So, I thought that it was the cable at fault; I now retract my pseudo modern car parts are rubbish rant (although it stands as a general comment) because it turns out that the idiot who owned my car before me (s/idiot/cunning git) failed to put part of the clutch cable mechanism back; when I replaced the clutch I didn’t realise it was missing and so put it back the way it was. It now appears that all of the strain from the clutch has been going onto the pedal box and has snapped part of it off. With some difficulty I managed to sort-of-fix it. It works now, and hopefully should stay working.
I couldn’t see why the brakes were having issues though, so he’ll have to go to the garage for definate.
I did however put the cover back in the engine bay so that fumes are less inclined to come join me in the passenger cabin, which was a positive.
And then I had this great idea; you know those great ideas you get? Well, I thought I’d fix the broken window winder. A while back the window in the passenger side decided it was not going to shut properly; or indeed open properly, or do anything very much. So I whipped the cover off and had a bit of a looksie. Of course, it became apparent part way through this process that neither could I see well enough, nor could I find anything that felt wrong and then I had my second great idea of the morning. I’ll put the new door card in while I’m here. So I got it, and while fitting it managed to unhook part of the door lock. Having spent about 10 minutes cursing I worked out how to put it back together, and discovered the new door panels are *exactly the same* apart from one teensy tiny difference. The door handles are subtly smaller and don’t actually operate the door lock on brick. Having cursed a little to myself I then removed the door panel again and refitted the original one. During which time I again dislodged that fracking bit of door lock mechanism.
Finally I got it all back together and although I can now say the clutch works, and the fan sucks in air rather than engine fumes, the door lock on the passenger side now only locks with a key, or from the inside. You can’t do the button-down-hold-door-handle-and-slam thing. And the window winder still doesn’t work. Gaaaah.
Just to round it all off, while I was posting this the laptop’s battery demonstrated that it is, indeed, a bit fubar. ISTR reading that this laptop does have problems with killing batteries fairly quickly, and it was a cheap battery. But still. Disconcertingly, having stopped and died stone dead, the battery now states it’s fully charged. *sigh*
