Joey spud

One job I really detest is changing suspension bushes so wasn't looking forward to replacing the absolutely buggered ones on the recently purchased Yaris t sport. They came out after fighting them with a cutting disc,drill and hack saw. The new one's pushed in ok with a hammer and blunt drift. My son had these Lexus rear lamps kicking around and thinks they look good (not so sure myself but I'm old) anyway it's all irrelevant if I don't get under it and repair the axle mounting point. Better look at that exhaust pipe while I'm at it.

Just spotted this old forum favourite in a dodgy part of Sittingbourne.

Live shitting going on right here. My son has a twin turbo 300zx that has sat for a couple of years with very infrequent starting or moving around. He gave it some fresh fuel the other day and it started first go but was popping and coughing and wouldn't clear its throat like it usually does so he turned it off and tried to restart it but it did half a turn then locked up. Putting it in 4th gear i wasn't able to push it forward but it would rotate the engine if I pushed it backwards. So armed with some tools I pulled the plugs out (a couple of them were soaked in fuel) and tried to crank it again which resulted in success and also an impressive jet of petrol being emitted from number four plug hole. I can only stop the flume of fuel if I pull the fuel pump fuse so I guess that'll be a jammed open injector then. Going to put the plugs and coils back on and unplug the naughty injector and see if it'll run again. Edit. Just unplugged the injector and it still shoots fuel out of the plug hole and over the bonnet of the neighbours motabity Kuga. Inlet manifold off it is then...

Ah yes I was smitten when I saw this on Mathewson's site recently,as Derek would say "find another one". They didn't have much else of interest for me last month although a Morris 8 series E that needed as Dave put it "oily ragging" did have me putting an unsuccessful bid in.

So a cheap little 1.5 Tsport Yaris has joined the fleet but alas the drivers side rear wheel is a bit wonky donkey. An hour or so saw the rear beam dropped out revealing the corroded mess that used to be the beams O/S mounting/pivot point. N/S not too bad. O/S is absolutely jiggered. The beam needs a good clean up to see if it's had it or if it'll go again but the car did come with £40 worth of new mounts. It's a real shame as the car has had a recent repaint and even the AC works fine.

That's a shame. She was still very enthusiastic about the collection when we visited in 2019.

I do like a Yaris so we have just purchased a very cheap T sport version that is surprisingly clean and tidy. The down side is it needs a bit of welding on the o/s rear corner as the rear axles mounting point has broken off...

I always thought that old Hillman was a darn cool ride do you know if it's still alive ?

My local operator was Maidstone and District and so anything M+D posted on the internet often catches my eye. The top three images were of vehicles based in the Medway towns and the Atlantean was at Hawkhurst and doubled up for tree lopping duties. The Altantean looking a bit worse for wear is still local and stored at ASD coaches in Strood.

I've got Boris the Morris back on Terra Firma today after nine months of on and off welding on the nearside (blame the bad weather honest gov). He's rockin' his scruffy eight spokes and looking pretty rakish already but he's told me he needs his front end dropping a spline or two.

Does the feed to the coil run through the fuse box ? I was just thinking when it previously misbehaved didn't you have the headlamps on so maybe some high resistance at the fuse box (or ignition switch) dropped the power to the ignition and caused your fail to proceed ?

Yeah it looks like the cheap supply of black leather Ka seats is drying up fast I've seen leather BMW Mini seats in a Minor and they looked good but maybe slightly oversize.

Despite the perfect weather I've not got much done but I did finally stop procrastinating long enough to prime and paint the repairs on the rear panel and much to my surprise they have turned out really rather good. Again it's gone on a bit darker than the surrounding paint and I have made no effort to blend it in or hide the miss match at a panel edge. I fitted the bit that goes under under the door and realised that the quarter repair panel was set too far in so I had to add an layer of metal to make it align better. I've been trying to blend in this repair panel but have been making a pigs ear of it. I think I managed to misalign and distort the quarter repair panel and there is a lot of ancient filler in the car here hiding a previous repair so in the end I ground it all back off and hammered the joint in slightly and tried again. It's nearly there now honest... I never have much joy selling stuff on Facebook as I seem to attract scammers and retards so I didn't hold out much hope when I posted these seats up yesterday. But blow me down a Father and Son combo came over from South London earlier and scooped them up for their 63' Anglia with zero hassle. I really liked the look of these but they are 100% no good for my back. After years of complaining about feeling fatigued and a bit broken i have finally been diagnosed with the weirdly sounding desease Ankylosing Spondylitis and an x-ray shows I now have a partially fused lower spine and joint inflammation more or less everywhere else so I need to look for something more supportive like a pair of leather Ka seats or maybe MGF jobbies.

An assortment of clutch bits turned up yesterday so I promptly cut the new relay shaft about and added a 20mm bit of the old one to it. I also replaced the bronze bushes in the chassis leg that the pedal pivot on although to be honest when measured they weren't really worn at all. It all went together ok but where the relay shaft locates/pivots against the gearbox is a right bodge. On a minor box there is a nice machined housing that the nylon ball sits in but on this Ford conversion there is just a thin piece of steel bolted to the side of the gearbox with a hole in for the relay shaft to protrude through and this metal plate is very flexible and needed levering back into shape. I think i will weld some angle or small box section metal along the entire length of this plate to stop it flexing and loosing its shape again. Anyway the clutch pedal can now be operated easily with one hand whereas before it was a struggle. This overly long brake pipe has been annoying me too and despite my reluctance to keep disturbing the brakes I removed it and took 10 cms off it. There are loads of horror stories on the Minor sites of owners not being able to get the air out of their brakes after working on them but Boris has an excellent full pedal and whenever I have disturbed the hydraulics I have just left a union or bleed nipple slightly open and let any air make its own way out. Maybe having the remote reservoir up high gives you an advantage. I also made a quick bracket to run the reservoir pipe well away from the clutch linkage. The filler work on the arse end is finally good enough but the making good of the quarter panel repair may test my limited patience.

A metal line does make more sense but I reasoned to myself that modern stuff uses plastic pipe work for everything so my repair would suffice. Andrew Eggleton the Morris Minor botherer in Bath recently bought up all of Charles Wares stock so I guess that's something good.

My house has just sold and so I need him useable to drive to my new gaff a mile down the road.

Apparently a 1275 engine and Ford Gearbox combo often results in a heavy clutch and jerky operation which can be overcome by converting to hydraulic operation which is outside of my budget. My pedal is too heavy and has a short action between being engaged/disengaged and the brake pedal is binding up on the clutch pedal shaft which won't help so I pulled the mechanism off the car to have a look. All of the clevis pins are well worn and their locating holes on the pedal and relay shaft are badly elongated. So I have ordered a complete kit of new parts for £32. So this and a couple of cheap pedal shaft bushes should improve the feel but not the heavy pedal. Having a good dig around on a Morris Minor forum and I think I have found a simple (cheap) solution. If you cut and extend this lever on the relay shaft that connects to the pedal by 20mm it lightens the clutch and improves the feel no end. So that's my next step.

I went up the garden to the shed earlier this week and noticed there was a wet patch under the front of Boris which was strange as he has no coolant in him,I dabbed a finger in the puddle and sussed it was Dot 4 flavoured. This old pipe from the brake reservoir had split and emptied its entire contents onto the chassis leg taking my nice fresh paint off in the process. Thinking about it it didn't seem like a smart idea having a metre length of rubber hose full of brake fluid next to a hot engine slowly degrading so I had a dig around the shed and found some plastic pipe to do the long run from the reservoir to the floor mounted master cylinder and connected it either end with two small lengths of fresh 7mm hose. And the exhaust has now been fully fitted without any problems. There's loads of room around the axle. And it pokes out the back just right but it may well turn out to be a bit noisy with just two straight thru silencers fitted and I may have to revisit it at a later date and fit a conventional silencer after the front pipe. Body filler can get in the Sea. I hate the stuff. I can eventually get a half tidy result but it takes me an age. When I fitted the new lower rear panel to the car I should have took more time with the accuracy of the joint but I never do. This side has blended in quickly and quite well. But the o/s is being a right slag but I won't be beaten i want to get it about right and get a top coat on it.

I do like this old thing it's a useful wagon to have on the fleet. It delivered a mobi scooter yesterday and the day before was collecting a load of IKEA flat pack. It's even carted the brides maids about for a mate's wedding and the council begrudgingly let me into the tip as well. It's just a shame the seats are a faff to remove/refit and it certainly doesn't do modern van mpg's.

My house/contents insurance last year was £302 this year LV's renewal quote is £457 and i've never claimed in thirty odd years. I shopped around and got it with More than for £307. I understand inflation and materials/labour costs have increased but when you can move to another insurer and match last year's price then there's got to be something dodgy going on in the insurance industry.

My thoughts are now turning to this awkward gap that's usually covered by the bumper valance/bumper blade. To me the blade and valance arrangement is a bit ugly and gifferish so I am going bumperless or loosing the valance and pulling just the bumper tight to the body but either way the gap needs filling. Something simple like this bit of folded steel would do so I've been collecting shreddies boxes to experiment with.

Thank you. I am still going to apply a good coating of waxoyl to the bare metal surfaces of the suspension and hub assemblies and inside the wings and front panel.

So to recover from crawling about under the Morris and as the weather was good I used the rattle can that I painted the front panel with to blow in around the head light. I left it a day to harden then gently cut it back using a worn out bit of 1500 grit production paper and soapy water then polished it up to a shine with some 3M green cap compound and an old pair of pants The colour is a bit out but where it is it doesn't really show and anyway the o/s rear corner has been painted dove grey instead of clarendon grey at some point in the past.

Well i got my mojo back long enough to degrease and clean where I wanted to splash the stone chip and picked a dry wind free day to do the dirty deed. The interior is now one colour and hopefully the coating might keep some road noise at bay too. I have this idea to leave the sill assembly inside the door shut on show rather than fit their covers as I quite like the agricultural look they have and I can keep an eye on any water/muck that might start collecting there too. The underside side took longer than I had planned for but I had to rub down and paint any bare or flaky areas before I could apply the top coating. All told I hit Boris with four litres of the Gravitex and I still need to do the front panel cross member and o/s front chassis leg. And the feeler gauge bodge on the compressor was sound too. The brake and fuel pipes were unmasked and refitted with insulated P clips where required and the prop got popped on too. It looks a bit like a patchwork quilt under here but it's my patchwork quilt. The fuel tank is also fitted in to its orifice in the boot floor. I bought a roll of this cauking stuff to sit it on and it seems to have done a far nicer job than using messy silicone out of a tube. Last year I loosely fitted the exhaust and so started fitting it for real only to need a little bit of welding on a bracket and have run out of gas again. It looks like it's low but when it's hanging on its rear mount it's about right. Something like that.