Cotton Pic'ing

BOB is still patiently waiting for its new carb's. It should be happening next Monday. I intend to take before and after pictures of the engine bay ... may be of interest to those who've never seen the anti-emissions set-up for 'special' overseas markets.

Ella is keen to try rally navigating, so we've been making contact with car clubs around Brisbane, trying to find a suitable entry-level introduction. It turns out that over here "road rallys" are called "touring assemblies" or something similar ... sounds tame, but that could be clever PR of course! In Brisbane there's an umbrella club Marque Sports Club that organise practices and competitive events. Nice, all sounds good ... except that we have to join a different CAMS (like the UK's MSA) affiliated club in order to join them. So, the decision that needs to be made is which of the CAMS affiliated clubs to join.

It turns out there's a fair amount of activity in the area, and the MG Sports Car Club of Queensland have a good competition schedule. We went along to the first of their hillclimb events on Sunday ... at their own purpose built circuit!!!! How about that for organisation.

It's a great little circuit 30 minutes drive away, and entry is free for spectators. As a circuit, what goes up must come down, so the 1 in 4 hills mean some hard braking is needed, and some good judgement.

There was a great field of entrants - not many MGs, a fair few modern Subarus, Skylines, etc, the Aussie muscle cars, and some Westfields. Plus lots of Mk1 and 2 Escorts, Datsuns, and a Ford Anglia (running with a 2000cc Nissan unit).
The two Triumphs on show were a 2 litre PI Dolomite (driven by the MG Club's president) and a 1300 Spitfire, with fibreglass GT6 bonnet and English plates. A nice way to spend a bit of Sunday morning, and it all helps fuel the enthusiasm to get out and use BOB ... but really sitting watching cars go round in circles gets a bit boring (although watching a modern Mini lose control on the hairpin was a bonus!). The camera ran out of batteries after 3 photos so this is the lot I'm afraid.





All good fun. Hopefully we'll progress and get involved in some rallying soon.

Holes in thumbs and hoses

The Bus is halfway through its status change … from Aussie ‘S’ to Pommy ‘S’. A re-built distributor, with advance instead of retard vacuum and some Bosch internals (harder wearing than Lucas), plus a Crane optical ignition system was stage 1. In a week or so I hope to be fitting some rebuilt carb’s (courtesy of Greg Tunstall )to replace the sad current ones. At this point the emissions kit will be stripped off, blocked up, re-routed. I don’t envisage it transforming Bob into a real snarler, of course, but it’s a logical start at least.

I finally removed the tacky sheepskin covers from the front-seats … to see what they were hiding. The seats beneath are in really good condition, barring the door-side top corners of both seats, which have faded and worn right through. It’s a real shame. For now they can be patched up I think. At some point I will fit some modern car seats instead, as my back gets pretty sore driving at the best of times. I’ve had two Saabs and the seats in those were both excellent, so maybe they will do the trick.

I haven’t really had much of a chance to do anything else around the car, though, on account of my own stupidity. I had an altercation with a fast moving 10mm drill bit … and it won! It basically snapped my thumbnail in two and tore the base out of the finger, which has made ‘handywork’ somewhat less practical for the meanwhile. I have a nice photo, but it’s a bit gory, so unless I get requests I will keep it to myself!

Yesterday I had my first breakdown adventure with Bob! A nice easy fix though. Ella and I went for a drive out of town, and after about ten minutes on the road I noticed the temp. gauge was a bit high … Uh oh! The bonnet goes up at the side of the road, and there’s lots of coolant sprayed around everywhere making it tricky to spot the leak (fingers were crossed hoping it wasn’t the radiator!). Eventually we traced the split hose next to the fan thermostat, sneakily hidden on the underside of the hose-clip. Luckily there was enough hose to chop it down and stick it back on. It was a bit of a pain trying to fiddle around with hot hoses, coolant, metal, etc. with my right thumb out of action. We filled the rad. back up and carried on without any further hitches.
Isn’t it nice when you break down and the fix is really easy?