Zelandeth

The other downside of creepers is that they do a wonderful job of demonstrating to you how that driveway that you thought was level really isn't as you wind up holding onto the car you're trying to work on to stop yourself rolling down the nearly imperceptible slope - which gets really annoying in a hurry! Some mats are really useful though. I've got a decent set somewhere in the garage, sadly haven't seen them in a couple of years...

Surprised to see a PCB based fuse box to be honest. I thought they'd be using something more old school than that (like the unreliable nonsense in my Rover which has tried to melt itself at least a couple of dozen times from the looks of things). That looks nicely engineered. Interesting to see the diodes there set up to be replaceable too. Worth getting a meter on those to see if they're all good as those being open/short could well cause odd behaviour from the associated systems. I imagine that's to do with the dash light test (does this do the same as the later ones where all the warning lights are tested when you crank the engine over?), but could be wrong. Tasteful coach line I reckon will actually really help smarten it up a bit, it's an awful lot of solid white otherwise. Your ongoing work with this isn't making me want it any less!

Back in the summer we ripped out an absolute disaster of a hedge and replaced it with a fence. Being really careful to be generous with how much room we were leaving because the plans we have showing the property boundary are fifth generation photocopies from the 80s which have been faxed a couple of times just for good measure. We did try to get clarification from the council just to be sure, but they were totally non responsive. Guess who just had a planning enforcement notice drop through the door this morning claiming the new fence is encroaching on amenity land? Excuse me while I go find a wall to smash my head to a bloody pulp against.

Made a point today before the rain (again) arrived to go over the rear suspension on the Trabant to ensure everything was tight. I just didn't trust it to be given how many things I'd found not to be. Sure enough, both of the securing bolts for the offside trailing arm were barely finger tight. Nearside ones did actually have some tightness to them, but nowhere near what I'd call "tight enough" for the application. I have to wonder if that's what the clonk from the rear end I'd been blaming on either the bootlid or rear seat when driving out of my driveway was...all I know is the car didn't do it when I pulled out today. I'm sure there's a large degree of placebo effect going on simply knowing everything is bolted up tightly now (and the wind has dropped) but the car definitely*seems* to feel a lot more stable when driving in a straight line now. I'm going to give the front end a similar going over at the weekend. I've also got a bit more power available following a tweak of the throttle cable to remove some of the excessive slack. I was easily able to take this much up with the adjuster. This definitely has made the car feel more responsive. Annoyingly the rubbing noise from one of the rear wheels has returned. Even more annoyingly I can't now make the car do it with the wheels in the air. I do note that the offside wheel bearing is definitely more rough than the nearside, not enough I'd worry about it but certainly worth keeping an eye on. Guess I'll need to pull the drums at some point and see if I can see anything amiss. I can't feel it through the car or brake pedal, but the noise like a dragging brake shoe is definitely there. Worth looking in to as I've had a car shed a brake shoe lining before and that was quite exciting when it randomly locked the wheel up without any prior warning. I'd rather not have that happen halfway around a roundabout in MK. Any further ideas for doing anything useful were quashed but yet more rain arriving. Didn't stop me using the car for the afternoon's errands though and once again making the moderns look huge. Could we knock it off with the rain now please? Our front lawn is literally under about 1/2" of water just now.

Every day's a school day. I didn't even know that these existed in automatic form.

A week and a day later this just arrived in my inbox... Yeah, sure...You definitely didn't forget about it for a week then realise you only had one on the shelf. Nope... Order cancelled. Thankfully I've got it sorted now as a local member of the owner's club had a spare gasket set on the shelf they didn't need. Sounds to me like a similar ruse to the folks who phone you up claiming to be from Microsoft telling you that there's a problem with your computer. They phone 500 people at random and if one of them takes the bait they're quids in. Sadly there will always be folks out there who just don't know better and will be lured into this. Just in this case it's a likely non-existent "garage" which has whisked the car away and refused to release it back to the owner until they paid a vastly inflated invoice, I'd wager without even opening the bonnet. I'd be surprised if the vehicle details given over the phone during the initial conversation were any more detailed than "your car" to be honest. They were just fishing for someone who wouldn't immediately hang up on them and would fall for it.

Oh look what dropped into my inbox this morning... First I've ever heard of a courier getting in touch with the sender to say they've lost something without it being chased! I'm absolutely suuuuuure that's what's happened. They absolutely didn't forget about the order for a week then realise they were out of stock...Nope, that definitely wouldn't be what happened. Additional: Had a chat with my usual MOT tester regarding the rust in the boot floor in the Trabant. He agrees with me that it's well outwith a prescribed area so won't be a problem. That's good news for me as it takes the urgency off fixing it. That's a job I'll definitely be farming out to someone with more skills than me. Probably get that and the rear windscreen surround sorted at the same time. The rust in the screen surround is how the water is getting into the boot I have confirmed, so it must be actually holed under the rubber - can't say I'm surprised. Test is booked for the 7th, so should give me time to get the steering rack gaiter changed and properly sort the headlight aim which is still on the low side I think. If you're reading this Steve, sorry for bringing the workshop to a standstill when I arrived due to everyone's curiosity!

We have started having 5-10 seconds power cuts as of about 45 minutes ago. Think we're up to six now. About half the time it takes out the RCD when the power comes back on. Which requires me to trapse out to the garage and stand on things to reach the fuse box that's basically on the ceiling to reset the cursed thing. I am officially fed up with this dance now.

Yep. It's doing it about 95% of the time for me when I click next in any thread now. That's across several platforms.

Still no sign of the gaskets ordered from eBay. Thankfully, a member of the owner's club just half an hour up the road bailed me out with a full engine gasket set they had going spare. Cheers for that if you're reading this! Then was a matter of about 20 minutes to get everything put back together. The fan shroud to manifold cowling hose is now correctly in place. As is the rubber seal between the shroud and the fan body. Still have the gasket sitting here for the other cylinder. I'll go back in and do that as a preventative measure shortly along with a thorough external clean of the engine. However it was raining sideways the whole time I was doing this today so I just wanted to get the job done as quickly as was reasonably possible. Glad I looked up the torque specs for the head nuts - only 42NM, so I'd almost definitely have over tightened those if I was doing it by hand without the torque wrench as that's really not all that tight at all. Seems to be back to it's old self now I'm glad to report.

Milton Keynes council have changed their on street parking. It used to be possible to buy time in increments of 15 minutes - now it's 2 hours minimum. Which given that the city centre car parks are £2 an hour is a bit steep when 99% of the time I'm there I'm running into one specific shop to grab one specific thing and usually I'm there for less than 20 minutes. Guess I'll just go to the retail parks that are a bit further away then! Bugger paying £2 for 30 minutes parking.

eBay seller still hasn't dispatched the head gaskets for the Trabant I ordered on Wednesday afternoon. I am not amused. Main reason I ordered from them rather than abroad was so they'd get here quicker. If I'd ordered from Trabantwelt the parts would be in my hands by now. Yes I'd have paid through the nose for postage, but this is one of those cases where it doesn't matter whether I'm paying £5 or £50, without the parts I can't fix the car! Grumpy Zel is grumpy. So I replaced the rear mud flaps. Car originally had them fitted as the remains were still there. A worthwhile addition I think, not so much for my benefit, but with the state of the roads around here, if it helps stop me putting a stone kicked up through someone else's windscreen it's worth having them. Front ones probably will get done tomorrow if the weather plays ball and I get a spare half hour.

We had a blackbird that did that a few years back. Scratched the top of the doors on the 107 by the mirrors to hell!

See, now all they needed was someone or even a sign at the platform or by the machines you needed to get the (free) tickets for the train from explaining the train wasn't running and to get the 490 bus from wherever instead. Rather than having half the people trying to leave the airport going on a giant treasure hunt to try to work out how to get back to their car. I think that's what annoys me even more is that it's a situation that was so infuriating and could have been avoided by something so simple! Granted, nobody we asked (including at the main information desk) knew of any way other than the train to get between the terminals either, so having someone there who actually knows would be a good start.

Oh this a thousand times. We ran into this problem last time we went to the US. Return flight was direct, whereas outbound was via Paris. So return flight was into T5, we'd left from T4, so the car was at T4. We'd been on the go for >20 hours thanks to delays, had had a horrible flight full of screaming kids, been pissed about by the border crossing, and just wanted to get to the damned car and go home. The discovered there was a signal failure so the shuttle rail service wasn't running. Was an overnight flight as well which is never a great start heading this way. Nearly two bloody hours it took us...we were all about ready to murder someone. If we'd known it was going to be such a bloody hassle we'd just have got a taxi - but we kept thinking "surely we're missing something..." At every step which then went wrong and ended up with us getting further and further away from our destination! Never. Ever. Again. Even if it doubles the sodding cost, we will make sure to fly back to the same bloody terminal we left from.

Ordered a couple of parts for one of the cars middle of the day on Wednesday. Made a point of finding a UK based supplier who had the parts in stock "as that will be quicker than ordering from Germany." Yeah, have they been dispatched yet? Nope! Would they be here from Germany by now? Most likely. Almost definitely by tomorrow morning. Yes it's a minor grump in the grand scheme of things, but it's still annoyed me.

Tell them to shove their tracker where the sun don't shine. The more people who put up with this nonsense the more companies will normalise it and we'll all end up stuck with it. Most likely all it's pulling from the OBD socket is power, I'd be very surprised if the device itself isn't entirely self contained. Mileage recording etc will all be done by it using GPS and regularly phoning home rather than taking data from the host vehicle. Also likely reporting to them if you're doing anything they class as high risk...such as braking sharply, driving quickly, using motorways or accelerating anything resembling briskly. I'm not a tin foil hat sort of person, but this normalisation of people plugging trackers into their cars being required by insurers is something which really puts my back up. It's just one step too far, and I can really see a situation where something happens and then they turn around and say "No, we're not paying out because our telemetry shows you were doing 70.0000002mph at the time of the accident." Being in the future.

Nope, just told to see my GP. Who booked in a phone appointment which they then (again) failed to make, instead sending me the angry letter telling me I'd missed my appointment and that I'd have to rebook. Which was the third time that cycle had repeated, at roughly 12 weeks each time. I'm basically just resigned to the fact that this isn't getting seen to until we move now - which means I hope it's benign. Really really annoying part is that all I need from the bloody GP is a referral letter to the private cover I have though my husband's work. However this is something for which they can't accept self-referrals for - and the lass I last spoke to there really did spend a lot of time trying to find a loop hole for me. She couldn't have been more helpful, but at the end of the day she's not the one who writes the rules.

When I got it the fob didn't work (and was also entombed in tape for reasons unknown). I went through the process to sync it with the vehicle again and it worked perfectly ever after that for me. I can't remember the procedure I'm afraid but I'm pretty sure it was in the handbook.

I've got a bunch of Trabant washer bottles here (seriously, I think I must have half a dozen of them) which wouldn't look out of place there if you want one. Happy to punt one your direction gratis if you let me know where to send it.

Glad you had a better experience with the walk in centre than I did here. Mine was waiting for nearly three hours in the world's most uncomfortable chair then speaking to a nurse for approximately 30 seconds before getting told that I had no reason to be there and needed to see my GP. Yeah, I've been trying to do that now for over a year. Thanks for that.

Today my thoughts can largely be summarised by a single image. When I piped up the fuel pump on the Rover a while back, I failed to notice that the hose clip on the output side of that filter had bound up rather than tightening on the hose properly. This remained unnoticed until this morning when I discovered that the hose had come loose (imagine I probably disturbed it yesterday) and had at some point during the night started to drip fuel onto the driveway. This continued for several hours until I woke up wondering why the heck the entire house reeked of petrol. Of course our driveway drains towards the house, so the fuel had run that way (assisted no doubt by the rain last night). We've had the windows open all day and it's better, but the smell is absolutely still here. I am really, really, really annoyed with myself for missing that. Especially on a safety critical component like the fuel system. Everything should have been double checked. In better news, the prototype fuel return line seems to be working just fine. I had the car run fully up to temperature today without any signs of fuel vaporisation problems as we would usually have been seeing. I suspect I am going to have to add a pressure regulator though. The original return line features a tiny orifice in the fitting where it feeds back into the tank (probably where the line is clogged), so I'll need to emulate that, as without a restriction on the return line it does cause the car to run lean. Hardly the end of the world, and I had kind of expected as much. The biggest headache with this setup actually was trying to find a suitable way to get a line from under the car into the boot where my return line goes into the tank. None of the holes in the boot floor actually go all the way through, just into double skinned sections. Eventually though I found a way to get there via a wiring pass through into the cabin, and then via a grommet under the rear seat. This is well clear of the seat base when it's in place. Hard to see in the photo, but there is a grommet protecting the pipe where it passes through the floor pan too. I will be re-making this in proper fuel line if this is proven to work, I just don't have enough in stock at the moment so wanted to test the theory with what materials I had to hand and I've been tripping over that spool of brake pipe for about a year and a half now. It was basically chosen because it was the easiest thing I could find to join to the existing nylon line exiting the carb fuel feed. Given that this isn't intended to be a long term solution, I didn't want to go drilling holes in anything for this. The fuel gauge sender/feed/return assembly in the tank will be getting replaced when I have the time and inclination to pull the tank, but that's not today's problem and I'd really like to resume the shakedown period in the interim.

Originally no, though I had wedged a bit of pipe that kinda sorta almost fit in there. I do now have a replacement that's the correct size which will go back in along with the cowl. Fitting it along with that sounds far easier than trying to wrangle it into the tiny space available with everything bolted in place.

Who failed to notice one of the fuel hose clips had bound up on itself rather than tighten properly at some point in the past on the Rover? That would be me. Discovered when it dumped an unknown but not insubstantial amount of fuel overnight. I was alerted to this fact by the entire house absolutely reeking of petrol when I woke up this morning. Oh what fun.

This car is one which really has surprised me in a lot of ways. There is a lot more clever engineering in there than you'd think to look at them. I mean I picked this up more or less just for a bit of a giggle, I really didn't have particularly high hopes for its abilities to function as An Car in the real world. However I've wound up using it by default as the daily. It's silly easy to park, the heater warms up in about a minute, the steering is lighter than many cars with power steering but has good feel, and the performance is entirely adequate around town. It's a bit bouncy but doesn't knock your teeth out, the driving position is...odd...but actually reasonably comfortable once you're used to it (though I wouldn't want to be there for hours - that's not really what it's designed for though), the boot is a decent size, and it's astonishingly chuckable in the handling department. Yes it's bleeping noisy - especially if you dare venture above 50mph, the standard equipment lost isn't exactly comprehensive, and there's not really a graceful way to get in/out of the driver's seat if you've got long legs. I'd really recommend having a proper look at, and if possible have a drive of one if you can. It's really quite a fascinating little thing. That's not a channel I've heard of before...why does that look like a potential rabbit hole for me to fall down?