Day: July 3, 2009

So, someone, I’m fairly certain, said that you could swap cylinder heads on a DAF 44 with the engine in situ. There’s not a great deal of space in there, but it appeared like, certainly on the R hand cylinder head it was feasible.

I spent the entire day stripping apart the car – documented here, for posterity, on flickr – only stopping when I realised it wasn’t actually possible to do it at all. That would be when the rockers were off and I slid the head up the studs and realised that ‘no; no amount of wiggling is going to make this come off’. Part way through reassembly the builder arrived. He says he rang, but he didn’t, not any number I’ve got. I scrabbled the exhaust back on and we pushed Jejy out onto the road. I then completed reassembly of the DAF on the road, and contemplated that the skip needs loading with rubble.

This evening I need to move the motorbikes and mark out the curve for the driveway.

Tomorrow they make the driveway wider and hopefully we can stop being quite so antisocial.

So, today I’m hoping to whip the head off Jejy and replace it with a new one (sent by the ever lovely Rich) – unfortunately he needed to send it urgently and discovered, somewhat sadly, that the exhaust was stuck. Apparently he’s lopped it off so it’ll fit in the box.

So I need to get that off.

Before I do that I need to work out why the minor’s not running – I suspect the hot weather’s evaporated all the petrol – and means that I need to prime the petrol pump. A new and novel fault. But she needs to go out on the road, anyway, so the DAF can go up on the drive…again.

I also need to find my battery charger, because both Rebecca and the Motorbike’s batteries are suffering from sitting. I looked in the attic – I was fairly convinced it was up there – but I can’t see it anywhere. I now have a selection of places where it’s not (where I thought it was) – and am wondering where’s left to look.

So, all in all a fairly busy day; which is why it’s a bugger that it decided to rain last night because while the rain almost certainly did the garden good (albeit somewhat late, since we watered it last night) it didn’t help with my sleeping – when the huge flash of lightning whipped across the sky I was suddenly awoken – and it wasn’t raining at that point – so I couldn’t lie there and listen to the rain. I just led there listening to rumbles of thunder and the whiiiiiirrrr-squeek of the desk-fan upstairs and contemplated that I’d just woken from a rather horrid dream where I’d been about to be shot; again*.

Trying to get back to sleep was accompanied by a return to that dream, which left me not really wanting to sleep for a while :(

At any rate, it’s now morning and I’m waiting for it to be late enough for me to go and be noisy. 0830’s a little early to be antisocial. 0900, then I’ll go and persuade Rebecca to start :)

I’m still hopeful that I might be able to cancel the hire-car this afternoon.

* I think that was about the third replay of that bit. The interesting thing was I wasn’t scared about being shot, I was worried about what’d happen to Kathryn after I was shot but the assailant. Fun fun fun.