Mostly lemon based

Category: Amy the Austin 1300

  • The Awesome Power

    So I’ve given in. I don’t think I mentioned on here, but we finally bought a modern car (lookie, a post at Transport Evolved, where I’m a staff writer now!). I’m planning to cut my hours at my main job to do a bit more agency work; with the theory being that we might be able to save a more significant sum of money up. I suspected that the Austin would probably not tolerate this very well, and moreover given that there’s less than 500 of them left, in total, it seemed a shame to throw that many miles onto it.

    Not only that, but we saw this (which when the link dies is a small live/work shop in Port Townsend that we can actually afford to buy outright). It’s fracking tempting, and I have this sort of sensation that we really should just go for it, but also, we don’t want to end up in the US broke and with no health insurance. That way lies insanity.

    On the other hand, if we owned somewhere outright our outgoings’d drop pretty dramatically.

    But our house isn’t finished and so isn’t terribly sellable, so that kind of puts a crimp in that concept anyway.

    Anyhow, as part of the process of selling the Austin off (which if anyone’s interested, I’m looking for around £1700) I’ve scrounged Nikki’s DA polisher, some paint restorer and some of her much-higher-quality-than-I-use-car polish. So I wandered outside this afternoon having completed my other exciting tasks for the day (go and get a polishing sleeve for the polisher; clean the steering wheel and switchgear and some other bits and bobs of the new car because they were hideously filthy it having been owned by a builder; spent several (quite a lot of) minutes trying (and failing) to persuade the Prius and the iPhone to talk / transfer contacts; organising Kathryn’s anniversary present…) and I gathered together the stuff to wash and polish the car.

    I washed it and grabbed the cutting compound… it said ‘wash and dry the car’ so I waited whilst it dried, applied the cutting compound and followed the instructions which ended with allow to dry. Literally as I finished applying the last bit to the roof it started to rain.

    I waited it out for a while, washing the Prius somewhat (which needs some cutting back in a few places too, being as a few places have paint transferred from other objects that the previous owner’s run into on them) before finally wiping off the worst of the cutting compound from the austin with the rain and heading inside. I really need to get it sold though because (a) I could do with some of the money back from the insurance and (b) It’s just sat cluttering up the street and (c) I could use the money back from the Austin to pay for some of the stuff that I had done to it to get it decently roadworthy. So I may have to have a look at it this weekend. Once it’s cleaned I need to tidy up the joint in the exhaust that I threw together when I was putting it on in a hurry (which is leaking), clean the inside and photograph the car. Then it should be good to go.

    I’m hoping this will feel like progress because at the moment I’m feeling terribly frustrated. We’re hoping to try for baby-stuff again this month, which should also feel like progress; but having been on holiday the house feels very stalled; and we’ve neither of us made great progress on the planning of the grand adventure nor of the possibility of just dropping that and going to start our bookshop.

    Feh, basically.

  • Having a plan

    So, I’m aware that I’m complaining about something I shouldn’t be complaining about. Buying a car. Most people don’t whinge half as much as I do about a simple process which is, frankly, a situation I should be grateful for, not one where I should be complaining. I have earned enough that I can borrow enough money to be able to buy a bottom of the barrel hybrid, or, were I less of a ethical person a pretty damn nice second hand car (actually, I could borrow much more than that and buy a much nicer car, I just don’t want to).

    Not phenominal, but something mid-range pleasant and a few years old.

    But I won’t.

    I want something that at least stands vaguely near my ethics. I am loathe to buy a car anyhow, I wish that the frickin’frakin’Austin had worked out better, but having spent the better part of a month in a garage waiting, waiting, waiting for it to be fixed I’m now forced to conclude that it’d be unwise to put it back on the road and then attempt to rack up infinite miles in it. Not because I don’t think it would cope. It probably would and probably would be adequately reliable. Until something important broke, and then I’d be back to ‘oh shit, I can’t earn anything’. This week, for example, I was intending to spend doing agency work. I’d set myself up mentally with ‘lots of agency shifts’. Now I could have hired a car for the week and done it, but it’d’ve cost me at least the entire value of a single shift and then I’d have the bonus paranoia of ‘I MUST WORK EVERY SHIFT’ to try and make the money back. And if I didn’t get a shift… ooh the stress.

    So I’ve been looking at cars.
    (more…)

  • Yeah, so about that

    Yesterday as I drove home I thought ‘oh, the indicators are flashing somewhat irregularly, I wonder if the alternator’s okay’. See, the Minor when I used to get the alternator kit from Charles Ware, it used to eat them. I don’t know why, but it did. Then I traded it for an alternative alternator – something more reliable from another, more modern car. And lo the problem was solved.

    But I have this recollection of well before the warning light’d kick in, other electrical systems, particularly voltage dependent ones, like the indicators, would get a bit erratic. Faster-slower-faster-slower.

    I thought I’d check the voltage, but couldn’t remember where I’d put the volt meter. I had a quick look in the garage but it wasn’t there (shame I didn’t look in the boot).

    Today on my way to a shift, the coil reached a temperature of insane high-ness, the condenser ceased to have any resistance, and I had a relaxing sit at the side of the motorway.

    Weeeell....bollocks.

    And lo, she was pronounced unrepairable at the side of the road.

    Hoiked unceremoniously up on a trailer and taken to a my favoured garage who will hopefully get her back on four wheels by the weekend (next weekend). Which puts a substantial crimp in my ‘I’ll do some shifts before the holiday’ plan.

    Fooey.

  • General Malaise

    So we got back yesterday after a very nice wedding at which we met lots of new, nice people, and worked our socialising abilities to the max. Neither Kathryn nor I seem terribly big on socialising, and find it pretty hard going, so after the wedding/reception/next day BBQ we were both completely people’d out.

    I very much don’t want to sound ungrateful. I am honoured to have been invited, and it was a pleasure to be there and witness the ceremony, but it reminded me that outside of work, when I don’t have my work-head on, I find peopling pretty damn hard. I don’t have great social skills so trying to maintain small-talk conversations with people I don’t know is quite a challenge.

    Anyhow, so we got back, and today I’m totally in the malaise category of behaviour today. I had vaguely thought about changing the ignition unit in the Austin, but then realised that it wants me to set the timing with the engine running at 1000 rpm. Whilst I have a strobe, mine doesn’t also give me the RPM, sadly (I’ve seen one that does, it ain’t mine). I’ve therefore popped in an order for a 10 quid ebay special laser tachometer*. But that does mean that I can’t do that today.

    I also took my Disclosure and Barring Service (Criminal Records check) to the nursing agency – a quick way to test out the new exhaust I felt, but forgot to take along proof of ID. So I’ll need to send that to them, too. Gah. I mean, the point of the journey was to test the exhaust, so I did achieve that, but could have done with having succeeded in the secondary point.

    I’ve also realised that my cunning plan to do 3 shifts this week has failed because I’ve managed to arrange a variety of other things that need doing too. All of these things, and a headache, are conspiring to not put me in the best of moods. But never mind.

    I have written a little one-year piece for Transport Evolved…

    Anyhow, I should stop whinging and get off my arse. P’raps go and switch the steering wheel for something more traditional.

    * Another tool who’s function will probably diminish rapidly when we get the minor converted.

  • Oh Amy, you’re so funny.

    So, Sunday I spent almost the entire day under the car. I’d scheduled two activities, plus some bonus ‘unlikely but if I have time’ ones:

    – Fit exhaust
    – Service
    – Check sidelight wiring
    – Change steering wheel
    – Replace bolt on seat that doesn’t fit very well
    – Clean windows

    So, that was the plan

    Here’s what I got done

    – Nearly fitted the exhaust

    It turned out that whilst the new exhaust looked like it should be a beautiful fit on a standard Austin 1300, it is a terrible fit on the car I’ve got, which has a Metro 1300 engine. The Austin exhaust is a pea-shooter that runs straight up the middle of the car; a single pipe. The Metro has a 2-into-1 pipe at the front that it appears wiggles all over the damn shop.

    Now my thought, my 150 pound saving thought was that I would attach the 2-into-1 section from the new Metro exhaust to the straight-shot new Austin exhaust. Easy.

    Only:

    – The clamps holding the exhaust to the manifold, one of them is broken and it took a long time to get it back together and back on. Irritatingly, later on I discovered a spare, good one, in a bag of otherwise useless nuts and bolts that came with the car.
    – They’ve moved the mounts so that the mount for the silencer is about a foot forward of where I think it should be…right in the middle of the current silencer. Which appears to be designed to have mounts at one end. Eventually I gave in and chopped other sections of the expensive new exhaust into many bits, so that the exhaust could be fitted. It now has about 4 joins in the last section pushing the silencer forward and down a bit to clear the back of the auto-box selector.
    – Because I had to chop it up so much, and didn’t realise I’d need to fabricate some kind of new mount at the back, I didn’t have enough clamps or rubber mounts.

    So despite being on a night shift tonight I shuffled the car back to the back of the house, hopped it up on ramps (I hate putting cars on ramps on gravel/mud, they slide about all over the flipping place) and managed to put the new clamps on.

    And y’know what, she sounds much better. I’m just praying it all hangs together. I’m not really very happy with the join from the 2-into-1 section to the main exhaust. Really it should be welded, but I’ve no welder.

    Anyhow, so I pootled across to stock up on the requisite quantity of Two Day Coffee. The journey was flawless, apart from the marked flaw of turning a corner on the way home and having the car die. Initially I pondered fuel starvation. It’s very hot out there today, and traffic wasn’t great. Eventually it became apparent that it was fuel starvation, but not heat related. The insanely complex Lucas fuel pump (fitted as an aftermarket installation for reasons that escape me) had got bored of the tedious job of pumping petrol and decided to stop. It took me several minutes to work this out during which I pushed the car to the side of the road and up onto the pavement. Austin 1300’s are remarkably light, incidentally.

    Thankfully a quick tap on the pump and it kicked into action, the car starting and running just fine afterwards. Can’t say it filled me with joy, though.

  • Exhausting, Exhausted, Exhaust…

    So, Amy has provided sterling service so far. Yesterday she racked up 220 almost faultless miles*. There are a number of issues, small ones but ones none-the-less… (more…)

  • I love work, I can watch it all day

    If I weren’t still slightly tediously coldy (and coughy, and going to work tomorrow) then I’d be a lot more angsty about the fact that today has mostly been spent with me doing stuff all.

    The auto electrician was meant to appear at 10, but instead didn’t appear until 1145; so I did a lot of waiting-unproductively; then (and this is my good deed for the day) filed all the paperwork that I’ve not filed for err, months, and also the stuff that we dug up when we were clearing the office (INCOMING GUESTS! PANIC! EVERYTHING MUST BE FINISHED!*). Then I just dawdled around the house doing odds and sods, wrote a teeny tiny bit (maybe 100 words, with some edits elsewhere, I still don’t hate it which remains unusual and is strangely pleasing, at some point I’ll have to show it to someone to see if it’s awful) and intermittently pottered out to see what the auto electrician was up to.

    I’m not entirely sure that the towbar electrics are still working; I’ll have to check that at some point, and one of the sidelights is apparently still wired very oddly (it’s really unclear what in heaven’s name they were attempting to do with the wiring; some stuff seems to just run the length of the car for no apparent reason, duplicating stuff in the loom that appears to be working**). Weirdly, in the middle of all his fixing, the interior light started working, so yay for that.

    Anyhow, once that was done and he’d flagged that the oil pressure switch wasn’t working, I nipped out, got that, installed it, and we now have what appears at the moment to be a functioning car.

    I am still waiting on the shiny exhaust, but for the moment I’ve got the emergency exhaust repair kit and some tools in the boot, and enough spare wire in there to go to Mars.

    All I can do is go for journeys and see.

    Oh, and I found a place that’ll service and check the calibration on the speedo, but the car has to have a non-GPS based speedo so I’ll probably do that at a point when I’m certain I won’t need the car for a bit. Having checked; 20 appears to be at 20 ish, so that’s fine for most of Bristol. It may just be that it needs a service.

    I’ve also blocked out potentially an entire week for agency work which should help with getting the EV conversion going…

    * I will fail at this, but don’t honestly really expect to achieve it, it’s just a ‘wouldn’t it be nice if they turned up and the house was actually finished’.
    ** Maybe rather than running the loom to work out what wires came out where, they just decided to run new ones?

  • So that went well.

    So, after debate and searching I ended up buying an Austin 1300 Auto. A car that doesn’t exist.
    (more…)