Kates Journal

After two years of sitting in the garage I brought the manual for the MZ home after my last trip. Today I’ve searched everywhere obvious, and quite a few non-obvious places and the fucking thing has just disappeared.

Short of actually emptying the shed entirely, something I’m seriously contemplating doing, I have no concept of where it could be. I’m hoping for ‘fell down the back of one of the shelves where the MZ boxes live’.

It’s beyond frustrating.

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 :(.

Plan: Motorbike to be transported here, put together, MOT and tax bike. Work on Vixy and sort the top speed, ideally change clutch plates and fit new exhaust. Same to Jejy but with added possibility of new rings.

Reality: Motorbike’s not here yet. Jejy completely unusable. Vixy not really right.

Running vehicles: 1ish
Off the road: 3

I need money/time/energy/DAF specialist.

Time for bed.

So, nights are bad. They stress your body, they stress your mind, they leave you drained and overtired. I find that I get into the ’swing’ fairly quickly, for the most part; but I’m not quite there yet, and was feeling undeservedly pissy at the vehicles. Mostly because despite throwing most of a tin of gun-gum at Vixy she was still clearly blowing a huge amount. Ironically, Jejy seems much quieter – most of her exhaust now consisting of gun-gum.

However, a moment’s tired contemplation reminded me of the unreasonableness of this. Between the two (DAF) cars and the motorbike I’ve spent around 1k over the year. For that we’ve acquired 2 MOT’d, Taxed vehicles which – while not exactly show-winning and certainly requiring more work – are being cajoled, poked, prodded and coaxed into being vehicles we can used daily.

The fact that they have some reliability issues, and some of the flakey 30 year old parts are disintegrating is not really unexpected in cars being run on a budget appropriate for push-bikes.

So. That in mind, I spent a little time laying under Vixy with the gun-gum this morning – and found that the exit from the silencer appears to be…mostly gone, and is now mostly gun-gum :-/

Really I think I need two complete exhaust systems – but we’ll patch it up as long as we can, eh?

As a side point, this made me want to build my classic EV again. I even poked at ebay.fr to see if there were any cheap left-hooker DAFs on there, but I think I really want ebay.nl. Hey, it was 3am, I can’t afford it, don’t have the time or space, but I can imagine eh? CVT EV DAF? Got to be done.

…but this seems a little unfair.

I’d been hoping to ride Cherry (Red ‘zed) until the tax ran out, the MOT expiring shortly afterwards. The slight and occasional clatter from the top end telling me more than I needed to know about how sick the engine truly is (‘cos she’s had a top end, less than 5000km ago).

Another week and I’d've been happy.

And I’m used to random bits dropping off a ‘zed. It’s normal. Usually they’re retrievable or they’re easy to replace. But today she had to show off. It’s easy to replace, if you’ve got the time, being only a bolt. Probably an M14 bolt. Only, it’s a specific length, and I don’t happen to have one spare. It’s also the bolt that holds the exhaust on.

Thankfully she opted for dropping the exhaust less than a mile from home, and with some careful propage I could ride home, albeit somewhat noisily.

I guess it’s time to retrieve and wire up Charlie. Lord knows when I’ll get the chance to do that. Soon, though, I hope. Because the fleet is rapidly diminishing in size.