Mostly lemon based

Category: DAF

Stuff about Jejy the DAF

  • Moop

    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 :-/

  • Another day in the dirt

    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.

  • Progress, but not in a very useful direction

    So, I spent some time fitting the radio ‘properly’ to the car (there’s a bit of a limitation to how neat it was going to be without damaging the dash, and I didn’t want to do that*). The Rover cassette radio (with presets no less, thanks John!) has been fitted into the ‘standard ISO’ holder -attrocious quality as it was, the wiring held out the way with tie-wraps, and all of it neatly crimped with my new crimping tool (nowt exciting, just a plain ordinary press as hard as you can crimper).

    I bought a stick-on glass mount aerial (yes, I know they’re not great, but I really didn’t fancy drilling holes in the bodywork to fit an aerial; and quite frankly, unless it’s roof mounted I think people like to snap them.

    The total cost of that little toy? 10 quid.

    I need to fix down the speakers at the back – I ‘fitted’ them yesterday but as I said, they’re just resting on the parcel shelf at the moment.

    I’m still waiting for the elusive call back from the auto-factor. I’m now 99% certain the parts won’t be arriving today, if he can order them, and in a few minutes I’m going to declare that time’s up and order the bits from Danny in Holland.

    It’s frustrating because I could have ordered them this morning and spent the day sorting out the Minor, but instead the whole morning’s been spent doing footling little jobs and watching TV waiting for a phonecall…

    …’I can’t get them anywhere’
    [thinks: “well why the frack did you not actually call and tell me that?!]
    “Oh, that’s okay, I’ll order them from Holland”.

    *sighs*

    Customer service here sometimes sucks. But at least we can do maths…

    * In the end I opted to drill two very small holes (2.5mm) under the dash. Everything else is run through existing holes. Should anyone ever want to make her standard again they just have to weld up two tiny holes and paint over it with black.

  • Another long day in mechanic mode

    So today was hard going. Started at 9:30, finished at 17:30 with only a break for lunch and a couple of quick trips to (a)Halfords and (b)Proper MotorFactor.

    At one point I was so demoralised I stood staring at Vixy wondering both how she’d actually managed to stay running so well, wondering if the fault I’d found had anything to do with the poor idle and failure to up-revs on braking, and contemplating whether she should return to the internet in search of a new home.

    However, thankfully (I think), I opted not to do that.

    Faults found and rectified today:
    – Idle / Braking: There’s an Electro-Magnetic doojit on the carb, it wasn’t actually screwed in. I’ve no idea if it was sucking in air around the barely attached doojit, but certainly, doing it up screwed with the mixture. Then I found that the pipe which covers the join between the inlet manifold and one of the inlet pipes (it’s got a flexible segment made by having a sleeve and a tube with a bit of rubber over it) was completely beyond saving. It was cracked and split and a mess. It’s been replaced. The idle’s now much better and the engine does it’s thing when you put your foot on the brakes.

    – Oil Leak: Turned out to be the oil-pressure warning sensor. It was leaking like a secret government meeting filled with double agents. Having spent an entertaining twenty minutes with my newly aquired ‘shop towel’ (like J-Cloths but less strength in tension and way more absorbent) cleaning gunky oil off bits of the engine I lay under the car waiting for the dripping to start. Sure enough, there was the leak, oozing it’s way out of the pressure switch. Amazingly my local autofactor had one in stock. Took them about 20 minutes to find it, but they had it.

    – Radio: Wired in and working, but I still need the bracket and an arial. Remarkably it can pick up Heart 106 (not that I like Heart 106, or it might be Star 106. It’s 106, anyway) despite not having an arial. The tape bit sort-of-works, and sound comes out of the really rather silly Goodmans Speakers plonked on the back shelf. I do need some means of attaching them as they don’t actually appear to have any means of attachment.

    Discoveries of a non-awful nature:
    – According to my wildly innacurate Autodata manual, the DAF has the pre-1972 wiring scheme. This is odd for a late ’73 car. However, the Autodata manual is noted for it’s similarity to the Haynes Book of Lies in the respect of ensuring things are accurate (like, for example, the non-existent Lockwasher I spent time angsting about).
    – The exhaust really is an astonishing piece of bodgery. It changes diameter twice and appears to have been made by someone going ‘hey, that’s a big ‘ol chunk of straight exhaust; that’ll do’.

    Things not fixed today:
    – The brakes.

    Discoverys of an unfortunate and upsetting nature:
    – Jejy’s brakes are dangerous. I took her to the store to get the oil pressure switch and had one of those ‘oh-dear-god-I’m-going-to-die’ moments when I put my foot on the brakes at a junction. The slightly weepy front cylinder has become the ‘pouring brake fluid out in a very generous and lubricous nature thus ensuring stopping is a gentle and largely terrifing experience’. I had a look on arriving home, having got Vixy fairly much as far sorted as I could, and basically, the brake cylinder is the fucked. I’ve asked my local autofactor if he can order 3 brake cylinders for me, if not then they’ll have to come urgent-first-class-next-day-as-soon-as from Holland, which’ll be pricey.

    Still, I consider myself to have rocked today. You may all praise me :)

  • The sun is shining, it’s a beautiful day

    And I’m lying on the sofa. In a bit I’m going to take Vixy (the other DAF) out for a little jaunt to check out the new fuel mixture and brakes. They’re still pulling to the right (odd, since the left is the new cylinder). Hopefully it’ll settle down as the brakes bed in. The tyres on the front are knackered though.

    The tyres on the back are, well, as old. So frankly it needs…guess what… four new tyres. But this time, just for fun, even the Minor suppliers don’t have any budget tyres. And frankly, the DAF can cope with budget tyres. The minor’s a bit more perky with 65bhp (not a great deal by modern means, but with cart-suspension at the back and lighter than a light thing on light-day she’s a lot of fun) – and the grotty old 155 Nankangs are feeling their cheapitude. Particularly at speed on the motorway.

    The DAF shod with Camacs though is acceptable. Not brilliant, certainly, but acceptable.

    I don’t really want to spend 40 quid plus per tyre, and so I’ve had to hunt around a lot, and have managed to come up with a company that says they have Nankang 145/80R14s in stock. If they do, once I’ve ordered, I’ll share then name with everyone. But first we’re going for a little drive-ette, see if all is well.

    Plan for today is have a fairly chilled out day, probably poke at the lounge and give it a bit of a clean, paint the window-whatsit in the kitchen; tomorrow is probably going to be fairly full-on-car stuff because the DAF…that doesn’t work any more does it… Jejy’s sucky tubes should be arriving. So Jejy will get ramp’d and have a going over – fiddling with the mixture, installing miles* of new vacuum hoses and whatever. Hopefully new sucky tubes and a tweak to the carb and we’ll be back to running well. I’m wondering if I should have ordered some new pipe to go between the manifold and the intake pipe (oddly DAFs have a flexible bit of tube on one side of the inlet manifold which, presumably, rots like all other rubber.

    I’ve got a dinky bit of painting to do today, and I might, just might, have a go at making the steps in the back garden. Could all go horribly wrong, really. At any rate I ought to move off this sofa, because its graviational pull has worked its magic. I have to admit I watched BSG yesterday – fracking brilliant – need to see the next episode (this seems to happen every episode at the moment, it’s all so tense, building to the end. Only it’s not the end, there’s that 2 hour special that’s been shot. So…), the L Word (ack, need to see E09), this morning I watched the Tyre Ecohouse in Grand Designs. It’s awesome.

    I would love to build something like that. I’m still more of a straw bale person, but I’m wondering if you could combine the building techniques – do earth sheltered homes have to be all earth-sheltered? Mind you, I wanted (want) to build the tile arch thingie too. I’m so fickle. If I built everything I wanted I’d have tile-arched, timber-frame-and-straw-bale, earth sheltered, recycled tyre & recovered materials eco-house. It’d be a mess. So it really needs to be one or two of those technologies, probably :)

    Oh, and I watched house.

    I really need to get off my arse and actually do something, really**.

    Links for the day:
    – Bad minister. Stole a biscuit. If you don’t believe in the evidence for evolution and Darwin then you should not be a science minister. Away with you.
    – If only I wanted to live in Detroit
    – This music is teh good.

    Side point: Mac Still Shiny. Have a fun day folks.

    * Well, feet. Technically, I’m told, there’s about 18′ of vacuum hose (split across two sizes) in a DAF44, so that’s what I’ve ordered. In blue silicone tubing. I’ve not had the shipping conformation yet though.
    ** I did actually patch up my pj’s while I’ve been sat here. Yes, Kate sewed. It’s rare, and not good when you look at the quality, but my PJ’s had a hole in approximately the size of my hand, and were destined for the bin otherwise…

  • No going back

    So, the Dell and the Apple are both now on ebay. Shinymac and Lapytopy will hopefully go to new owners, although to be honest, I doubt the Dell will sell. Added to the near 100 quid I got from the first auction I’m hoping that I’ll get enough from the Apple (starting bid 580 quid) that a MacBook (or ideally, a MacBook Pro) will be mine. I doubt the latter, but the former’s definately achievable. It’s a little weird to think that in a week I won’t actually have a ‘main’ computer. The RiscPC’s a bit past it, and the EntMac’s only connected to a TV (and not a HiDef one) so isn’t really useable in that way.

    The DAF’s been ministered to, yesterday the throttle stuck open, the kink in the cable caught on the cable inner and it also seemed to possibly be unhooked at the pedal end. I’ve checked it over, and it shouldn’t happen again – but when the new inner arrives (it’s going to the new DAF) then I should hopefully be able to replace it without too much pain.

    This time I shan’t kink it.

    I went to pick up Kathryn after work yesterday, missed her junction and got to travel all the way into London before I could turn around. The traffic was awful and I ended up being around 40 minutes late :( But, it did mean that Kathryn had the opportunity to go out for more driving practice yesterday, and we pootled around Slough. Apart from the incident with the pedals (before we moved at all) there weren’t any problems, but the traffic was lousy, and it opted to snow, which was a little cruel. Today I’m hoping to put an hour or two into clearing the garden a bit. I’m just going to suck down my Chai.

    I’ve been incredibly lazy today. Really, ridiculously lazy. Although, to be fair, it took me ages to get the Dell posted on e-bay. It’s taken days, actually, ‘cos the photo-upload wasn’t working last night.

    As a side point, I’ve been listening to far too much VV Brown and The Ting Tings. The bloody VV Brown song (Crying blood) keeps getting stuck in my head. Too damn catchy.

    And I keep wandering about going ‘Aaaaree yoooooooou caaaaaalling meeee darrrrrrlin(g)…’

    I had something else to ramble about, but I’ve forgotten. I blame the Ting Tings.

    Oh, no, I remember; I finally got around to entering Snapshot Hunter again. It’s not a great shot, some of the ones up there are way better (already, and we’re only on like the 6th photo), my excuse is that my camera dies after 8 photos now. Do I need new batteries? Yes I do. Not this month though, I think I’ve spent my money for this and next month.

    Oh, and yes, my minimal bid is on the shite DAB adapter. I won the amplifier, so we’re all go for taking the Radiomobile to bits. Anyway. Chai. Garden. Collect Kathryn.

  • Wakey wakey rise and shine

    Said my body at 4:45am. I’m not quite sure why, I think I was woken by my throat, and then my brain started listing all the things I need to do today. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) Kathryn said I wasn’t to do anything that might upset my throat further – so my cunning plan to strip the paint on the door frames, and uh, paint them is off*.

    I’ve still got a fair bit to get on with. When the frost’s melted a bit I need to take jejy round to the tyre place, having found that the ‘slow’ puncture’s got quicker, and that it’s leaking from the valve. Now I can point and go “look, it’s leaking from the valve; that’s definately your fault, please fix it”. I also am debating getting an external enclosure for my now spare SATA hard drive (what? why?!)…

    Let me explain. I want to sell the G5 Mac. The G5 Mac currently sports 2 largish harddrives, a lot of memory, a 20″ monitor, a 14″ LCD monitor and so on. To sell it, I have two options:

    1) Dump all my data onto and remove the second HDD.
    2) Copy all my data onto the 500Gb ex-entertainment-Hackintosh drive in an external drive case and then nuke the two drives.

    I think the latter is probably the better solution. Whilst it will cost 20 quid, it will probably add more than 20 quid to the value of the Mac, selling it with two big hard drives in. Mind you, if one of them is bigger than 500Gig it’ll be being swapped around.

    At any rate, I’ve been travelling in the DAF a lot recently, and it’s come to my attention that the Radiomobile radio doesn’t work…

    It did work when we got the car, it stopped working a while ago, and has not spontaneously reanimated itself. But I rather like the look of it. Ratty and tatty though it is, it’s part of the car’s 1970s charm. The plasti-chrome is peeling and the volume knob turns on it’s spindle. But I have a solution. Rip out its guts and throw them away.

    I’ve finally found a cheapie company making (almost certainly lousy quality) automotive amplifiers (but you’re in a car with no soundproofing to speak of). In fact, the one I’ve bid 75p for (but £9.99 shipping) also sports 2 inputs (but no means of switching between them, switches, presumably, are extra). But since I intend to gut the poor wee beastie, that’s fine. I’m also hopefully going to get my grubby little hands on one of the Matsui DAB tuners. Back before I planned to move to Canada I debated buying one of these for the Minor. But they were 30 quid at the time.

    Now, at a few quid second hand, they’re tempting to again be the subject of my soldering iron. The plan is simple; gut the DAB tuner, gut the amplifier, make Radiomobile into DAB tuner. Leave socket for MP3/CD player. And lo, we’ll have the perfect modern stereo in a 70s box.

    Mind you, that’s how it is in my head. How it’ll work in practice is another question. The other thing I quite fancy, having driven the car a while now, is a small amount of illumination around the air vent controls and the hot/cold air selector sliders.

    I usually end up waving my arms around under the dashboard to find them (when driving in the dark) so a little glowy white LED illuminating the up/down arrows seems quite tempting to me. And a little red/blue illumination on the hot air and cold air sliders also seems like quite a nice idea (potentially mounting them in a small piece of sanded perspex to diffuse the light). I’m slightly concerned she might look a little boy-racer though with the blue/red glow eminating from the dash, but at least I’d be able to control the temperature while driving without too much concentration. I’m also slightly concerned that I might get overly attached to Jejy. But hey.

    This all comes about because I need to prepare Jejy to be Rebecca’s temporary replacement while I fit the diff (when it arrives), the gearbox (when it’s ready), the new swivel pins (when they’re manufactured; if ever), trunions, poly-bush the front suspension, and repaint the damaged paint areas of the engine bay. Oh, and strip out the dash, find all the things that are rattling, stop them from doing so, clean out the heater, fit a new inline heater control valve (from a golf, apparently), and potentially convert her to Left Hand Drive (which involves moving the brake master cylinder and associated plumbing, remanufacturing the dash I made (otherwise the worry gauges will all be in front of the passenger), fitting the other gearbox front plate and somehow working out how to lock and unlock the passenger door from the outside), oh and ideally fitting a heated rear window that works, and in a perfect world sending off the speedo to be recalibrated, the revcounter to be reinternalised and the clock to be made to work (a car with a working clock! that’d be a novelty).

    Just a short list of jobs…

    So Jejy may have to do service for the minor for a while. Which is why I fancy a radio and a CD input.

    Anyway, today I need to get my act together and sell the Mac, and possibly the Dell (although I doubt the dell is going to sell). And in aid of getting started, I shall now have my breakfast.

    * Yes, yes, I know she’s right, but it seemed like a good idea in my head :)

  • Amazingly, I’m not working on the car

    It’s Sunday, it’s cold out, and guess what. I’m inside!

    Inside!

    I can feel all my limbs, my peripheries are not the temperature of something you’d normally drop in a cocktail, and I can’t see my breath. The lights fading and I’m not struggling to put in bolts in the half-light.

    The minor has an exhaust, I’m not rating it as the best fitting exhaust in all of christendom, it’s an Aluminised Steel one so it hopefully last a few years longer than a plain mild steel one (before it rusts and drops off). I’ve poked at LJ, Kathryn and I went out for a drive in the DAF – we went out for one yesterday and on hitting 40mph the L plate (a magnetic one) peeled up and flicked off the front of the car, fluttering gently into traffic. Sadly it meant Kathryn couldn’t drive home from the store, so we checked the road today and couldn’t see it… Instead, today, we bought a static-cling one which is living behind the front windscreen – seeming less likely to go fluttering off.

    Assuming it’s not pissing down with rain tomorrow I may even take the little DAF round the corner and get the front and rear windows removed and refitted in an attempt to stop the high rate of water ingress.

    We’ve had a very nice breakfast, in a relaxed and quite decadent manner (Lady Grey tea, scrambled eggs with mushrooms and Parmesan; with toasted bagels and home* made jam (apple and ginger)) before we head out to inflict DAF on Slough. I’ve placed a bid on an e-bay Bread Maker – we appear to have missed the whole bread-makers being cool thing. Every shop appears to have stopped stocking them. The two laptops have all of a few quid between them – which is less great, but hopefully the watchers will bid in the last few minutes as normal.

    Jejy still has a few quirks, most noteably a distinct leftward urge when braking hard. The idle’s started to settle down now, which is nice, it was far too high (my fault) because I kinked the throttle cable (and also because I pulled it too taught). Other than that though, she’s been a good little car, and definately is running better with the new air filter, the new insulated king lead & the insulated HT leads… :)

    You’d think I’d’ve noticed the horrendous lack of insulation at some point earlier….never mind :)

    *My mum’s home, not ours…

  • Defeated by one nut.

    So, the plan was to do the clutch on the DAF. This is, obviously a simple job…

    1) Remove the bonnet, bumper and grille
    2) Detach all electrics (including the solenoid on the carb, the coil, the ….)
    3) Remove the air filter
    4) Remove the exhaust and heat exchangers
    5) Slip out the engine and clutch
    6) Change the clutch
    7) Put the whole darn lot back together.

    Theoretically a weekend should have been enough. Hell, with enough light and it being warm enough it should have been done in a day. Unfortunately, mid way through day two (siezed bolts, the fact it was freezing yesterday) this bolt intervened:

    DAF exhaust

    It is actually impossible to reach with ordinary spanners, a 3/4" wrench or a 1/2" wrench (even with a UJ inserted into the mix). I’m contemplating a set of S-shaped spanners but I’m not sure I can even get it off with them. I’m suspecting that the answer is: Angle grind off old exhaust (which I suspect may have been badly welded), Replace. Put on new exhaust with S-spanners. Unfortunately this doesn’t fit into the plan of having the car running tomorrow, or uh, any day this week.

    It’s very annoying to have been defeated by a single nut. Once that’s off the engine can come out and we can attempt to change the clutch shoes, but until it’s done we’re stuck with a DAF on ramps with a tarp over the front on our drive. Not really what we had in mind.

    On the plus side, we had a very, very nice dinner yesterday at Wagamamas in Windsor. And then came home and had a very nice evening at home :)

    Also on the plus points, the minor’s oil leak is now sorted, theoretically, and the heater while not pumping out heat is significantly warmer.

  • Shedloads of Cash

    Yesterday I engaged in shameless money grubbing, despite being exhausted I drove for an hour and a half after a revoltingly early wake up call, to go work in St. Marks Hospital for the Feverish and Sickly. I’ve done one shift there before – a night shift months ago – and bizzarely some of the staff were on again. And also somewhat confusingly we’ve had so many agency staff at the trust in which I work over the last few weeks that I knew a whole load of people who were at St. Marks yesterday – all of whom looked very confused when they realised I was out of my normal location. Not only that, but a member of the Ambulance Service who I thought seemed interesting, but never got around to working out how to say ‘hi, shall we meet up for a coffee some-time’*, and who recently left our area to work closer to home, happened to be on duty too. So it was kind of like working in my own department.

    I even knew how the system worked and were the drugs were… which was nice. It wasn’t that harder day, although being one of the agency nurses I got shuffled from one place to another through the morning, ended up doing admission assessments, having my own bay, looking after an observation ward… It was all fine though.

    Unfortunately, it has left me exhausted. The 3 hours of driving after how ever many days on shift has left me feeling drained. I slept in ’til nearly 10, which is incredibly unusual for me, and even now just ache. I need to sort out the exhaust on the mog, the front manifold of which is leaking like….well…something. Although I’ve asked (at long last) about the abandoned garage a couple of houses down, so if I’ve got access to that then that’d make all the jobs that need doing much more pleasant. Unfortunately, it also requires time; time which I don’t currently have. ONe would think that you’d either have time or money, and though this month through a process of working a ridiculous number of extra shifts I’m able to actually look at my bank account and not wince, which is nice.

    There may even be some to pay off the overwhelming debts that lurk on my credit card. And perhaps there’s the possibilty that Charles Ware’s Morris Minor centre might respond to my statement that I’m going to have to take them to court over the ‘restoration’ of Rebecca they did 7 years ago – in which case – the debt incurred fixing that restoration will be somewhat ameliorated.

    Anyhow, I need to get on with doing Kathryn’s present, the coffee doesn’t seem to have kicked in in quite the way I’d hoped, but I am at least upright.

    In other news I’ve sorted a place to sort the gearbox – so the new gearbox is off to them to be reconditioned (later today if I get off my arse) *and* I’ve got the clips to hold the trim in place on the DAF. Woo yeah!

    * I’m always faintly worried that it’ll (a) sound odd, particularly with the techs/paramedics because I barely know ’em, and (b) sound like some sort of come-on, when all I want to do is make some friends**
    ** Yes, I really suck at making friends.