Mostly lemon based

Category: I’m a mechanic me…

  • 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.

  • So that went well.

    So, after debate and searching I ended up buying an Austin 1300 Auto. A car that doesn’t exist.
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  • That futzed with the plan

    So, I had this simple plan for today: Get up early, take Rebecca for MOT. She passes MOT. I spend rest of day either pottering in garden or recording podcast.

    Actually the day went: Drive to MOT. Fail on a few minor points (no pun intended), then drive back via parts store, then grab lunch, then reorganise the garage so there’s more space, then… well.

    First up was the washer pump. The old pump’s been moderately pathetic for quite a while. It still sort of worked, but most of the spray was kind of directed onto the screen surround unless it happened to be in an astonishingly enthusiastic mood.

    So, it was out with the old…

    Out with the old...

    And in with the new. Which would have been awesome but for the fact that the generic washer pump I picked up has a substantial design flaw. One of those design flaws where you look at it and think ‘Really? Really? You didn’t think that was a problem?’. Can y’guess what it is?

    Untitled

    Didja get it?

    Both the holes for the screws are behind the supply and output pipes (which are moulded into the body of it) and, as a bonus, on one end they’re behind the power connectors too. Well done Generic Brand designer. Fortunately, because it’s made of cheap nasty plastic it was bendable enough that I could brute-force-bend it enough to get the screwdriver in to get one of the screws properly tight. The other screw is a bit more of a problem, but I’m really not sure how to fix it short of an entertaining bit of 3D printing to make the damn thing some kind of bracket with clips. Either that or tightening the screw edge-on using pliers :-/

    Oooh, or I could replace it with a teeny tiny hex-bolt. Cunning. I might do that.

    Untitled

    Anyhow, the washer fluid now hits the screen in a most vigorous way. Cleaning the screen with vim and enthusiasm. So I also changed the somewhat leaky windscreen-wiper-washer, which, it turned out was a bonus level challenge because the windscreen wiper spindle comes through at a subtly different angle than the chrome finisher is meant to fit, so the rubber doesn’t fit at all. In the end I used two of them on the one side to give me a bit more thickness in an attempt to make it fit. The other side doesn’t really leak, so I’m going to leave that for the minute.

    Then we had to explore the brakes. There were two failure points:

    – Nearside brake binding
    – Brake imbalance

    Now I could have assumed that the brake imbalance was due to the brake binding, but thankfully I didn’t. A quick look in the off-side drum revealed a partial cause for the imbalance; everyone’s favourite paper gasket had failed. Again. Oh ho.

    Yes, it's everybody's favourite oil seal failure...

    So my brakes had a thin coating of oil on them. Again.

    Although I’d picked up new brake shoes I’d not bothered to get anything else; I mean, why would I? So a quick dance with the stanley knife and the cardboard from a packet of ice-lollies later I produced a new gasket. This is, of course, the oldest trick in the book. Well, one of ’em. I also popped a thin coating of silicone gasket sealant on it this time since I did that to the other side and that, finally, seems to have stopped the recurrent failures. I have a feeling though that I’ll need to repeat this with a paper gasket instead of the cardboard one I’ve made up because I imagine it’ll leak again :-/

    Of course the plan is, as part of the EV conversion, to switch it for an Escort rear axle and a Sierra gearbox. So it would be amusingly ironic if I finally got the seals to both be perfect now.

    Anyhow, having tweaked that and the brakes on the other side which seemed to be over adjusted-up (oddly, since I’ve not adjusted them since the service 2000 miles ago), things seem better. The handbrake is coming on at 4 clicks like it should. If it’s not good enough then either I or the garage will have the joy of replacing the shoes (I’ve got them, just didn’t really want to waste the barely used ones that were on the car, even if they’re a bit oil contaminated).

    Then there was the misadjusted headlamps. They’ve been ‘a bit low’ since she was returned to the road, and every MOT has been kind of scraped through on that front. I don’t know if the suspension’s settled a bit, or if the guy today was a weeny bit more picky, or indeed, the simple fact that the fuel tank was all but empty was enough to tip the scales against her, but she failed on that too. I’ve tweaked them both up a bit, but it’s kinda guess work. We don’t have a flat area with sufficient room to back up that we can adjust the headlights properly. Unfortunately, this brought me into close contact with the plastic headlamp dome, which it turns out is a terrible fit. After several minutes of me fiddling, I managed to get the headlamp ring back on and screwed on, but it…well, it’s still loose and any degree of tightening in one area makes it want to pop off from somewhere else. Modern parts really can be quite rubbish.

    The funniest thing about the day was I rang the garage to check up that I’d hit all the points on the MOT list, and the guy proclaimed “I thought you’d fix it, well, I hoped you would. It’d’ve been disappointing if you didn’t”. Hopefully we can trundle up on Saturday with the iMiEV and the Minor and come back with both of them sporting new MOTs.

    To be honest I’d’ve quite liked to go out for my nice lunch at Hart’s instead of spending the day lying by the car. But hey, needs must… :-/

  • Oh hai, it’s January

    So, it is traditional this time of year to look back on the past year and think ‘what did I achieve’ and discern whether it was ‘a good year’ or not. My vague notions about last year is that I didn’t really make much progress on the house, and that it was a quiet but not unpleasant year, for the most part. However, as with my friend’s recollections, thousands of miles away my general opinion wasn’t exactly the whole story.

    It started well enough, with the discovery of Rise, the music store in Bristol, where I make infrequent pilgrimages and fawn hopelessly over the ranks and ranks of records. The fresh stacks of vinyl make me want to spend all the money. Every time I head in there I find my bank account substantially lighter on leaving, and frequently seem to pass from not knowing of a thing’s existence, to utter total desire without pause. It’s both terrible and wonderful simultaneously.

    Not only that but I took my aged BBC Master around to my friend John’s, and he applied his L337 soldering skills and replaced the dodgy capacitors before they could expire. It functioned exactly as it should, lending hope to the possibility that I can inflict it on our child, when s/he is old enough to want a computer. Heh. Actually, I think our child will get something akin to the Pi. When I got my computer the deal was “here are some basic games, if you want more you’ll have to write ’em” which I think is a fair way to do things :)

    Anyhow, so it was an auspicious start. Flicking through blog entries made me finally take stock of what I’d achieved on the house over the year, and perhaps I’d been unduly harsh on myself. Perhaps, when you look at it, I’ve actually achieved a fair amount. In the last year I:

    – Finished decorating the bathroom (which was essentially decorating the bathroom and plumbing in the new shower)
    – Painted the downstairs half of the hallway
    – Built and installed the understairs storage
    – Insulated under the house
    – Designed and made the kitchen lighting
    – Built the top surface of the deck, including sinking 4 posts in to the ground
    – Completely decorated Kathryn’s office

    Amongst that there were a number of smaller jobs like installing the telephone, adding a radiator to the central heating, adding in bits of trim, repairing other bits and bobs that broke throughout the house.

    Y’know, given that I’m working full time and had various other projects ongoing last year, I don’t think that’s a bad list.

    As I say I had a number of other projects ongoing, my beloved Minor’s disintegrated differential was finally replaced after months sat at the front of the house being sad. I’m still working on the Electric Minor Project, and have a potential sponsor to contact, which has led me to fawn hopelessly over Adobe In-Design. My background with Ovation Pro (which, assuming it still works in modern versions of Windows I highly recommend to anyone needing a cheaper DTP package for Windows) came in handy because it had many of the features of In-Design and works in fundamentally the same way. Playing with layout and design is quite delightful, and one of the few things in IT that I think I could get quite into if my career in nursing ever went south.

    Anyhow, so the Minor is [touch wood] back on the road.

    However, it wasn’t all sunshine and bunnies. Last year witnessed the death of our plan to move to Canada. Nova Scotia telling me in the politest way possible that I would need to spend thousands of Canadian Dollars if we wanted to land up there. The difference between UK and Canadian nursing registration was simply too great. However, the good news is that we plan to move to the States, which will put us closer to Kathryn’s family and some of the awesome people (Kathryn’s friends that I’ve met too) over in the USA. We’re maybe looking at San Francisco, although it’ll be a while.

    We also found out that we can’t have the free solar panels installed. A fact which makes me very sad, because in all honesty, if the UK was like Germany our roof would be well within the benefit side of the cost-benefit analysis; solar panels in the UK being way more expensive than in Germany. This is because UK has decided that we’d like to pollute the planet and our local environment as rapidly and depressingly as possible, by fracking every last bit of this once green and pleasant land. Indeed, politically this has been one of the most heartrendingly awful periods I can recall. The Conservatives and their political lackeys, the Lib Dems, for whom, shamefully, I voted, have destroyed the few bits of Britain of which I was proud. The’ve pushed our xenophobic streak and also made this country hateful for it’s treatment of the poor, those with disabilities, the sick. They’ve divisively separated every minority group and demonised everyone who’s not rich.

    I recently saw a quote from Aneurin Bevan, the awesome angry Welshman who rounded up the Doctors and Nurses and said ‘Fix the people’.

    “Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune, the cost of which should be shared by the community.”

    Which I think is a perfect way of describing illness. Mr Bevan rocked. Incidentally, he also said of the tories, this, which seems pretty accurate at the moment:

    So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation. Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts and are hoping by this organised sustained mass suggestion to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through. (1945)

    Anyhow, enough depressing, because all in all it was actually a pretty good year.

    So, other projects are the ongoing attempt to re-rip music and video. That’s sort of fallen into stasis, but I really should get that going again. There are still massively large stacks of stuff that need to be re-ripped. All the DVDs/Blu-Rays, and still stacks and stacks of music. Actually, that’s pretty depressing to think about. It was a good starter project but maybe I need one of those lego diskchangers. Unfortunately so many of our disks fail to pull down art, or fail to get listings… which completely screws up the rapid disk ripping.

    Oh, actually, whilst we’re on depressing, I sold my motorbike. I, for the first time in many years, am without motorcycle for the long term. The thing is though, I’ve no excuse to ride them. And not enough money to just ‘have’ a motorbike kicking around. Nor the space. So… Yeah. But I do miss it. It’s like not having a bit of me. One day I’ll have a Zero or somesuch.

    We also, on a more cheery note, sold Chester. We ran all over France, toured the place, and having pushed him really hard travelling down to the base of the Alps and back we sold him and switched to our much loved iMiEV. You gotta love an electric car, they’re just flipping awesome. Not only that, but it’s also managed to get me a little bit of fame writing as a guest writer on the Transport Evolved website. I need to have a ponder about more things to write about because I’ve enjoyed writing them. I also got featured, briefly, on the Kyocera blog. Not my writing, but a brief bit about our aged Kyocera FS-1030D which continues to provide sterling service and provides endless glee when it prints wirelessly.

    And on the writing front, I also did NaNoWriMo. Didn’t finish it, but I’m still working on the book, which is interesting. I’ve never written a novel before, it may be awful, but it’ll be my bit of awful. I need to find some people to look at it, so if anyone wants to read a not very good first-half of a detective novel (be my Beta testers!) then let me know :)

    I also, for the first year ever (I think) managed to push out a full year of Dead Bug Jumping. Something I’m quite proud of, because it’s actually a fair amount of work to produce new episodes.

    Oh, and there were a few other minor achievements. I finished and passed my MSc. And I got a permanent Senior Staff Nurse position… so, job wise, that’s pretty good.

    I think all in all I achieved a fair bit in 2013. Some things didn’t go at all the way I’d hoped. Some things went very well, and y’know, screw my sense of ‘I didn’t work hard enough’. I clearly bloody did. Stupid brain.

    So here’s to 2014. Let’s hope it’s a good one.

  • Getting older…

    As I travelled back from Gloucester yesterday, Rebecca’s odometer clicked over to 44,000 miles*. On these bigger transitions the worn mechanism that advances the numbers struggles to move the five (or six) cylinders required. The ‘tenths’ figure will sit between 9 and 0, clicking with every tenth of a mile unable to move as the higher values furiously resisting advancing milage.

    And then it happens, there’s a click, the speedo flicks wildly from 70 to 90 and back, and we settle in to the next 1,000 miles…

    Sometimes I think she just doesn’t like getting older.

    * It has no relation to her actual milage.

  • What is this shit?

    So, I know I’m harping on about it but. Look, sometimes I forget how much I enjoy driving the minor. Driving the minor is a properly visceral experience. It’s so simple, there’s as little between you and the road as there realistically can be. It would be considered pared down, except that at the time, that’s just how you built cars.

    Tonight I slipped into ‘that place’, with Filthy/Gorgeous playing on the radio, Rebecca’s engine humming along, and winding country backroads between here and Bath*. That place where it all comes together, the car is gripping the road like a limpet, the road is clear and the whole thing is just bucket loads of fun. The exhaust note of that 1300 A series engine is wonderfully musical, and in the moment the whole thing, that whole package, it’s delightful. The entire point of putting a fast-road 1300 A+ engine in a minor is that the car is delicious like that.

    A well tuned minor, on good suspension**, with brakes up to snuff is quite simply a joy to drive.

    Then I got home, and had to put the car in the garage.

    And whilst our garage is pretty darn big by UK standards, the garage doors are pretty narrow. So it’s a careful shuffle to get in. And it’s not like it took a long time, I did in about one more than the customary 2 shuffles. It did take a little longer than normal because I forgot that I’d put a box off the shelf on the floor earlier today, and that stopped me getting in. So, maybe in all an extra minute.

    After all that – the garage was full of fumes. It was hideous. Kathryn was coughing and I stepped out of the garage with a headache. Having dipped our toe (rather an expensive toe, I’ll grant) in the EV waters, we’ve found it warm, inviting and perhaps above all, so clean and quiet. And the idea of taking Rebecca on that journey with us fills me with delight (and a little trepidation, because we’re heading in to territory that I don’t know well). But I’m quite excited, and need to go save up lots of cash so I can make it happen :)

    And we can stop burning this hideous dinosaur juice.

    It is funny though, we’re so used to it that we just think that’s the way it has to be, and then you discover it doesn’t need to be that way and…well… it just doesn’t. It makes you think about things.

    * I was off to Topping and Co to see Deb Perelman talk.
    ** My car may not be standard at the back on the suspension front, but the front end is pure Issigonis.

  • In which Kate spends a lot of money, services her Minor and wonders WTF is up with charging points

    So, the sums were in. The unbiased non-car-o’phile had been presented with raw facts and come to her conclusion. The answer came back the same as Kathryn’s. Basically – the new car – is a good idea although can we afford it?

    The bank was rung, and they gave their loan costing. The change from the current payment ended up being 60 quid.

    60 quid extra a month on the loan but no petrol spend (or at least very little), no servicing, and hopefully much more painless MOTs.

    We should break even on our spend just before 2 years. Just as we’re leaving… Although, obviously, at that point we can consider whether we’re taking the EV with Rebecca, or selling it on.

    Because, that’s what we’ve done. We’ve bought an EV. Well, we’ve had an offer accepted on a second hand EV which is currently approximately 3 times it’s normal driving range from our house. Ye-es. I blame Nikki. Having faintly floated the concept to her she instantly pointed out the one which we’ve kind of ended up buying (we’ve bought it’s twin, actually, the guy had two).

    We’ve also applied for a free charging point from Polar Network, which will look quite lovely in the garage, I feel. Of course, this also means that I need to get my act together and tidy the garage, because at the moment it’s a one-car-and-shed-loads-of-crap car garage, rather than a two car garage.

    Of course, at the moment, it’s likely that we’ll still take Rebecca Mog down to my mum’s because of the absence of charging points in convenient locations. Ironically, we can get 100 of the 130 miles to my mum’s house, because there’s a rapid charger 30 miles from our house. Driving really carefully we could probably just about make it there, but just around Exeter there seems to be a bit of a dearth of rapid chargers. Also, winding up the already 3 hour journey to 4 hours is not ideal…

    But the rest of our existence, which is powered by sunlight and bought locally will continue to be revoltingly green.

    To counteract this, I spent the morningday servicing Rebecca. It turns out that I’m way out of practice, and that I am completely incapable of turning the engine over without the starting handle (so I had to cut the hole in the glass fibre bumper valance for the starting handle), and that I am quite slow, therefore, at servicing her. She has, however, got greased nipples & fresh lubrication ;)

    I’ve also changed the fuel sender for a new fuel sender, which means that the fuel gauge now shows an actual quantity of fuel. I did try the ‘LED Indicator Relay’ which it turns out is a lie. I’m quite pissed because I bought it off e-bay a while ago, and it turns out now that it does not, in fact, work.

    It is a standard relay, so far as I can tell, and thus goes absolutely spare when connected to LED indicators. However, the act did allow me to change the rear light lens which had cracked in so many places I thought it was going to drop off. A trip to a classic carboot sale is probably in order. I was going to delight your visual senses with a timelapse courtesy of ‘Lapse It’. But it doesn’t seem to render large time-lapse files. Or at least, it’s so far failed 5 times to render it – just quitting with no explanation having ‘Processed’ the final image. This is, as you might guess, quite annoying. Especially since I paid for it after my playing with it yesterday.

    I also spent a little time attaching pieces of metal to my freshly varnished driftwood and spraying the brass-bits-of-stuff which I bought accidentally (but it turns out I require) black, so as they’ll blend with the plastic bits of stuff (which I bought on purpose and do require) and not stand out as being brass against the chrome bits (which I also bought and which I thought would go okay with the black bit).

    I may offer up photos at some point :)

  • Complex Math(s) & Shiny Metal

    So, with us planning to be here for most likely two years (nice to be less, but in reality probably at least 2) I’ve been contemplating the EV question again. Much though I would love to do Rebecca’s EV conversion, I’m well aware that this is not a cheap, nor low-time task. Not least because it’s something that I really want to do well which involves careful planning and design, and knowledge that is outside my normal field of work. And so I/we have been vaguely contemplating whether it might be time to consider replacing Chester with an EV.

    Also, the idea of Baby + Car that intermittently sucks large quantities of money is slightly concerning.

    Anyhow, as part of this, yesterday I/we did some finger in the air waving: ‘we spend…this much… on running the cars’ kind of thing. This came out at:

    £ 4953.60

    That’s petrol, tax, servicing, tyres… *and* Kathryn’s not-by-car commuting costs, or at least, what we thought we spent.

    Having done actual sums and looked through an entire year of bank statements I’ve come up with:

    £ 4790.55

    As the *actual* spend, except that doesn’t actually include Kathryn’s petrol spending. This suggests I’ve woefully underestimated the amount that we actually spend on petrol, given that it might well be around £50 a month.

    Of course, we don’t actually have the money to buy an EV outright. But the sums so far suggest it might be worth borrowing to do this.

  • Onwards into a warm arsed future

    So, I spent some more time with my minor today…

    Untitled

    Having stripped the dashboard down I was able to complete fitting of the heater more easily, although I had to do hideous, hideous things to the ‘footwell’ setting on the passenger side to get it to fit with the new heater matrix, which saddens me, but hey, the whole thing will be going when she’s electrified, so I suppose it doesn’t matter.

    It will, hopefully, be producing warmer air. I must remember to top-up the coolant system before starting her again.

    I also got the new indicator stalk in, which turned out (surprise surprise) to be not quite as straightforward as you might like to imagine. The old one was actually held together with tape (well, the ball bearing which makes it ‘sit’ in left-off-right positions was held in place with tape). This is because the thing that holds the ball bearing in had disintegrated, and removing the ball bearing led to an indicator that flapped around like a wet fish. So the ‘temporary’ fix was to tape it in place, in such a way that it still sort of worked. I’d bought a new indicator lever with the intention of fixing it ages ago, but not got around to it because it required taking the dash apart. Today I had no such excuse, and after a brief tussle with the lucar connectors (lucas is not known as the prince of darkness without good cause) I had the new lever wired in, but hanging like an ornamental basket from the dash.
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  • She Riiiiiides (again)

    I know, I know, she’s riiiiiiiiided a few times in her many years in my ownership, but today, following some help from my awesome friend Nikki (who kindly put aside her EV journalism for some of the day to come help) Rebecca is sporting a ‘new’ diff and actually, for the first time in months trundled up, and down, the private road outside our garage (without me having the fear that she was going to emit a ghastly ‘crunch’ noise and stop dead).

    Today has, in fact, been a bit of a slog though. Indeed whilst fitting the differential went very smoothly, nay, incredibly smoothly (at least, assuming I don’t get down there tomorrow and find a huge pool of oil under the car, or that a rending metal noise does not occur when we’re enroute to the garage for the MOT).

    If you’ve never worked under a car before, a way to simulate it would be to crawl under your bed with some 2kg bags of sugar. Now, whilst an assistant sprinkles you with bits of mud and grit, and ideally whilst rubbing your head in a mixture of mud and oil, hold the weights up at the most inconvenient angle you can until you’re whimpering from the pain.
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