:: Diary - March 2013 ::

:: Friday, March 1, 2013 ::

It's TVR Car Club day on Sunday, and it's a nice day today, so I decide to give the car a wash, and polish the wheels. Oh, and change the fan belt, which isn't slipping but it does this "squeak-squeak-squeak" thing that gets on my wires.

So the first step - to Halfords for metal polish and a fan belt.

They have a choice of 4, i.e. Meguiars, Autoglym, Autosol and T-Cut. I was going to buy Meguiars because I like its results, but I notice that under the price per tin, it says it's the equivalent of £63 per litre. Jees, that's a lot, eh? The labels say that the Autoglym is £11.98 a litre, the Autosol is £7.99 a litre, and the T-Cut is some other fairly low price that I forget at the moment. Why is the Meguiars so expensive?

Suddenly the fucking "Rainman" syndrome kicks in. So pay attention at the back, right? The Autosol is £5.99 for a tube. The tube is 75ml. So there are about 14 tubes to make up a litre. 14 times £5.99 is £84, not the £7.99 "equivalent price per litre" that the shelf label says. An equivalent check and mental arithmetic on the other brands shows that they are equally miles out.

Just at this point, an assistant shows up, having watched me looking at all the packs. "Can I help you sir?" For a moment I think "Bugger it I can't be bothered" but then I hear my voice saying "these price labels are all wrong". I explain my concern to her, but I would have been as well teaching Stephen Hawking's "Brief History of time" to a retarded gerbil. She goes to get a bit of paper, and I write it out. Then she goes to get a calculator cause she can't do multiplication. Then she goes to get somebody else because even with a calculator she doesn't know how to work out the cost per litre.

He eventually sees the point (or he's better at bluffing than she is), and says he'll report it to head office. Somehow I doubt it because if they ask him to explain the calculation on his own, he'll fold like a paper plate under Pavarotti's dinner.

Anyway, the fan belt… I ask where they are. "Ah we don't put them on display any more, they're in the parts department, so that people don't buy the wrong thing." Guess who's in charge of the parts counter? Yes it's the mathematical genius.

"I need a fan belt please"

"What car is it for".

"It's your part number HB1200C"

"Eh?"

That's your part number."

"Oh right. How many teeth has it got?"

That completely throws me. Who gives a toss how many teeth it's got? I say "it's just a vee-belt, an ordinary fan belt."

Oh we don't do vee-belts."

Yes you do, they are there, on that shelf there, look… no, there!"

"Oh ok… What car is it for". I decide to indulge them, "It's a TVR."

"What make though."

"TVR"

After a minute or two of typing he says "What Model?"

"S3"

"We've got Chimaera, Griffith and Tuscan, those do?"

"No, look, just look up HB1200C, have you got any?"

Click-click-clickety-clack-click-click-clack. "Yes"

"Right I'll take one then."

"How do you know that fits?"

"I just do…"

So armed with my fan belt, and pot of metal polish that's worth more per litre than gold mined by virgins, I finally negotiate the till.

Why does it all have to be so hard?

Anyway, get home, car washed and dried, wheels polished, fan belt changed. The easy bit.

:: Sunday, March 3, 2013 ::

It's TVR Car Club day today! And typically, it's bloody freezing after being nice for most of the last week. Still, the roof stays off, the hat goes on, and off we go to Dave's to meet up with Jim. Nobody else is meeting us today so it's only the hardcore 3. I take Dave and Jim follows on. The car is going great, although at one point I detect a low-range misfire, or maybe just a power gap.

We get to the meeting and park up beside Adrian's Chimaera, which is proudly sporting a new bum, after his high-speed reverse into the scenery. It looks good, especially without a tax disk spoiling the line of the windscreen. He says he has it in his pocket because he's lost the sticky bit.

Service in the hotel is typically useless, but the food is at least ok.

I can't remember what we talked about. It did include Porsches, Wedges, S-Series brakes, huffy teenagers, vicious dogs (both being equally dangerous), the hypocrisy of car forums, company cars, and plans for events to be attended in the summer. I must have missed our Regional Organiser's announcement of other possible events, possibly because he whispered it up his sleeve on his way to the loo.

The journey back is as good as the journey there. Dave goes with Jim and this time I follow. The car seems to be going much better. Something to do with power to weight ratios, I guess.

:: Monday, March 11, 2013 ::

This has nothing to do with TVRs, but I thought I would share it anyway.

Today it snowed here. It also snowed yesterday. As a result, there is a fair thickness of snow - but temperatures were not too bad during the day time, so it didn't start freezing till about 6pm.

At 7.40, I get a text from daughter no 2, who has been working since 8am, and is stuck on the hill leading up to our house. She's been there for 20 minutes, in a queue watching some bloke getting himself stuck on the relatively flat bit at the bottom of the hill. I decide to walk down to help push his car and, perhaps more crucially, to prevent her trying to batter him - a 19-year old with no dinner, after an 11-hour work shift, is a formidable and ruthless foe. Even Attilla and Ghengis would have the sense to run for the hills (not snowy ones, obviously, in case they got stuck).

Anyway, I get there, and it's chaos. The wheel-spinning clutch-controlless nitwit is sitting in the middle of the road. A young lad has come out of a nearby house, and is shouting in the driver's window "NO! Not first! Third, how many times do I have to tell you?" I think "that's a bit rude" but set my shoulder to the task of pushing. Much wheelspin. No movement. "That's not third!" shouts my young compadre.

Much fiddling with gear lever, while car rolls backwards, losing 3 precious laboriously-gained feet. Third is engaged at last! Car stalls. Rolls backwards 2 feet.

Repeat ad nauseam, well certainly to the nauseam of the young neighbour, who persuades the stupid git to let him have a shot, and promptly drives 100 yards up the road, no problem. He stops, hands back control to the owner, and walks back down the hill. I take off in third, and drive up the hill. Well, halfway up the hill There's my pal again, spinning his wheels madly while the car goes backwards.

As I stop, he goes rummaging in the boot, and produces several sheets of cardboard, and proceeds to stuff them under the rear wheels. I am sure Ford Focusses (or is it Foci?) are front wheel drive, but he's not to be deterred. He gets back in, he spins, I push, fuck all else happens.

I remind him that he needs to be in THIRD not first, we move the cardboard to the front wheels. He gets back in, he spins, I push, fuck all else happens except the sheets of cardboard fly backwards down the hill.

After another 15 minutes of wheelspinning and stalling, I find myself standing in a cloud of rubber and clutch smoke, shouting in the driver's window "NO! Not first! Third, how many times do I have to tell you?"

By this time, daughter has walked home before she decks him. I decide to park her car and walk as well.

As I am reversing down the hill to the parking lay-by, 4 lads appear and basically lift him to the top of the hill. Once he has turned off, I drive up the hill and park in my drive.

Now, I am in no position to criticise other people's - not after bobsleighing the Lexus into a fence last year - but honest to god, you have to wonder…

I am supposed to be going to collect the Porsche on Wednesday. I hope the snow has gone by then. or I'll never get it up that hill…

:: Wednesday, March 13, 2013 ::

The Porsche is ready, so it's up before first sparrowfart to get the train to Leeds. I am out the door at 6am, and it's freezing.

Train number 1 is a wee train from here to Edinburgh. Train number 2 is busy, and I had to reserve a seat. They don't do plans showing how wide the arse is of the person next to you, so there's always this risk that you'll end up squished up the window. Fortunately, the person next to me doesn't get on till Durham, so it's only 2 stops of crushing, at the most.

When he gets on, he's a respectable business type, suit and case etc. He also honks of a smell that I can't place, and it takes me ages to remember what it is. It's marijuana, and he must have a pocketful. Or a caseful. It's really strong.

By the time I get off the train, I'm giggling but don't know why, but the ticket collector doesn't care because he's too busy eating 3 fish suppers.

At the garage, I inspect the car again, hand over the dosh, exchange pleasantries and set off for home, 230 miles to go.

2 hours later I've covered 130 of those miles, mainly on motorway to be fair, but with a cross-country bit of 45 miles, overtaking caravans and lorries on a mix of single and dual carriageway. I'm grinning uncontrollably again, and this time it's not because of an hour spent inhaling weed. This car is absolutely brilliant. I've driven a flat-six Porsche before, but I think it was a 2.4 (it was a 1976 left hand drive one) and this one is every bit as much fun, it's just superb.

Comparisons with TVR? Well seeing as Porsche probably spent as much on designing the fag lighter, as TVR's development budget for a whole new model, comparisons are perhaps not very fair. I can see why they were so popular in their day though!

After a break for a pee and a Whopper (ooo-er matron) the next 100 miles take another 2 hours, so I am home before tea time. The car sits there, ticking in that way that real cars do when they've just enjoyed a good drive.

In other news (unrelated to Porsche acquisition, I did it a few weeks ago), I have resigned as the S-Series editor for articles for Sprint magazine. The Club hasn't made an announcement yet, but I hear they have been locked into a conclave to elect a successor, and everybody is waiting for a sign from the chimney where they burn the ballot papers. Black smoke apparently means somebody has installed a clapped out diesel and is therefore disqualified. Blue smoke means that the engine is totally buggered so the candidate is disqualified unless he writes an article about replacing it (but not with a diesel). White smoke means imminent head gasket failure. Yes it does, whatever the seller tells you.

Hazy sweet-smelling smoke means that they haven't elected a successor, but nobody give a fuck, and when they all stop laughing at whatever it was that started it, they'll send out for 117 pizzas. It also means that I now know where my fellow passenger on the train was going.

:: Friday, March 22, 2013 ::

It's been snowing like there's no tomorrow, and I've spent most of the last week shovelling the bloody stuff into heaps, so that I can get in and out of the house. The garage is a bit more of an expedition, and I haven't got any huskies.

Today, though, I decide to make a start to the front of the chassis. First step is to remove the bonnet so that I can get to the chassis, and also so that I can fit my fandabby stainless hinges.

I jack the car up and support it on axle stands, then remove the front wheels.

Then I remove the gas strut (a nut and bolt at each end) and set it aside in a safe place where I'll never find it again. That lets me get the bonnet up nearly vertical.

Next off are the inner wheel arches. They are held on with two 10mm bolts each, so once those are removed, the arch twists out easily.

Now I can disconnect the three waterproof electrical connectors on each side: one for the headlamp, one for the indicator, and one for the foglamp.

That's it nearly ready to come off. I need to support the bonnet before I take the hinge bolts out though. What to use though?

Height adjustable stool! Put it right down, wheel it under, press hydraulic lever, seat self-adjusts to right height!

So now I can remove the two hinge bolts, and that's it ready for lifting off. It's (a) heavy and (b) fecking mahoosive though, so I need a volunteer…

:: Sunday, March 24, 2013 ::

Well that's the weekend over, and I still haven't lifted the bonnet off. That might sound a bit "Billy No-Mates" but it's not. It comes down to reliability. First, you have to pick somebody who isn't a complete klutz, who will drop it on the floor, scrape it on the wall or crack it. That cuts down the list. Quite a lot. I would even exclude myself on that basis, if it wasn't my car.

My son would help me, but he's on holiday this weekend.

The other person I thought of first, is up to his arse in his own alligators and doesn't need me pestering him for a hand.

So I had found somebody else. Except he texted at 2pm today, to say that he wasn't very well.

Now I would prefer somebody to just say "Naw I can't do it", because then at least you can ask somebody else. But see the number of people who take stuff on, and then do sod all about it till it's too late? It happens all the time, in my professional life, to the extent that I have minimised the amount of stuff I "outsource", if I can do it myself. Similar problems have affected car club and other events recently.

Why do people do it? Either promise to do something, and then do it, or don't make the promise in the first place. It's not hard.

I am now off to work out a Heath Robinson (or Wallace and Gromit) system of pulleys and straps to lift it up to the ceiling.

And… breathe...

:: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 ::

Git Jnr came to visit last night, and in exchange for having his dinner made for him, came out to help me lift the bonnet off, and prop it against the wall, which I had already carpeted in anticipation. We also put some towels over the edge of the bonnet as an extra precaution, and a ratchet strap round the bonnet pins and over a rafter as an extra extra precaution. To be sure, to be sure, as they say in Ireland.

It all looks pretty sound, even although it's obviously manky.

The radiator is held on with 2 bolts at the top, as you see here. They go into captive nuts on the radiator itself. The closest one to the camera in the photo is actually cross-threaded, because I had to fit the radiator in a hurry about 8 years ago, so that I could move the car before a painting squad started painting next door's fence, and splashing the car in paint. I knew that bolt wasn't right, but the captive nut had uncaptivated itself and I never got round to fixing it.

You can see here that it's not actually a nut (no, that would have been too decking easy, eh?) but a smooth round threaded sleeve. Which you can't get a grip of. After some judicious bending of the radiator bracket, removal of that bleed screw, a liberal application of penetrating fluid, and a trip to Halfords to buy long-nose mole grips (which I then had to clamp together in a vice because the jaws were so loose that they were flapping about like Dumbo's ears in a hurricane), it comes off. Just.

You forget, until you see one of these cars with its clothes off, how far back the engine is - it's well behind the front axle.

Not quite as far behind the front axle as a Porsche's, mind, but that brings different exciting qualities of its own. Allegedly.

:: Friday, March 29, 2013 ::

It's beginning to look a lot like Easter
Everywhere you go
But that hasn't been very far
Cos I haven't dug out the car
from a pile of snow.

It's beginning to look a lot like Easter
but we won't be rolling eggs
Because all of the nearby hills
are covered in ice but still
we can always sledge.

Yes boys and girls, its almost April and it's still the middle of winter. Worse than that, I've got a pile of urgent work to do over the holiday weekend.

So today I diligently start by going for a run in the Porsche. That takes me till lunch time, by which time the roads have dried out, so I can give it a bit of revs for the first time. Up to about 4,000 revs it's like a nippy V Beetle - above that, it really gets into its stride and sounds brilliant!

Right, so that's lunch time, so better get on with this work…

So I go out to the garage, find an old bucket, and drain the radiator on the S by pulling the bottom hose off. While the bucket is filling, I take off the top hose. I've already removed the mounting bolts, so I can lift the radiator out and empty the last of its water into the bucket.

Then I prop it against the fence on its side, with the bottom hose stub at the top, and back flush it with a hose in the bottom stub (which is really the top one when it's right way up - clear enough?) .

I need to recapture that loose "captive nut" so first I wire brush all the paint off so that it'll weld, and also to check that the bracket is steel and not brass.

Then I wrap a water-soaked cloth around the bracket to act as a heat sink (I don't want to risk melting the solder in the radiator!) and tack weld the nut into the bracket at two points diametrically opposite each other, and then test-fit the bolt to make sure it holds. A quick dressing of the welds with a grinder and then I run a tap down the thread to clean it up. Sorted! That was almost proper engineering!

Meanwhile the front of the car looks like this. The radiator fan is clamped onto two metal rods, which are bolted through a detachable surround that the radiator sits on. When it was put together, all those bits probably slid effortlessly into each other, and bolted together easily.

Now, after being bombarded with various types of shit through the front grill, it's one solid block of rust, and it's not for coming apart.

So the first step is to remove the 4 bolts at the ends of those 2 rods. I've decided that the rods themselves are not salvageable, in fact I'll probably have to cut them to get them out, so I don't care if I break them. So it's the air gun…

Unfortunately the bloody rods survive, and the inner lock nuts are seized solid, so you can't do the sideways wiggle you need to get the rods out intact. 5 minutes with a hacksaw solves that wee dilemma. The fan is off, but still attached to various sticks of rust that used to be mounting rods!

The rods are seized into the 3 clamps that hold the fan housing on (you can see one of them in the photo above), and the M5 clamp bolts are also seized solid. I don't want to break those, because I have no idea where I would get replacement clamps, so I need to get them apart intact. Through a mix of blowtorch, penetrating spray and freezer spray, dedicated prayer and gentle persuasion, I get the wee clamp bolts out.

The rods are still not for budging… So I grind the rods off, flush with the round clamps on one side. Then I grip each clamp in a vice and eventually manage to punch the 3 bits of rod out of the clamp holes.

So the fan is off, and it's still in one piece! More proper engineering! If only Adrian Newey reads this web site - I'd be in with Red Bull F1 Racing like a shot.

Last bit for today - I remove the 4 wee M6 bolts that hold that radiator support bracket onto the front of the chassis. That's me almost ready to start paint and rust removal. After I have snipped all the cable ties and moved the wiring out of the way. Oh and removed the front brake hoses so that I can paint the brackets.

Right, so now it's dinner time...

After my dinner, I'm sitting here processing the photos and writing the web site, while watching "A Car is Born" as Mark Evans builds an AC Cobra. It looks a lot easier when everything is new and shiny… are you listening Adrian?

So that's me, I've had a cartastic day, better get on with that work. Tomorrow. I hope my client isn't reading this!

:: Saturday, March 30, 2013 ::

I am up early, and get on with some of that work I have to do. I give up at about 10am though, and go down to the shops. In the Porsche.

When I get back, I decide to pop out to the garage just for a couple of minutes. First I remove the top radiator hose from the swirl pot - it's only one jubilee clip. Unfortunately the hose and the swirl pot are both full of water though, so the floor gets soaked. Note to self - buy new hose clips.

Then I remove the rear bits of the wheel arches, after scraping my head open on the edge of one. Note to self - buy new screws for arches.

Then I remove the bottom hose for better access to the chassis. First I remove the hose clamp from the water pump, but the pipe is still held by a clamp to the chassis.I manage to unbolt the clamp off the chassis but the u-bolt on the pipe itself, snaps when I try to remove the nuts. With the clamp out of the way, there's (just) enough space to wriggle the hose ad pipe out

Here's the broken clamp, with the joining bit in between. I cut the broken u-clamp off, and shape the end to fit so that I can weld a new clamp on. Note to self - need to buy a 43mm clamp!

This is the front corner of the chassis, with the hinge bracket, before I start.

So it's out with the air descaler, and get started to the front of the chassis. There are still a lot of areas where the original powder coat is pretty well stick on, but most of it comes off in chunks. Not too much rust though. I do realise, though, that the area under the steering rack needs to be treated as well.

So I decide to remove the rack. I start with column, first removing the clamp in the triangular bit through the bulkhead, and then I mark the position of the bottom joint, remove the pinch bolt and knock the joint off the rack pinion.

Then I disconnect the steering arms, by loosening the nut and then use a balljoint separator to split the joints. It knackers the nuts though. Note to self - buy a couple of M10 nylock nuts.

That lets me remove the 4 clamp bolts into the chassis, and I can wriggle the rack out. Note to self - you need 4 new rack fixing bolts, and some washers.

So that leaves car looking like this.

Here's that same bit of the chassis, now descaled

Bu this time, I am fed up sitting in a puddle of antifreeze, so I decide to clean up the radiator fan, by spraying the black fan and orange housing with a degreaser, brushing it in, and then rinsing it off. It comes up right nice!

Then I clean up the wheel arches, the same way.

Then I remove the old rusty hinges from the bonnet, and adjust the new ones to the same length. There are no washers or lock nut in the kit, so I need to buy some. I've now got a fair list of new nuts, bolts and washers (and hose clamps) to buy before I can put this all back together. Assuming it does go back together.

Here's the garage, with the bonnet popped against the far wall, against the carpet.

Here's the repaired radiator captive nut

I am knackered. I think I am definitely getting too old for all this! Good job I could only afford a couple of minutes, because I've got work to do!