On the road

At the wedding

The first thing I learnt was to always take a toolbox with me at all times. A friend of mine and I went to the wedding in my car, and on the way, some of the screws that held in the door latch mechanism started to fall out. I had no screwdriver, and no way of doing them up again tightly. I had to ask people in the Church if anyone had a screwdriver. Luckily, some did, but I had lost a few bolts (writing this a year later, I still haven't replaced them!).

Adam saw the car, took some photos of it, and seemed quite impressed. I think a lot of people were. After so much time, I think most of them thought I was never going to finish it, but I proved them wrong.

Things going wrong

The bolts falling off was really the start of finding problems and fixing them.

The first was that the carb was set to running rich, but the mixture was quite lean. After a while, the car would lose power, and not start. It took two weeks to find the problem - one of the nuts on the carb was missing, and not holding it down. Once that had been sorted out (I had to get outside help, as a special tool was needed), it was running fine again.

The next problem was one of the spark plugs left the engine while it was running - not a normal state of affairs. I popped it back in, and continued.

I then had the exhaust split, and had it penciled in to be welded again.

While waiting until the exhaust could be sealed, the plug decided to jump again. I was on my way to a meeting, and only three minutes away, so I continued onwards. However, when I got there, the spark plug had also left the ignition lead, but I kept spares with me. However, it wouldn't go back in. This meant calling the AA to take me home (it was a sad sight to see my car on the back of a lorry).

In the analysis, the plug had decided to take some of the engine with it, so I would need a new cylinder head in order to fix the problem. Since leaded petrol was being removed at the end of the year, buying a new unleaded engine was the best option (with the assistance of the bank), so I did that instead. There was about a two weeks until the engine turned up, so the head was carefully tapped to take a larger (Ford) spark plug.

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