours on the Maxus and got absolutely nowhere. I still can't get the track rod end undone, despite soaking it in Plus Gas all week. I tried heating it but that didn't help - not sure if my little propane blowtorch was getting the metal hot enough, everything is quite chunky being a van. The wishbone ball joint showed no interest in coming undone either - I was hammering away at the ball joint splitter but couldn't budge it. Part of the problem is that the ball joint has so much play in it that when I try to get brutal with it it just moves around and the splitter won't stay in place. I've squirted some Plus Gas round where the taper goes into the wishbone, but I have no idea if any of it will penetrate or if it'll do any good if it does. I could really do without having to pay a garage to do it though. I was determined to do something useful given that it was such a nice day, so I changed the plugs on the Innocenti (it seems to be running smoother now but that could just be a placebo effect...) and I got the 107 up on the ramps, gave the underside a rinse off with the 12v jet wash and slapped some Hydrate 80 on the rusty bits. I might spray some underseal under there as well, help improve its chances of surviving the winter. I was pleased to find that despite the fairly torrential rain we've had this week, the Innocenti has stayed bone dry inside. That's good as it means that hopefully I can park it up over the winter without having to put a cover over it - I'm not sure covers do a great deal of good to the bodywork. The Volvo has got a bit damp in the passenger footwell, which isn't unexpected; the Renault 6 had a bit of dampness on the floor but no standing water like it's had in the past, which is good. I did do a buy today. I say a buy, it was mostly a swap for the Dodge, although I did have to stick a bit of money on top. It's quite a posh one - Exclusive spec - although it's a 2.0 HDI with an auto 'box so it's not a rocket ship. It does have a lot of gizmos though, including voice recognition (the first time I've had a car thus equipped) and front foglights which come on when you turn the steering, plus the usual heated electric leather seats, sat nav, auto lights and wipers etc. First impressions are quite good - I think it'll make an excellent long distance cruiser. It does have an annoying rattle from the nearside front over bumps though which I'm going to need to investigate.

@JJ0063 is just down the road from Dereham so he's probably best placed to advise.

Is there an echo in here?