Kates Journal

Somewhat tardily I put in a fuel filter on both DAFs today. I say somewhat tardily because after quite a lot of investigation I found this in the carb on Jejy:

Which I dug out with a screwdriver, tissue paper, and cotton buds – giving me this:

Yes it does look like fine-brown sugar. Yes that did go into my engine. Yes I have sod-all compression on one cylinder.

I realised I was possibly screwed when I looked at the butterfly in the carb and saw a layer of crudy-rusty-dirt the same as was in the float chamber. I did everything correctly all the same; popped in an inline fuel filter before I started her, somewhat hopefully. The erratic idle’s gone, but the engine still runs like pants on a stick. I’ve no idea what ‘healthy’ values are for the compression on a DAF 44 – on the minor I think it’s around 140lb/in². Jejy returned 110psi and 70 psi. I know 70 is too low.

There was also a cheerful line of sooty oil sprayed out the exhaust when I moved her.

Tomorrow I shall ring places and obtain quotes. I may as well get them to do the clutch shoes as well, frankly, since the engine has to come out. All please pray.

I’ve also asked JLH for a quote for the minor. That needs prayer too.

Anyway, now it’s time for me to convince Cardiff to let me be a postgrad despite my attrocious grades on my BScs :(.

So, another week of nights approaches, and we’re trying to get a car ready to go on holiday. The minor’s exhaust is fouling the suspension, which should be fairly easily fixed. Rebecca is the most likely candidate; only the noisy gearbox and worn diff and suspension being a problem. Jejy’s right out. Vixy’s heading that way too. In fact, Vixy is looking like she might end up being a parts car for Jejy. In so far as I might pinch the engine, and possibly the seats.

Jejy then gets all new hoses, all new front brakes, new shoes, and a 21k mile engine. Vixy gets a worn out 79k mile engine and shipped off to a new home, keeping her new brake shoes and brake cylinders.

In other news I forked out for a new charger for the batteries. Years ago when I bought some Uniross rechargable NiMHs I went for the nicer charger that they had. It did NiCds and NiMHs and all seemed well, until, obviously, I looked deeper into the ‘my batteries seem to die awfully quickly). It turns out it can’t deal with more than 2,000mAh batteries. It’s timer, not ΔV based, which means it’s never, ever charged the batteries properly. The new charger (VapexTech, had a good review, somewhere) is ΔV based (although it has an over-time shut-off), sports specs for 2900mAh batteries (my highest capacity ones say 3,000mAH but probably aren’t after having never been charged properly), and came with 4 shiny new 2,900mAH batteries. Hopefully the holiday snaps should be snappable.

Also, in the name of longevity it runs on anywhere from 100-250V at anything from 50-60Hz. Woot for portability.

Now, I’m gonna go shower and get working on the DAF. I need to get the rear brake drum off, because there is, what looks like a leak. Impressive, I feel, since when I tried to bleed it no fluid came out. A whole and proper WTF moment.

Anyhow. Shower. Car*.

* We were meant to be going protesting today. Can’t though, ‘cos we need transport. Granted we don’t need transport more than we need to be able to breathe, but it’s all a matter of timing :-/

So, my good friend Nikki rang me up after the last post, concerned that I sounded very down and wanting to check I was okay. She’s kind and thoughtful like that.

So I thought I’d just say, I’m okay. It’s perhaps a healthy dose of realism time. I’ve been sticking solidly to the “the house will sell for enough and we’ll go to Canada” belief because of the options we’ve got it’s my favourite. To use the house metaphore, it’s the one I’ve built foundations for, I’d been looking at the plans and preparing to get contractors. It worked thusly:

Buy house
Fix house
Sell house, use funds thus obtained to enable us to
1) Go to Canada
2) Me to pay off *all* my debts
3) Have some savings to live off in Canada if it all goes pearshaped
And I’d added:
4) Hopefully have enough that some of those savings can be scooped off for our notional world trip in a few years time.

There wasn’t really a plan B. I knew that the housing market was going to plummet in just the way that bricks do, I just hoped it did it after I’d (now) we’d sold. Unfortunately, my hopes lacked the strong foundations of reality.

The new ‘plan’, for want of a better word, is to finish the house (because whether we’re living in it, or selling it, I’d rather like it not to niggle like a splinter. The unfinished floor in the lounge, the dirty old door* in our shiny new kitchen), get it valued and make the rest of the plan based on the outcome of that.

- Sell and get to Canada ASAP
- Sell and move somewhere else in the UK (I don’t need to clear my debts to do that**)
- Enjoy the lovely environs of Slough.

I’m rooting for A, hoping that at worst B comes off and trying to think about ways to make C more bearable. Ironically, the house is coming together to be a really lovely place. The garden should be beautiful this year, and even more so next; there should be fruit and fresh veg, herbs and gorgeous flowers…

If it weren’t for the builder’s yard right behind it would be glorious*** .

Anyway, so I’m okay. I’m just…. disappointed.

In other news, I just realised that I’ve owned Rebecca 17 years. That was quite a shock. And in another quirky thing I’ve never noticed before; she was first registered on my mum’s birthday. How bizzare is that? It’s funny how coincidence pops up on you.

Now, What shall I do with this last hour before I go to work? I’ve swept the bedroom (and put clothes away), and looked depressingly at my Student Loan deferment thing (I think I may finally have to actually start paying back the loans****). Hrm, maybe I’ll watch some Holmes on Holmes.

Tomorrow is another day, and I’m hoping a day when bits of DAF might turn up.

* Needs the 1960s hardboard overcoat taking off, then it needs stripping and painting.
** I don’t, I suppose, technically need to clear my debts to move to Canada, but it really makes everything a lot more complicated if I don’t. And it makes living much harder to do. It’s bad enough here where I can go and chat and shuffle my lack of money around. There… well…
*** It *was*, when I moved in, a wild untended lot. It was pretty.
**** Confusingly my loans are owned by two separate companies. I’m not sure if I’ll get two separate student-loan-deferment letters, and need to make payments to two separate companies. That would be distressing. But only one of them has been flagged as ‘needing payment’ in this letter. It appears I won’t make my dream of never paying them back by remaining a poorly paid wage-slave.

Not all car stuff today; to skip the car stuff just scroll down to where it proclaims that car stuff endeth. :)

So, today I shuffled the cars to get the Minor on the drive, and whipped off the ill-fitting exhaust, separated the 45 degree segment at the base of the downpipe (which I spent about 40 minutes attacking last time with ‘penetrating oil’, this time I got the Plus-Gas on it, and the thing just came apart. Simple as that). Then, with Kathryn’s help, we reattached the exhaust.

Only took from 11am to 3pm. I’m not very good at exhaust fitting, and having done it we drove into town and… it’s rattling against something at the back. Usually this is the exhaust hitting the fuel tank; not a soothing noise at the best of times; so that’s something to attack later.

Then I spent about half an hour adjusting the mixture. She’s been running rich and idling too high. A bit of a tweak to that and she’s now idling at a much more sensible speed and lord knows what the mixture’s doing. I suck at setting carbs up, I keep meaning to buy a colortune to aid in my attrociousness. The DAFs have a much more ‘relaxed’ carb than the HiF44 in the Minor, which is slightly worn (not terribly so, she doesn’t hunt horribly at idle) and which has proper mixture adjustment.

Still, she’s running okay, so I’m going to presume it’s alright for the minute.

Next week will be more car stuff, hopefully, in so far as I’m hoping that the brake bits will arrive for Jejy and Vixy and we can get them assembled.

Then comes the difficult decision, which of the cars to take on holiday with us. We’re looking at around 1000 miles plus whatever motoring we do while we’re there. The minor’s swivel pins are worn, but I don’t know how badly. Jejy’s a big no-no, without the new clutch drum she’s not going anywhere far (so that’s easy), but Vixy? Vixy’s kind of an unknown quantity. Unknown quantities aren’t good for holiday relaxing, I find, but on the other hand she’s been recently serviced by a garage, she’ll have new brakes, she’s got a spare pair of belts in the boot…

…and only 21k on the clock.

We’ll see.

Anyway, hopefully we’ll have less car-posts for y’all once this is done. Then we can return to the ‘house posts’

car stuff endeth here

Mind you, I ought to do a garden post because the garden is *awesome*. Kathryn spent time today breaking up soil and prepping it, then planted some of our wild-flower seeds; she’s hacked down pruned the buddleia, out the front, which officially needs to be dug up and moved into the raised bed at the front, but since the builders haven’t quoted (or contacted me) then, uh, that’s not quite happening yet. The back garden is looking really very nice; when she takes the photos off her camera and flickr’s them I’ll linky.

It is just amazing to look at the ground and go ‘my god, they’re beans. They are our beans, that we planted and they’re growing. I could get quite into gardening, I fear. It’s really lovely though, to go out there, in the nice weather we’ve been having and see plants we planted growing, and indeed growing well. It’s not like either of us is particularly ‘green fingered’, but we’ve got good soil, and my mum’s around to help and advise us (and Kathryn’s mom is available for advice too :) ) and it’s come together to be a really restful place, potentially.

And the lie and deception which is the gravel-over-concrete path appears to be working.

Anyhow, now it’s time to make dinner. So I shall scoot.

Or, possibly a breeze-blockery. One or other.

Before I get started on this update, can I share a moment? We were expecting (to use a very loose term, I think faintly hoping is more what I was doing) that we would have a delivery of top-soil today. Our local top-soil merchant having given us a price which is much better than one of the national companies (but also means it’s almost certainly not screened, graded soil). Yesterday they didn’t turn up, and I had a little book running in my head regarding today’s excuse.

Sorry, we…
a) had problems with equipment
b) over-ran on the previous job
c) got stuck in traffic coming back from our previous job
d) had to close early due to a sudden onset of bubonic plague
e) were overrun on site by a horde of marauding miniature nuns (skateboarding nuns, no less) demanding all our topsoil for a new convent garden they were building

It was of course e, uh, I mean, a, today. But it did make me wonder, do builders have a magic-8 ball which they shake when a customer rings? Or do they have an excuse of the day message e-mailed to them?

Apparently he will ‘personally’ deliver the topsoil tomorrow. I will believe it when the annoyingly large pile of dirt is on our driveway.

Anyway, we went to Tummies for lunch, the service was somewhat lackadaisical, not dreadful, but not brilliant. I was slightly less than impressed that they pulled the panini from the chiller (and Kathryn’s sandwich) – at the price they’re charging I’d expect a bit better’n that (given that for much less in a similarly nice cafe in Brizzy you pull things from the fridge and they toast ‘em). But the food was good, and it’s a pleasant (and less paint-y) environment. And we needed to celebrate Kathryn’s test-passitude.

Anyhow, after shopping and a somewhat lax period of web-browsing, I headed out to the garden to move rubble. I’ve moved a slightly distressingly small amount of rubble, although I did create the basis for the breeze-blockery (aka rockery, aka good-way-to-disguise-a-pile-of-rubble). It includes, at the moment, an impressively large lump of concrete which I have no means of getting to the tip. Once the earth arrives, we shall pile it all over the damn thing, and then wedge some nicer stones in it, and some of those rockery-type-plants and no-one shall know the evil lying beneath; at least, not until they go forth and attempt to move it.

Plan is to put a fence segment up behind it (between it and the compost bin) and thus hide the big-black compost bin from the view out of the windows. Of course, the big plain brick wall will still be there.

Oooh, there’s a lot of fumes in here now, I may have to move.

Anyway, the undercoat’s gone on the door frame, Kathryn’s working on my anniversary prezzie, (I cheated and bought her something, but it must be said I just looked at it and wanted to give it to her right there and then, so ordering it and waiting was pretty good). Rebecca’s booked in to have her exhaust sorted on Friday*, and the oven’s on to cook dinner.

Today has been a day where much has been accomplished. Ra :)

ETA: The laptop, incredibly, has a bid on it. i.e. it has sold. Even despite the description.

*I should ring the gearbox reconning company about the gearbox but can’t pay for it until I’ve been paid anyhow. And there’s still no signs of the king/swivelpins; a somewhat significant component in the front suspension which have now been on back-order with most MM companies for over a year. A situation which borders on the ludicrous.