My Motley Meanderings

As I think I've mentioned, I'm planning to get Lintilla back on the road and drive her for the first half of this year's LEO rally. Here is a list of things I've yet to do on her before the rally. I'll strike them out when I've done them and add more as I think of them. ( Read more... )

I have just calculated that by the time I reach the National Morris Minor Rally tonight I will have done 12,791 miles in Fenchurch since I got her back on the road less than a year ago.

This includes my daily commute, the first LEO, London five times, Glasgow, Edinburgh, the midlands several times, Middlesbrough several times, and lots of shorter trips.

Good news:

• I managed to find the time this afternoon to finish dismantling Lintilla's front suspension.
• The threads on the left hand swivel pin are fine. In fact I had a closer look at the right hand one and came to the conclusion that the threads on both of them are hardly worn (and not rusty at all). A good clean, new dust seals, and regular greasing should see them last a long time yet.
• The left-hand crossmember end, while far from perfect, looks easily strong enough that the torsion bar isn't in imminent danger of ripping a hole through the floor and piercing the passenger's posterior. I'm just going to put a small patch on it, repair the floor above it, then leave it alone until I'm ready to replace the sills.
• The front brake cylinders and flexihoses look to be good enough to reuse after a bit of a clean (unlike the fixed pipes, several of which snapped when I tried to undo them).
• I don't think the steering rack gaiters need replacing quite yet (this is good news because I really hate doing that job).

Not so good news:

• I managed to break yet another nice nearly-new fluorescent inspection lamp, this time by dropping a torsion bar on it and smashing the tube inside (replacement tubes aren't available for them AFAIK). I really need to get hold of some more of those professional quality 12V inspection lamps with the clumsy-mechanic-resistant steel and rubber casing.
• The left-hand eyebolt is noticeably worn at the top. I think the car must have been driven for a long time after the rubber bush between the pin and the hole disintegrated. Considering the hole doesn't tend to wear at all on the bottom, I'm going to turn the eyebolt upside down if I can to give it a second lease of life.

I haven't done all that much on Lintilla since the last post about the crossmember repair. She's still at that stage where every time I try to do some work on her I discover another thing that needs fixing. The problem is worse than it was with Fenchurch because she has been abused and neglected in the past - I'm not only dealing with old worn parts and rust, but past bodges and shoddy workmanship too.

Tonight I did some more dismantling of the front suspension because I've decided to fit the bigger Wolseley 1500 front brakes to her, plus I wanted to check the condition of the trunnions and clean and paint everything while I've got it in bits. If the threads on the trunnions and swivel pins are badly worn they can suddenly fall apart and plough the front end of the car into the road, usually when you drive up a kerb or something. I'm not confident of my ability to tell how far gone they are without taking them apart and having a close look inside. The one swivel pin I've taken apart so far (the right hand side) doesn't look too bad - the bottom one is noticeably more worn than the top one, but it's not worn to the point of needing immediate replacement.

While I was working on that, I realised that the brake pipes are in a poorer condition than they initially appeared and will need replacing, plus the clutch is on the absolute limit of its adjustment and will also need replacing very soon. I only thought of looking at the clutch adjuster rod after my recent problem with Fenchurch's clutch on the way to morris1000's place. Annoyingly the engine was changed not all that many miles ago and I find it hard to believe that the mechanic failed to notice that the clutch was badly worn when he swapped it over.

I also spotted that they made a real mess of attaching the front bump stops to the inner wings, meaning they are probably a lot less effective than they should be, and at least one of the front dampers is loose. The eye bolt bushes have totally disintegrated and the pins are rather worn, but I already knew that and have got a set of Superflex polybushes and new pins ready to fit. Luckily the eyebolts themselves don't look badly worn as they are out of stock at the supplier I use. Another problem I noticed was the tie-rod on one side was rather wonky and the big washers on it were badly chewed up - I reckon it got bent in a small front-end collision some time ago and whoever repaired it just bent it back roughly straight again and didn't bother to replace the washers. I'm hoping to pick up a better one from Ray at the National rally next weekend.

One area in which I have actually made a bit of progress is that I have fitted all new straps and cushions in the front seats and they are much more comfortable now. If I get time this weekend I will finish dismantling the left-hand front suspension, decide whether or not the crossmember-end on that side is good enough to leave alone for a while, and make a start on cleaning up all the front suspension parts and the Wolseley brakes.

I took the day off work yesterday and drove down to Birmingham to meet emmzzi and see Our House, the musical based on the songs of Madness. It was the first time I had ever driven into the centre of Birmingham, and I left the motorway at bang on 5PM. Luckily nearly all of the traffic was heading out rather than in, but working out which lane I needed to be in at each junction/roundabout wasn't easy. I miraculously reached the car park behind the theatre without getting lost, parked up, and wandered off in search of food and a public toilet. The latter proved rather difficult to find - I came across one in a shopping mall that was locked, then I found my way to the railway station because I was sure there was one in there, only to discover that the toilets are on the concourse and you need a valid travel ticket to get to it. While I was in the station I decided to grab some takeaway food from Burger King, then carried on up the escalators and through the huge mall, eventually finding some toilets about another ten minutes walk away. The place was strangely laid out, and it took me another five minutes to work out how to get outside (passing a second Burger King on the way), where I sat down near some interesting buildings and water features to eat my now-cold burger.

emmzzi had arrived at the theatre by this time so I set off back, taking a detour on the way to buy a new parking ticket (it costs £2.50 from 6PM to midnight, but I had arrived at 5:30PM so was forced to buy a more expensive ticket that didn't allow me to park for as long). I encountered three Big Issue sellers, two of them very bouncy and charismatic compared to the ones we get in Nelson (but still not enough to make me buy a copy). Even though emmzzi had texted me to say she was in the bar, I still wandered twice around all the public areas of the theatre without spotting her before phoning to discover she was sitting at a table a few metres away.

The musical itself was really very good. It's a fairly simple morality tale about a lad who takes a girl out on his 16th birthday and breaks into an empty flat to get out of the rain, wrongly thinking this will impress her. The police arrive and the story splits off in two directions, one where he runs and gets away, and the other where he stays to face the punishment for his crime. Musically the songs were good and fit the plot fairly well. We discussed during the interval how they might be going to fit Night Boat to Cairo in, and the link was... inspired. The hero had a rather harsh singing voice but his girlfriend sung beautifully. The cast were all very young and athletic apart from the hero's parents, and the choreography really took advantage of this. Of course the real star of the show was the knackered white Morris Minor convertible the hero buys at one point for £80 to take his girlfriend out in (It says Morris on the door, the GPO owned it before). We had a good time and I would definitely recommend going to see it if you enjoy Madness songs.

There was another incident of lorry-rage on the way home. Entering a single-lane 50MPH section of roadworks on the motorway, the van in front of me slowed down to 50 so I did likewise, maintaining a sensible stopping distance in front of me. The HGV behind me kept on going until he was literally inches from my bumper. If I had braked at all at that point, he would have clipped me. After a few seconds he dropped back perhaps ten yards (still much too close to safely follow someone at 50MPH) and maintained that distance all the way through the roadworks. It's not as if I could have gone very far if I had accelerated as he seemed to want me to do, because I was simply following the van in front of me. Upon reaching the end of the restricted area, the van quickly accelerated up to 70 and so did I. The HGV pulled into the next lane as if meaning to overtake me, only to see me rapidly getting away. This really ticked him off, so he pulled back into my lane and gave me a long blast on his main-beam headlights and spotlights.

I've just watched a movie morris1000 lent to me called Hear My Song. It made me very happy. Not just because it features the protagonist and his best mate driving around Ireland in a Morris Minor Traveller, and not even because the protagonist's girlfriend is played by the gorgeous Tara Fitzgerald, who we get to see rather a lot of in one scene. It is simply a really good film that I'm surprised I had never heard of before.

The plot revolves around a failing theatre promoter and his attempts to book Josef Locke, an Irish singer who was very popular here in the 1950s but was forced to flee back to Ireland after failing to pay his taxes. Locke really existed and some of the back-story is based on reality - my mum actually saw him perform under the pseudonym "Mr X" (but was it really him? :). It is funny, light-hearted, romantic, eccentric, and touching without straying into the territory of the formulaic Hollywood rom-com. Highly recommended.

Unfortunately, what it isn't is easily available on DVD in this country. Inexplicably it appears to have only been released in Germany. The disc has the English soundtrack on it but it defaults to the dubbed soundtrack and the menus are all in German. If you do manage to lay your mitts on an imported copy, the trick to getting it to play in English is to select "Sprachen Ton" then "Englische Fassung Stereo" then "Film Fortfahren." If you are unable to get hold of an imported DVD, I couldn't possibly advocate typing something like "Hear My Song" and "torrent" into Google.

On Saturday I drove down to the Gaspodes' place at Aylesbury for the Odyssey 2010 volunteers' barbecue. After food and chat we watched Doctor Who on the giant projector screen, followed by DVDs until after midnight.

Sunday morning I carried on down to Southwold to meet the invaluable, incomparable, ineffable and rarely incoherent morris1000, who also drives a Morris Minor Traveller and will be coming with us on the AIR. On the way there Fenchurch's clutch wore down sufficiently that I was having trouble changing gear, so I had to spend a few minutes lying on my back on the drive adjusting it to take up the slack (modern cars do this automatically I believe). In hindsight I realise I should be checking how much free-play there is in the pedal at each service, as I hadn't done anything to it since I changed the gearbox last year.

morris1000 and I talked about various things (including all the work he has yet to do on his car before the rally!), then went to see some friends of his and had a ride in their immaculately restored Morris Eight. We had lunch in the local pub, went for a bit of a drive around in Fenchurch, then I had to set off back on the marathon seven-hour trek home up the A14, A1, and M62. Total distance covered over the weekend was around 600-650 miles.

Remember this?

For a while it looked like ( this... )

I have now booked both the ferry and all my accommodation for the Around Ireland Rally. the_magician and I will be staying in the following YHs:

30th August: Foulksrath Castle (Kilkenny)
31st August: Cork
1st September: Dun Chaoin (Dingle)
2nd September: Sleepzone City (Galway)
3rd September: Blue Stack (Donegal)
4th September: Whitepark Bay (Giant's Causeway)
5th September: Belfast
6th September: Dublin

This bank-holiday weekend I want to achieve several things: research B&B options for those who don't want to stay in YHs, finish off the first draft route plan, produce a progress report and send it out to all the prospective participants, and get on with repairing Lintilla.

With regards to Lintilla, I've decided to try to get her back on the road in time for the National Rally next month. Longer term, the plan is to have both Minors on the road and running reliably by the time of this year's Land's End to Orkney run. I already know Fenchurch is reliable enough to do a long road trip, so I'm thinking of using Lintilla for half or possibly even all of the LEO in order to iron out any problems before the AIR. That way I will have a choice of which car to take, or I could even lend one of them to another of the participants if their car has problems before the trip.

This weekend I gave Fenchurch a service (at 74010 miles). While I was underneath I noticed the exhaust was on its last legs - I poked at the rusty silencer with a screwdriver and it developed a big hole. So I ordered a new two-part stainless steel exhaust from ESM. At £107 it wasn't the cheapest one available, but it is made by GS Exhausts who have a good reputation for quality and offer a lifetime guarantee. The most expensive standard exhaust I found (high-performance ones can cost even more) was £250 from P D Gough, who sounded very surprised that I could get one elsewhere for about £100. I didn't have the heart to tell him there are cheaper imported stainless systems available for £65 and mild steel ones for £40.

The new exhaust system arrived yesterday and I fitted it last night. It seems well made and it went on OK; the only fettling required was to shorten one of the mounting straps by an inch or so. As others had predicted, it is slightly louder than the old mild steel exhaust, even with the rotten silencer. I'm not too bothered (I just turn the stereo up another notch) but some people might be irritated by it. Two good things compared to the old one are the pipe doesn't touch the edge of the hole it passes through in the engine bay, and it has a good downpipe flange that hopefully won't start blowing every few hundred miles.

The plans for my Around Ireland Rally are proceeding nicely. I've put up a web page about it and have had adverts in various places. I'm working on a joint AIR/LEO flyer to hand out at MOT and the National Rally. I have been corresponding with someone from the Irish Morris Minor Owner's Club who has previously done a slightly shorter rally around southern Ireland and is interested in coming on the AIR. A couple more people sound very keen on coming with us but haven't definitely committed yet. Most of my friends list will no doubt be envious to learn that we are planning to visit The Cliffs of Insanity (AKA The Cliffs of Moher, where part of The Princess Bride movie was filmed). I've also decided we will visit Mizen Head and Malin Head (Ireland's equivalents of Land's End and John O'Groats).

On Saturday I drove down to Stratford upon Avon. I saw several traffic jams and accidents on the way, luckily all heading the other way to me. I went straight to the Youth Hostel, oddly having more difficulty finding it than the first time I stayed there (I think the problem was that the address says Alveston but it's not actually in the village). I grabbed a bit of lunch, then set off walking to Stratford (about four miles from the hostel). I'd gone about 2.5 miles when I realised I had forgotten the piece of paper with my theatre booking reference number on it, so I walked all the way back to the car to get it. Having wasted a lot of time already I thought I would drive into town instead, which I did, only to find that it was incredibly busy and there was nowhere suitable to park. The car parks were all full, short-stay, due to lock up early (before the end of the play), or some combination of the three. So I drove back to the hostel and did what in hindsight I should have done to begin with: caught a bus into town from the stop across the road.

Upon finally reaching Stratford, the first thing I did was to locate the cinema and buy a ticket for Iron Man. I had some time to kill before the showing so I went and got an ice cream from a street seller, then wandered around gawking at the huge number of tourists and shops selling Shakespeare-related tat (what must it be like to live and work in a tourist town?). The film was fairly good, only spoiled slightly by the very uncomfortable seat and the inane running commentary from the people sat behind me. I'm not sure it was worth sitting through the very long end credits to see the brief post-credits scene everyone has been raving about though.

Next I walked down to the theatre to pick up my ticket, only to discover that I had somehow lost the bit of paper with my booking reference on it (the one I went back to the car for earlier), probably when I took it out of my pocket in the cinema to double-check the start time. Luckily the box office let me have my ticket anyway after taking my name and swiping my credit card. It was after dinnertime by this point so I went off to find food and ended up in a fish and chip shop near the river before returning to the theatre in time for the play.

The play was a performance of The Taming of the Shrew by The Royal Shakespeare Company at The Courtyard Theatre. It was really very good; easier to follow than Henry V (the last play I saw there) and surprisingly funny. The star of the show was the brilliant Michelle Gomez as Kate (the shrew). The other actor I recognised was William Beck as Grumio. The most confusing aspect of the play was the framing device. A drunk passes out in the street and a noblewoman finds him and decides to play a practical joke by making him think he is a lord. One of the things she does is to arrange for a play to be performed for his benefit - which turns out to be the 'real' play. After a few scenes the fake lord in the outer play suddenly starts playing one of the main characters (also a lord) in the inner play. The main subject matter of the play is pretty controversial now but I think they handled it rather well. I like the theatre (though I didn't get as good a view from the seat I was in this time), the acting was polished, and the scenery and costumes were impressive. I would highly recommend going to see it, but it appears that I went to the last show and they are starting on A Midsummer Night's Dream this week. ETA: They are doing A Midsummer Night's Dream and A Merchant of Venice for the next few weeks but Taming of the Shrew returns on Tuesday the 27th.

I walked back to the hostel afterwards. The room I was in this time didn't have the noisy wooden bunks but I still seemed to sleep very lightly and woke up frequently. When it reached 6:30AM I decided to get up and have a shower before breakfast. The Stratford hostel is one of those where breakfast is included in the price (you don't get a choice about this unfortunately). Afterwards I made some sandwiches for lunch and headed off to Kenilworth Castle where people from the Morris Minor Owners' Club web forum had agreed to meet up.

I arrived before they had even opened the car park so I had to go away and park in the village for half an hour before returning. The rally seemed to go fairly well. Three travellers and two saloons turned up, plus three more people in modern cars. There was a mediaeval reenactment event going on at the castle which was rather interesting. One of the things I saw was a demonstration of mediaeval court dancing, most of which looked very dull, but they also threw in a country dance that I recognised from having done it at a ceilidh recently (albeit at about twice the speed with five times as many couples in the circle). After Kenilworth Castle we left in convoy to drive around the area but it was a bit of a shambles as we got split up two or three times. We visited an unusual windmill on a hilltop, then a very old church, before finishing up at the JLH Morris Minor garage to have a look at the customised cars they are working on.

The bank holiday Monday I mostly spent catching up with little bits and pieces of things and not getting very much of note done. I am making good progress with my route plans for the AIR and we may have picked up another participant.

I've just found out about a fairly hefty discount available on the ferry to Ireland for people taking part in the Kilbroney classic car show. Unfortunately I already booked my ferry a few weeks ago at the standard economy rate that doesn't allow for cancellations. I just phoned the ferry company up and tried to talk them into switching me onto the discounted rate but they weren't having any of it. On the plus side, this may help to sway some of the people who were previously undecided about coming on the Around Ireland Rally.

After work on Friday I drove down to the_magician's place near Heathrow. There had been an accident on the M6 in the afternoon and the matrix signs were still making their proclamations of eternal doom ('long delays J16-J13' etc), but it had all cleared by the time I reached it. Incidentally, the_magician has agreed to be my co-driver/co-navigator/photographer/evening entertainment organiser for the Around Ireland Rally.

On Saturday morning we paid a visit to B&Q, unsuccessfully attempted to fix a leaky central heating pipe (hampered by the fact that the system is so bunged up we couldn't drain the water out of it), and had a look at some loose guttering, before rushing over to fifitrix's house west of London for an Odyssey 2010 committee meeting. I'm not exactly sure yet what I'm going to be doing for Odyssey but it sounds like I will have fewer responsibilities than I had for Orbital. I left at 2:45PM because I wanted to get to Poynton Ceilidh near Stockport when it opened at 7:45 - the website warned us to get there early because they only let a maximum 110 people in.

After a fast run up with only a couple of brief stops and one misread signpost, I arrived at my destination at about 7:55. It turned out that I needn't have rushed because it started off very quiet and never got really busy. Apparently there were two other ceilidhs going on elsewhere that had drawn a lot of people away. It was a friendly crowd with a reasonable mix of young and not-so-young dancers. At the start of the night there were more single blokes than single women but the ratio evened out later on. I sat out the first dance, then on the second one a girl came up and asked me to dance. After that I was lucky the rest of the evening and didn't get turned down once. The dance floor was fairly small and I imagine it could get pretty cramped if they had the full 110 people in and most of them were dancing. I was slightly disappointed that the bar felt it necessary to charge 40p per pint of tapwater, and briefly considered refilling my glass from the sink in the gents. Overall it was a good night with some fun dances. I'm not sure if I'm getting worse at dancing or getting better at noticing when I've done something wrong - some of the early dances were a bit of a mess but they got better as the night went on and people got into the swing of it. A couple of people did comment that I had 'obviously done this before.' I particularly enjoyed a rather silly dance that involved the gents from each set linking hands and dashing around the room to meet the ladies from another randomly-chosen set, then the ladies doing the same, trying to end up with matched sets (as opposed to eg. eight men in one set and none in another) before the next step of the dance.

Poynton is a fair distance away from me (it's actually in Cheshire) and I think the shortest route unfortunately involves negotiating Stockport centre, but I reckon I will go again. While I was there I picked up a flyer for a "Grand Ceilidh" in Antrobus next month - that's even further away than Poynton but it's a decent run, nearly all motorways, so I might go to that one too. On the way back I was feeling rather too smug about the number of miles I've done recently without any problems other than the sticking speedometer needle, so Fenchurch decided to start misfiring and cutting out on the M60 (the Manchester ringroad) while the rev counter went haywire. The engine never quite died completely though and I managed to nurse her the thirty miles or so home. I had a look under the bonnet this morning and found the fault in a couple of minutes - one of the wires to the coil had broken inside the insulation just before the crimped connector so it would have been making intermittent contact as the engine vibrated. I was sure it would be something simple like that - there's no computerised engine management systems to go wrong on these old engines.

Speaking of electronics going wrong, I thought my new 500GB backup disk had died because first it kept freezing, then it wouldn't even spin up. I tried swapping it into a different Firewire enclosure and it worked fine again. Either the enclosure or its power supply has died. I have had it for several years and it always worked fine with the 120GB disk it came with but when I tried putting that one back in it would no longer spin up either. Perhaps the new disk put a greater load on the power supply or something.

This past weekend I visited Edinburgh. ( Read more... )

( I've been working on Lintilla today... )

Monday from about 9AM to 3:30PM was spent rushing around finishing things off in the workshop and getting prepared for the Great Crystal Cyberdrome Exhibition. SMS and Eira presented two guided tours while Cuil sabotaged the monorail, then suddenly it was 5PM and I had to rush off to the closing ceremony. watervole and the_magician thanked loads of people by name, then asked everyone who had helped in some way to run the con (including gophers and panellists) to stand up - that turned out to be roughly two thirds of us. Back down to Newbury where we spent the next couple of hours first shifting all the exhibits back to the workshop room, then sorting, packing, and clearing everything out of the room (the hotel wanted it back the next day).

When I came back to the dead dog party after dinner I staggered around for a few minutes in a bit of a daze thinking, "is it over already? what happened? I've only been to one panel item!" before twinfair nabbed me and sent me on a quest to remove the posters from the walls all over the hotel. After finishing that, Vince handed me a small fortune in spare groats! With only a few hours left to spend them, I bought a drink for myself and one for Bazooka, attempted to buy one for Mad Elf (the bar had run out of cider), then came to the conclusion that I was never going to get rid of them at that rate and it really wasn't worth stressing out about it, so I went and handed most of them to a poor student who no doubt was able to find a productive use for them.

I'm back home now and have unloaded Fenchurch. There was one incident of Lorry Rage[1] on the way home. I would like to know who the person in the Volvo estate was who waved at me as they passed, then did it again a couple of hundred miles later. I'm not sure if they were somebody from Eastercon or just a random Morris Minor enthusiast. ETA: That was feorag.

How to summarise Orbital? Having worked on it for over two years (since before I went to my first Eastercon!) I have so many different feelings that I don't think I can adequately articulate them. It seemed to go pretty well from the comments I've heard. We had possibly the biggest Eastercon programme ever, and the highest membership count for over twenty years. The highlights for me personally were the ceilidh, the Beer Hunt sketch in the cabaret, Mitch Benn's act, and directing the second episode of Torchwood Wobblevision. I really hope we can have ceilidhs again at future Eastercons - it's such a fun social thing to do, much more so than a disco in my opinion. I'm already planning to do more episodes of Torchwood Wobblevision and have some ideas for ways to make it run a bit smoother.

The post-con blues haven't hit yet (that will probably come tomorrow when I have to go back to work) but the post-con lurgy has already begun to attack my throat. I'll try to get Torchwood Wobblevision posted up within the next day or two. I have registered my interest in helping out with Odyssey 2010 - watch this space. Finally, I'd just like to say get well soon to multiclassgeek and tracey_jane!

[1] When I'm doing a long journey I tend to cruise along behind a lorry, keeping pace with it for long periods of time. It's less stressful and more economical than constantly overtaking. Often another lorry will creep up behind me at less than 1 MPH faster than the lorry in front, and the driver will decide to overtake. For some reason they expect me to slow down so as to open a gap for them instead of continuing to keep pace with the lorry in front. Sometimes they get quite pissed off when I don't, especially if the gap in front of me increases and I speed up to close it again. One of them today gave me a long blast on the horn and flashed his headlights several times when he realised his speed-limiter wouldn't allow him to go fast enough to overtake a Morris Minor.

I've just realised that I haven't posted yet about getting the new Morris Minor home. In fact I've hardly posted at all in the past couple of weeks. I must try to remedy that - it's not that I'm doing nothing, it's that I'm not getting around to writing about it. ( Read more... )

I've just got back from Liverpool, where I went to look at a 1970 two-door Minor saloon that somebody advertised on the MMOC forum: free to a good home. It's a bit tatty and will probably need new sills soon, but it's roadworthy and it has a long MOT. I'm returning to pick it up on Sunday morning. Very pleased. :)

Continuing in the HHGTTG naming theme, I briefly considered calling it Ford Prefect, but decided that would just be too surreal! So, Arthur it is then. Only trouble with that name is he doesn't actually have any Dents as far as I could see...

Yesterday[1] I changed Fenchurch's oil, oil filter, air filter, spark plugs, rotor arm, and distributor cap. ( Read more... )

Through the window I can see trees bending over sideways and birds flying backwards. I need to do some maintenance on Fenchurch this morning and there's no room to put her in the garage...

I got fed up with the uncomfortable MG Metro seats I put in Fenchurch so I've put the standard ones back while I try to find a solution. I've had a look at how the bases are sprung, and they've not got a diaphragm or elastic straps, it's a wire mesh attached to some fairly hefty steel springs. On top of that is an oddly shaped cushion made from high density foam. I reckon the springs are probably still OK and it's the foam that's lost its strength, so I might be able to solve the problem by buying some suitable replacement foam and making new cushions.

Incidentally I talked to Newton Commercial about the seats, and they said nobody makes replacement springs/foam etc. for them any more. They could probably make me a new set of covers but they would cost about £260 EACH! I reckon if I manage to solve the comfort problem the next task is learning to make seat covers myself. Either that or get hold of a set of those furry elasticated covers that used to be popular in the 80's. :)

The replacement rotor arm turned out to be only a temporary cure for the misfiring. It started doing it again after the drive down to London, and got gradually worse last week. I've bought a new set of ignition components so I can try replacing a bit at a time to track down the source of the fault, but I decided to first try giving everything a good clean. There was a surprising amount of crud on the contacts in the distributor cap, and the plugs were sooty from all the short runs to and from work with the choke on for part of the journey.

If the rain holds off I'll adjust the brakes, grease the nipples, check the tyre pressures, etc. this afternoon.

I got the MG Metro front seats installed in Fenchurch today. Unfortunately I'm not convinced they're much more comfortable than the standard seats, though they are at least uncomfortable in a different way. The padding on the back isn't very soft, and the width between the side bolsters is a bit cramped. I suppose I'll get a better idea of what they'll be like on a rally the next time I do a long journey. As it happens, I'm heading down to Heathrow again on Friday evening for another Orbital site visit.

I had been having some problems with the engine occasionally misfiring at certain revs - motorway cruising was fine but it could feel quite lumpy around 30MPH. It started not long after the last service, when I replaced several ignition components. Today I tried replacing the rotor arm again with a brand new one and I think the problem might be cured (it didn't misfire at all on the five-mile drive home).

Yesterday I obtained some more comfortable front seats for Fenchurch and went to the Sheffield SF Group's Hogswatchnight party.

( Read more... )

I fitted an original Series 2 heater to Fenchurch last night. It was a rather more awkward job than I expected due to lack of space inside the dashboard for ducts and pipes. The demister outlets are a bit feeble, particularly the driver's side one (I suspect the vent is partially blocked), but it does work. How well it works depends on how hot the engine is, and in this weather the engine has only reached about 60-70C by the time I arrive at the office in the morning. It doesn't even really start to warm up for the first five minutes because I live at the top of a big hill (actually the side of valley) and mostly coast down it. I may need to think about fitting a radiator muff so it warms up faster.

( What I did this weekend... )

Things that are broken:

• Fenchurch's oil pressure warning light sensor. The pressure is still OK according to the gauge but the light has started coming on at anything below 40PSI (ie. at tickover). I think it's supposed to switch at 21PSI.
• The national blood service. Specifically, inviting me to a session then turning me away at the door because they suddenly decided to only do people who had booked an appointment in advance.
• OSX MAME's pause control. If I pause a game and then go and try to write an email or something, it unpauses every time I hit the 'p' key even though it hasn't got the keyboard focus.
• The Morris Minor Owner's Club forum. It's been going up and down like a donkey pump for about a week now and it's becoming quite annoying.

I was hoping the weather would be fine this weekend because I had a long list of maintenance jobs I wanted to do on Fenchurch. That is why I've spent much of today and yesterday working outside in close to zero temperatures with a strong windchill factor and a constant light drizzle. I did manage to do most of the stuff on my list before it started trying to snow and I came back inside. It's unfortunate that the garage under my office that I did the respray in now contains a large trailer. The garage we have next to the house is just big enough to park the car in and squeeze around one side (if I clear a load of junk out first); it's too cramped to want to use it for jobs that involve taking all the wheels off.

When I wasn't getting cold and wet outside I've been doing a lot of reading about Nixie tubes and neon indicator lamps. I'd heard of Nixie tubes and even have an old piece of test equipment with a few in it, but they were obsolete before I was born so I've never worked with them. Recently there has been a resurgence in their popularity, usually in the form of digital clocks, as people come to realise that they actually look a lot prettier than the seven segment LED displays that replaced them. You can still buy them as New Old Stock even though the last factories that made them closed down shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Neon lamps are still commonly used as a power indication light in mains-powered equipment such as multi-way socket adapters. I didn't know that Nixie tubes are basically glorified neon lamps, and I had no idea how versatile the lamps are. They were even used to build digital logic gates in the days before semiconductors took over. Don't believe me? Take a look at this!

You might be wondering why I've suddenly developed an interest in obsolete optoelectronics. The reason is that I've decided to use Nixie tubes for the score display and an array of 200 cheap neon lamps as the main display of my retro-futuristic Tetris machine. I originally wanted to build a mechanical display but it proved impractical and would have cost far too much for the parts.

Next weekend is starting to look a bit busy. I'm going to the Morris Minor Owners' Club AGM in Derby on Saturday, a vintage slot machine fair in Coventry on Sunday, and at some point I need to pick up a heater for Fenchurch from a bloke who lives near Birmingham. I'm thinking of trying to stay in the Stratford upon Avon YH on Saturday, and if I do that it might be worth also trying to see a play at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Courtyard Theatre (they'll be performing Henry V).

Fenchurch is back on the road again, having replaced the gearbox with a rebuilt one. It was getting late when I finished so I just had a quick run up and down the road outside. It felt OK in all gears, first and reverse are now virtually silent, and the new clutch seems to have a smoother action than the old one.

The job took me rather longer than morris1000's impressive 5 hours. I've no idea how he managed to get the box back in without removing either the engine or the gearbox crossmember. Getting the top of the bell housing past the steering rack was very awkward even with the rear of the engine lowered as far as it would go and with a pit below the car so I could can stand up rather than lying flat on my back.

The rebuilt gearbox had one slight fault - the spring-loaded detent that stops you accidentally changing into reverse instead of fourth was jammed. Upon closer inspection it appeared that some water had got into the the back of the remote control unit (there was no gearstick fitted, so it had an open hole on the top) and it had rusted slightly inside. The simplest solution was to just swap the remote control unit from my old box (which was still in excellent condition) onto the new one.

I did have to cut a corner to get the car back on the road this weekend. The clutch pedal doesn't return fully while the brake is pressed (the brake pedal hinges on the clutch shaft). I was hoping I would be able to get away with just replacing the brake pedal bushes, but upon taking the assembly apart (rather an awkward task in itself as the spacer tube had rusted onto the shaft) I discovered the clutch shaft to be quite badly worn and pitted from rusting. Several other parts of the clutch linkage are badly worn too. If I'd waited until I could get hold of the parts to rebuild it all properly it would have meant several more days off the road, so I decided to just clean and grease the old parts and reassemble them.

( A photo of the new box installed in the car )

( Pictures behind the cut )