RickRirai

Thank you young man; on the drive to Calais yesterday it certainly felt like we'd left the best of the weather in Germany!  Calais felt like home, in that the sky was grey and a cold wind was doing about 155mph down the streets.  Fortunately, as the White Cliffs came in sight, so did blue skies again.  
This trip isn't over until I park up in our own Disabled space again, which will be some time on Saturday afternoon, so keep watching as there will be more Spottings (big tease!).

Just returned to AS after a few years away and was enjoying reading your post when I saw the V8 hotel, it's about a mile from where I work at Mercedes-Benz Sindelfingen!
Gutted I didn't log in a few days earlier so missed the opportunity to meet a shiter in the wild 😕
The museums and Autoworld around the hotel are cool, if you're ever back in the area it's deffo worth booking a works tour in the massive Sindlefingen works. It's well impressive.
However, if you or anyone else is in this region this place is an absolute shiters paradise http://www.fahrzeugmuseum-marxzell.de/bilder.html


It's rammed full of all kinds of shite and absolutely astounding.

Yep, been nice reading your adventures anyway and seems like you've brought fantastic weather with you and left it here 😀 
Godspeed to Walsall then!

Yep, been nice reading your adventures anyway and seems like you've brought fantastic weather with you and left it here 😀 
Godspeed to Walsall then!

Aw bugger!  Yeah, it would have been great to have a meet up!  While I've been on this trip, 3 or 4 other Shiters have been the same side of the Channel, but we haven't managed to cross paths.  Thanks for the tips though, in case we're ever back there.
Never mind.  We are now at Dartford for tonight.  Walsall tomorrow.

Just returned to AS after a few years away and was enjoying reading your post when I saw the V8 hotel, it's about a mile from where I work at Mercedes-Benz Sindelfingen!
Gutted I didn't log in a few days earlier so missed the opportunity to meet a shiter in the wild 😕
The museums and Autoworld around the hotel are cool, if you're ever back in the area it's deffo worth booking a works tour in the massive Sindlefingen works. It's well impressive.
However, if you or anyone else is in this region this place is an absolute shiters paradise http://www.fahrzeugmuseum-marxzell.de/bilder.html


It's rammed full of all kinds of shite and absolutely astounding.

Just returned to AS after a few years away and was enjoying reading your post when I saw the V8 hotel, it's about a mile from where I work at Mercedes-Benz Sindelfingen!
Gutted I didn't log in a few days earlier so missed the opportunity to meet a shiter in the wild 😕
The museums and Autoworld around the hotel are cool, if you're ever back in the area it's deffo worth booking a works tour in the massive Sindlefingen works. It's well impressive.
However, if you or anyone else is in this region this place is an absolute shiters paradise http://www.fahrzeugmuseum-marxzell.de/bilder.html


It's rammed full of all kinds of shite and absolutely astounding.

Just returned to AS after a few years away and was enjoying reading your post when I saw the V8 hotel, it's about a mile from where I work at Mercedes-Benz Sindelfingen!
Gutted I didn't log in a few days earlier so missed the opportunity to meet a shiter in the wild 😕
The museums and Autoworld around the hotel are cool, if you're ever back in the area it's deffo worth booking a works tour in the massive Sindlefingen works. It's well impressive.
However, if you or anyone else is in this region this place is an absolute shiters paradise http://www.fahrzeugmuseum-marxzell.de/bilder.html


It's rammed full of all kinds of shite and absolutely astounding.

Just returned to AS after a few years away and was enjoying reading your post when I saw the V8 hotel, it's about a mile from where I work at Mercedes-Benz Sindelfingen!
Gutted I didn't log in a few days earlier so missed the opportunity to meet a shiter in the wild 😕
The museums and Autoworld around the hotel are cool, if you're ever back in the area it's deffo worth booking a works tour in the massive Sindlefingen works. It's well impressive.
However, if you or anyone else is in this region this place is an absolute shiters paradise http://www.fahrzeugmuseum-marxzell.de/bilder.html


It's rammed full of all kinds of shite and absolutely astounding.

We are both shattered now!  In fact MrsR is asleep as I type this.  There's a big car park by the hotel with a BFO Ferris wheel on it and a couple of catering stalls, so we went for a Wurst for our tea... well you have to, don't you?

(This was earlier, cake and coffee; again, you have to!)
Our peace was disturbed slightly by some Fast&Furious types in Mercs and BMWs with pop-fart remaps tearing up the car park.  I thought maybe there was a Meet this evening but I went out for a look later and saw nothing to indicate such a Meet.
Tomorrow we're back on the road, heading north.

And back to our hotel.



(I used to drive one of these for work, many years ago.  It was.... an experience.  SKD 428T)

That was this morning.  This afternoon we moved on to the Mercedes museum.

At last I've managed to sneak out of work and family commitments and have a day out with Brian the Mk12e.  The task was to get the chassis, floor and some reproduced fixtures drilled to enable it all to fit together, I'm not quite finished but most of the more critical holes have been drilled. All this was made quite  tricky due to the fact that the original components are so rotten and lacking rigidity and also have great chunks missing entirely due to rust. It is also true that InvaCar must have hired a Chimp or drunkard to do this job originally as a lot of the holes on the old chassis had been double drilled or slotted, this also made the job harder.  All that remains to be done drilling wise now is to drill a series of rivet holes along the outrigger flanges/floor, this shouldn't take so long as the six hours taken measuring, measuring again, fitting up, removing, measuring again and marking, drilling, re-fitting (yes I'm a slow worker!). Once they're drilled it can all come apart once again, clean and wire brush the new chassis which is still covered in flux and also starting to show surface rust and then slap a bit of paint on.

I am long, long overdue an update.
As I, like many others on this fine forum, change motors on a frequent basis, I have decided to amalgamate all my previous vehicle threads into one easy to locate/ignore thread.
So. Current vehicles littering the Cornish landscape (and old threads) are as follows:
1992 Citroen BX 16TXS - https://autoshite.com/topic/38036-fatharris-citroen-bx-slightly-less-broken-updated-106-minor-update-and-pictures/
1998 BMW 728i (Herman) - https://autoshite.com/topic/23842-fatharris-bargain-basement-barge-hermanthegerman/
1991 Honda Beat - https://autoshite.com/topic/33458-bring-that-yellow-beat-updated-with-pics-712/
1998 Renault Laguna 2.0 RT Sport - https://autoshite.com/topic/34411-laguna-escapades-cheeky-buggers-2303/
1998 Mazda MX-5 1.8 Classic (mk1) - https://autoshite.com/topic/32460-early-mid-life-crisis-the-mx5-story-minor-job-168/
and a 1991 Mini Neon, that's been an untouched bare-shell project since 2015. No project thread for this one, because I'm not keen to be reminded that I've done fuck all to it.
And that's it. No modern dailies to fall back on. MrsH runs the Laguna, and the rest are my burden to bear!
 
Full driveway shot:


So, what's happened since the threads were all last updated?

Glad you asked.
 
 
 

When we bought this house in '16, the garage had a partition room at the back. Fully soundproofed, it was the previous owners' music room. For a couple of years, we left it at that, using the back room to stores the Mini bits, and the main garage held the shell, my tools and the tumble drier.

Eventually, I bought the MX-5 and decided I'd much rather have it nice and dry in the evenings, so after a few beers, I got my hammers out and took the partition wall down.

Took a while, but eventually, I was left with no wall, but a lot of mess to clean up:

Eventually, after much sweeping, shifting and organising, I finally got to a point where the Mini and the MX5 could live indoors in harmony. A crude workbench was fashioned down the side from a leftover bit of kitchen worktop, balanced on top of my rolling toolbox and another metal storage box.

This was all done in Aug '18. The Beat was purchased in Oct '18 and immediately leapfrogged the queue to live indoors, leaving the Mazda to stay outside in the pissing rain. Sorry Mazda.
Now, the eagle-eyed amongst you would have noticed the plug sockets and light switches dangling from the wall. These were formerly attached to the partition wall, and just stayed dangling there, getting in everyones way until recently. With me finally calling time on the Mini, the BX needed to be the next priority to come inside for some work.
So, with all the cars evicted onto the driveway, the first port of call was to ensure the Beat and Mini were adequately protected from the elements during their time outside. The Beat was easy, we had the cover from the MX-5 and some bungee cords, thankfully in the nick of time, as it pissed down just as the cover was thrown on!
The Mini shell was a bit trickier, the shell sat on a wooden pallet on wheels, so we just bought a really sturdy large tarpaulin and stapled it all the way around in such a way that rain would just run down and off the car. Winner!

Next job was to relocate the light switch and plug sockets to the walls/ceiling to make some space.

Then came the massive fucking around of shifting stuff around to achieve the goal:


The vision was slowly starting to come together, thanks to my willing volunteer MrsH

My £2.50 hardtop stowage bracket was relocated:

After a bit more tidying, I had the big test. Would/Could Herman fit in the garage?
The answer?

Happy days. With the BX in there, as was the intention, there was plenty of walking round room too!

And empty, there's plenty of room for DIY projects. A lot of the racking will go when the Mini leaves.

Then, using the spare chipboard left over from ripping down the partition wall, I hung it back up intending to use it as a tool shadowboard. 

Thankfully, someone on Facebook was disposing of a set of bedroom cabinets for free. A quick visit, some screws and baton provided me with the final product:

Finally for inside, in order to free some surface space, I mounted the stereo to the sides of the cabinets and added a Bluetooth adapter. I also assigned the most important cupboard in a garage:


Lastly, my next door neighbour gave me a spare sodium street lamp he had kicking about. A quick loom knocked up to check it works:

Then it was a case of mounting it on top of the garage and wiring it up. 

 
(Ignore the blanket, that was just on there to test the light sensor!)
And when night falls, the garage and driveway are suitably illuminated, as is half the garden.

So, I now have a garage I can actually work in, and a project car I'm really keen to get back on the road.

That's me up to date now, so any and all car goings-on will all fall within this post.
Thanks for reading
 

Wee bit of Toledo tinkering today. Fitted a new choke cable as the old one had seized up. Toledo specific ones aren't available and dolomite ones are shorter but I thought I'd give one a go to retain the same look on the dash. None of the longer "universal" cables look the same unfortunately.The new cable is about 6" shorter and has a pretty tortured bend in it now but still seems content to work just fine so I'm calling it a win. You can see in the pic just how far away it is from  the clip on the rocker cover it's supposed to be connected to!

As well as this I also cleaned up all the ground points and all the connections on the starter solenoid. The end result was it firing up straight away in freezing conditions even though it had sat for several weeks. Very happy with that and have shelved plans to revert back to a ballasted coil to assist starting. 
Just a pity all the roads round here have been freshly salted or I'd be using it for the next lockdown approved shopping trip.

Obligatory snow post.

Driving back from work on Friday, at dropping my phone and smashing the screen to bits, they Multipla was reluctant to go into 5th.
Then extremely reluctant to leave 5th. Drove home like Michael Schumacher did that time he won a race stuck in 5th and left it until today.

The black arm at the top is meant to be attached to the grey ball just below it (above the green painted bolt on the left).
The arm was attached by the last scrap of metal and came off in my hand mate.

Secondhand replacement found on eBay for £33

Found a rear wheel arch / sill horror story behind the sill trim on the missises 96 Passat. 


so set to work on that. There is a recess at the bottom of the wheel arch that's filled with wax but holds mud and just rots right back through the arch and sill




not perfect but should give a few more years service now...

Found a rear wheel arch / sill horror story behind the sill trim on the missises 96 Passat. 


so set to work on that. There is a recess at the bottom of the wheel arch that's filled with wax but holds mud and just rots right back through the arch and sill




not perfect but should give a few more years service now...

@RickRirai that XL looks fantastic!

Double good day today, got the Escort through the TÜV (MOT) so that's another 2 years till the next one. Not a single advisory either and it's eligible for an historic vehicle plate too. 

 
Also just got back from a long trip through S.Germany and Austria in the missus's 3B5, although it's the most modern of our cars it has been something of a star performer and just ticked over 200K.
Here it is at the start of the Silvretta-Hochalpenstraße which was blocked with snow very soon after.

A fantastic road though, I think the Escort deserves a blast along it in the summer, I've only ever done it on bikes. 
Check it out on Google if you've never seen it...you can see why it's liable to snow blockage in winter...

Maybe, the pistes last year were very bare. Although this year it was reasonable much to our surprise.
Cheers mate, the best thing is it only cost me 50 euros. Just saw it in the paper and though I'll have that. It had a Bluetooth stereo too which I gave to the missus and managed to find the original tape player on eBay. I just had to replace the water pump and weld an exhaust to fit.
Now I think about it it was actually 50 euros ono. I didnt have the heart to haggle though, I just handed over the cash and drove off.

I tidied my house in about 2 hours last night. I'm impressed.

Double good day today, got the Escort through the TÜV (MOT) so that's another 2 years till the next one. Not a single advisory either and it's eligible for an historic vehicle plate too. 

 
Also just got back from a long trip through S.Germany and Austria in the missus's 3B5, although it's the most modern of our cars it has been something of a star performer and just ticked over 200K.
Here it is at the start of the Silvretta-Hochalpenstraße which was blocked with snow very soon after.

A fantastic road though, I think the Escort deserves a blast along it in the summer, I've only ever done it on bikes. 
Check it out on Google if you've never seen it...you can see why it's liable to snow blockage in winter...