Surface Rust

This weekend is my bi-annual holiday weekend, yes it is Lemans Classic weekend. I try to get to this every time it is on and think I have only missed a couple. A group of us travel on the tunnel on Thursday morning and return on Monday evening. Unfortunately, this year, work got in the way with 7-10 days trip commencing on Thursday last, perfect timing to screw things up. As I type, at 0730 on Tuesday, I am here

and we have 12 to 24 hours work left. Port is a 14 hour sail away. Last flight to Aberdeen that will allow me to bypass home and head straight for the tunnel leaves Stavanger at 1800 Wednesday. This will mean a 12 hour drive to the tunnel then a 5-6 hour drive in France. Things are very tight!
To cap it off, the Norwegian aircraft technicians are on strike. There are two carriers for the SVG-ABZ route, Wideroe and SAS. Wideroe have this morning announced all flights today are cancelled. Some SAS flights are running, including ABZ at the moment, but that could change at any moment.
So to sum up, I am in the middle of the north sea, with 12-24 hours work left and a 14 hour steam to port. The absolute deadline to leave field and have a chance of making the trip is midnight tonight. The planes are on strike with just a few running. I have no flight booked yet. I have no tunnel booked. I will be taking the ex AS Saab 9-3 convertible that cost me 700 quid and spent not a penny on in the 8 months I have had it (as that is what I took to the airport). I have no european brake down cover in place. I have done no preparation as I expected to be working.
Will I make it? Watch this space.  

Aren't I lucky? I was only trying to sell a car and now I've been offered a job! 

The Saab is currently still running well and quite enjoyable to drive. It's a stopgap though. I'll part it for something very cheap to run when I trip over something. Better not to be too pushed to find what you are looking for like when all your cars have broken down!
Now may I introduce what might just be peak Jaguar for me..
Not long ago @worldofceri (many thanks again!) dropped off this very ratty looking Jag XJR. Looks terrible I hear you cry. Have a peek underneath...
Every part of the underside has been refreshed. It's a rust free shell, factory manual XJR6, which is basically a new car underneath. Engine and gearbox have been out in the process and have everything attended to (the engine internals were obviously fine this being an X300, the supercharger had been rebuilt just prior to taking off the road). Subframes have been dropped and and all new joints, bushes, springs, shockers, every nut and bolt, all the brakes, exhaust. Everything has been done. I took it for an MOT yesterday and the guys there were suitable impressed. Suffice to say it passed. The car has been off the road since 2007 so the first drive was terrifying. So much work done and completely untested. It was all fine though amazingly! Still loads of dialling in, adjustments, alignment etc, but it's all there. The car needs a full respray now. I'm open to suggestion on someone to do the respray, it's very difficult to get a good dialogue going with anyone. There are some good places near me, some too expensive and not available for a long time, others on budget but again booked for quite a long time. This should become one of the best X300s out there once the cosmetics are attended to!
 

I love Stradas too (my first ever car journey was in one), but a wheel design like that would make parking a real pain, I mean how long must it take to get them to line up?!

I love Stradas too (my first ever car journey was in one), but a wheel design like that would make parking a real pain, I mean how long must it take to get them to line up?!

I love Stradas too (my first ever car journey was in one), but a wheel design like that would make parking a real pain, I mean how long must it take to get them to line up?!

I love Stradas too (my first ever car journey was in one), but a wheel design like that would make parking a real pain, I mean how long must it take to get them to line up?!

I love Stradas too (my first ever car journey was in one), but a wheel design like that would make parking a real pain, I mean how long must it take to get them to line up?!

I love Stradas too (my first ever car journey was in one), but a wheel design like that would make parking a real pain, I mean how long must it take to get them to line up?!

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Apologies if I'm covering old ground again, but would a diaphragm from a later mini fit? They seem very similar in style, though you might have to adjust the length of the hooks.
I recall one of these splitting on me and I ended up using cable ties to hold the two halves together. It reduced the 'bounce', though that's arguably a good thing in a mini.

With the allegro sold I now had a 1977 Chevy c10 and a Nissan micra on the fleet. 
 
I’m all for a noisy American toy but that micra. Actually I like k11 micras for their chuckability but decided I needed something a little bit nicer as my daily….
Hence I’ve sold the micra and bought a 1992  merc 220ce. In “Nutra” - named after a semi aquatic rodent. It’s metallic brown basically. Probably a very unusual choice in 1992, long before it was rediscovered by car buyers.
Its also been very thoroughly gone over.  All the stuff that rots or goes wrong has been sorted. 
 
Anyway here is the rodent brown merc coupe










 

We're like pistonheads only without the big budget or the ability to comfortably make eye contact while talking to people

Well, maybe not quite 100 reasons, but it was cheap, local and I wanted one!
As some of you may have seen in the news 24 thread, not long ago I was chatting to a mate about the best* family cars. I settled on a 100 Avant as being my ideal choice of family chod. This made me remember there was a cheap one locally advertised at some point. A trawl through my saved items in Facebook revealed that the listing wasn't marked as sold, but it was a fair while back that I first saw it!

Amazingly, when I messaged the chap it turned out it was still available and I could go have a look.
Viewing the car was a formality, as I had already bought it in my head when he said it was still for sale 😅 I need to go back and trailer it home next week, so I'll get better pictures up then, but for now here she is in all her glory:
 
As it was so cheap I didn't waste much of his time whilst viewing it - he tells me it starts and I've taken his word for it. I had a half hearted look underneath and it looks pretty solid. Oil smells alright. Coolant is growing stuff. It has a boot full of spare lamps and hub caps. It has the roll out luggage cover which wasn't shown in the ad. He seemed a decent chap, and apparently the reason he hadn't sold it yet was because he didn't want it going to scrap. Apparently he had been asked a few time 'has this got the original cat M9?' and he's too attached to the car to send it off to be pulled apart. It went on ebay once, made £380 and then the buyer bailed.
I'm setting myself a deadline of having this on the road by the time the baby arrives, stay tuned to see me focus on literally anything else but the task at hand and miss the date completely.
 

May I ask if you had really identified this as a gap in your fleet before you saw it for sale, or like me, you create and justify a gap after  seeing something interesting for sale.

May I ask if you had really identified this as a gap in your fleet before you saw it for sale, or like me, you create and justify a gap after  seeing something interesting for sale.

May I ask if you had really identified this as a gap in your fleet before you saw it for sale, or like me, you create and justify a gap after  seeing something interesting for sale.

May I ask if you had really identified this as a gap in your fleet before you saw it for sale, or like me, you create and justify a gap after  seeing something interesting for sale.

May I ask if you had really identified this as a gap in your fleet before you saw it for sale, or like me, you create and justify a gap after  seeing something interesting for sale.

May I ask if you had really identified this as a gap in your fleet before you saw it for sale, or like me, you create and justify a gap after  seeing something interesting for sale.

We all know that funnest thing ever is indentfying holes in your collection of vehicles.. those little niches where your Vespa, Morris, Fiat, Ford or bicycle won't do. 
I have one such hole in my collection and an opportunity to do something about it came up...
So I set off on my trusty Brompton on an 8 mile cycle across London. 

Where I then collected this and cycled 10 miles in a somewhat slower fashion. 
 
It's fucked, but it was very cheap. The indexing is all over the place, the chain alignment is wonky, the steering is out of alignment, there's a mismatch between chain and sprockets, the list is endless. The chain skips about 6 times with every pedal revolution which made the journey FUN. 

It's pretty hilarious how lllloooooooong it feels. 

BIKE IN A BIKE FTW! 

I like the Superb following a work trip to Austria in a hired one a few years ago. It ate the miles and the luggage without complaint. Probably the only VAG product I'd consider, must be the eastern European practicality that shows through in the design.
Speaking of eastern European design, can I draw everyone's attention to the East German Intercamp caravan in the background of this shot, a proper AS caravan!

Chod achieved! Now on the hunt for a drive through car wash or cheap hand wash place

Didn't think an Ambitious Roof Box thread would gain much traction so this will have to do here...
At a car park in Mablethorpe.

Been out a few times in the Chevy. I’d got hold of it as a largely completed project as it needed a new engine. It has a replacement 305ci (5 litre) v8 with 3 speed automatic transmission. One of the consequences of the engine swap was that various vacuum lines had been hurriedly cut and not re instated. I made up a few; the the vacuum advance, pcv valve and auto box. The last of these means that the gearbox shifts up as it should as it was holding onto the gears for far too long.
The next decision is wether or not to add more silencing to the violently loud exhaust system. It basically sounds like a dragster which is partly hilarious but basically antisocial IMO. So I think I’ll certainly add more as the new looking system is pretty much straight through with a couple of minimal, demonic looking red painted silencers. I want some v8 noise but not to wake everyone up.
 
Anyway I took it for a quick spin in a sparsely populated area to celibate a functioning gearbox.