I have been out of commission for a while but managed to get some driving in this last week with OCC. I did a fair bit round the Yorkshire Dales & as usual, was impressed with the car.
For those of you who like railways, this is at Docker near Kendal on the West Coast Main Line:
Before I went, I took the plunge & put a pair of Winguard door mirrors on. The car hasn't had any fixed external mirrors since I got it, but safety has to trump originality!
The car drove really well again & is surprisingly sprightly. Over 400 spirited glitch-free miles
OCC's temperature gauge has been acting oddly for many years. It doesn't respond for a while & then goes all the way over into the red. The engine's cooling is fine.
I decided to have a look through this fantastic forum recently, to see if the sender or the gauge was at fault. Whist reading through details about temperature & choke senders, I suddenly realised that OCC's wires may be the wrong way round...
Anyway, I switched them round & hey-presto, the gauge works fine
When I put the o/s wing badge on a year or so ago, I put it on at a really peculiar angle. How I managed it is anyone's guess. I certainly can't have followed the "measure twice, cut once" rule:
I thought I'd better straighten it out, which meant drilling another hole in the wing. When I took the badge off, I realised that I'd already had it correct before & then put it at a daft angle. You can see the original hole on the left:
So I've opened the old hole up & filled the other. Not ideal, but worse things happen.
Thank you. I've been out of sorts over the last 18 months having had 3 operations, so haven't done a huge amount on the cars in that time (even my bench got cobwebs on it ), but I hope to get back on with things soon.
I managed an interlude over Christmas & got work done on the Alfa, which I've posted here Mid-life crisis!
OCC is still in pretty good nick, but there's one place that it has rusted through:
This is the bottom of the nsf wing & I'll weld a repair piece in.
OCC's paint will need redoing at some point as I didn't quite do as a good a job as I wanted to. It looks OK from a few yards, though :
Whilst I was on, I'm fitting a 3rd brake light to the bottom of the rear window as I've had on Hazel for many years. It can always be removed, but in today's traffic, I think it's a must. Same reason that I've put the door mirrors on & the dipping mirror.
I had the boot lid up & thought I'd sort the boot lamp wiring out as the light hasn't worked ever since I got the car. I had assumed it was the switch that was faulty, but of course when I took the bulb out, it had blown. One spare bulb later & it's fine......
One of these days, I'll have to start putting together a list of detail differences between Sharkstooth cars & later ones.
Whilst I was doing the boot light, I removed the card fuel tank cover. I'd forgotten that it is held in with 4 screws on small brackets, rather than the 'teeth' brackets that the later ones slip into:
After I'd sorted the small area of rot in the front wing, I thought I'd take the outer sills off so that I could shutz the middle sills & floor areas again. There was a bit of surface rust on each sill, but nothing serious. Strangely the o/s sill needed a fair bit of tlc, whereas the n/s needed hardly anything. You would have expected it to be the other way round, surely...
O/S:
N/S:
Now both looking reasonable & ready to go back on for another few years:
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), but I hope to get back on with things soon.
